Rember This Milk

A recent posting from Smashing Magazine pointed me towards Remember The Milk, which is an online task and time-management application.

I have to say I'm impressed - and on several levels.

First of all it's free - a paid-for 'pro' upgrade is available (US$25 per year) which gives you some extra features such as iPhone and iPod support as well as synchronisation to Blackberry devices etc, but the 'free' version is certainly not lacking.

Secondly it works very well - you can create tasks easily and categorise them under groups like 'personal', 'work', etc and set appropriate attributes for each task such as due-date and time, repetition, notes and location. You can also assign arbitrary 'tags' to a task, which allow you to group and explore tasks in an abstract manner.

All of this is very nice, but not particularly new - the likes of Google and Yahoo have offered online calendars and task-lists for quite some time now.

However, one of the things that sets Remember The Milk apart is the easy integration with other applications and devices. In my case I needed to integrate with the Lightning add-on to Thunderbird which proved almost trivial.

Task lists within Remember The Milk are each supported by an iCal interface - you can either reference a single interface that contains all your tasks (regardless of category) or you can reference just a single category.

This means that I can link my email client at work to just my 'work' category and my home email-client to just my 'personal' category.

Another thing that sets it apart is the ability to 'share' a task-list with known contacts so more than one person can see and change your tasks (consider a PA, for example). You can also 'publish' a list, which gives read-only access to either a set of contacts or the general public.

The final thing that impressed me about Remember The Milk is the design of its user-interface, which is about as forgiving as possible and a great example of how a web-based user-interface should be implemented.

For example, when registering for the first time fields get validated as you type, rather than upon final submission of the form. Another example is that dates can be entered in as free-form text and are interpreted sensibly - this allows dates such as 'tomorrow', 'end of month', '5pm' and so on. All of this follows the Forgiving UI Design Pattern.

A similar principle exists when entering new tasks - you can use a shorthand to specify the date and tag(s) of a task all in one go - for example:

Meet Sally for Lunch ^12pm #personal

The above creates a new task called 'Meet Sally for Lunch' that is scheduled for 12pm today (the '^' prefix) with a tag of 'personal' (the '#' prefix).

I've only highlighted some of the features here - there's lots more the service can offer (offline support, for instance), but take the time to have a look, if only to see a good example of user-interface design.