My pet peeves with MLO (Android)

[Jorgen Bodde]

Since a lot of emails have been going around about the practical use of MLO, it's shortcomings and what should be really nice to be added, I thought I would offer my daily struggles, and ideas for improvements as well, which I hope will be picked up by the devs and at least talked about or filed for future improvements in their (hidden, invisible or non-existent) bug-tracker .. (long read ahead)

What do I miss?

- a decent daily planner
I do not mean just show, or share to google calendar. Just a simple view of a dayplanner where MLO presents the day (partially already present in "Today" view), the tasks for that day as input (from start date), and maybe block off  slots in that planner by taking input from google calendar (as busy hours), and a way to drag the tasks to empty slots in that area. The advantage is that if my agenda shows me an hour free in the morning, I know I cannot do lengthy tasks so I will take two or three short tasks and drag them in that slot. The forgotten and never used "Time Required" field in MLO can be used to estimate the time needed. The planner has a single thin line showing the current time over the day (like outlook calendar has), allows to freely drag tasks, where all other tasks below it, will be readjusted if they don't fit in the time slots (e.g. due to occupied times acquired from google calendar).

Right now I use the "starred" propery to just select a few tasks for the day, but it lacks structure or insight how long something takes, or when to do them the best. Adding these tasks to my google calendar every day with "share" is just too cumbersome, as it needs to be a guide for the day. I use Clockwork Tomato for dividing every hour in about 2 pomodoro's allowing me to throttle or timebox my work, estimate and keep track of my energy in between high intensity tasks like programming (never do these for longer than four pomodoro's or you're mentally drained)

- Timer / Pomodoro Ticker
While being on the subject, if MLO would have an integrated way of starting a countdown timer for a task, and log time or time iterations on it, it would fit perfect in the pomodoro technique. Simply select a task from a view, and start the countdown timer (25 minutes default). For timeboxing tasks or activities, and taking frequent breaks, this is really a good technique

- Mass update!
If I want to set the start date, a context, delete a property from multiple tasks, delete multiple tasks, I need to do that for every task! It would be nice to select a few tasks, see the properties view, and whatever I change, changes for all of them. If I add a context, the context gets added to all, if I delete one, it gets deleted from all. It is so common in every list based app on android. Long press, select all or multiple, do something.

- Do not allow checking off items that have children
How often I did not accidentally check off a project or parent item, because I wanted to collapse it to see it's children? Countless. Simply prevent completing a parent when the children are not complete, or ASK.

- Better clipboard / share control
"Share to ... google calendar". Ok. Useful. "Share to .. any app" will always provide a dump of all of the task as multi line text (title, start date, comment). It might be a nice option if I can select what to share. For example, by lack of the pomodoro timer I would be happy if I can share just the title of the task, to the clipboard. I will set the task(s) in Clockwork Tomato, and that will be my day. I can use the pomodoro timer to actually work on things, and keep MLO as my managed database of items.

- Flexible import or export / Backup
Sorry I still find this sorely needed. if MLO wants to keep all tasks for itself, it needs to be self contained and be a swiss army knife for all that is todo management (like i mentioned above). Exporting a selection, view, or all to a predefined format (JSON, todo.txt format, csv) and export it to dropbox, or simply a file, will make me feel more at ease that if something stops working, MLO stops working, or something crashes which makes me lose all my tasks that I at least have a backup of the last tasks.

- Use of hashtags in comments to relate otherwise unrelated tasks
Tasks are now structured by tree, but they have no inter-relations other than context, or a time to do them. It might be nice if flags (like iOS, or free field hashtags) can group related tasks that are living in separate branches. For example, something might be weakly related to something else, by clicking on the hashtag, I see all the tasks sharing it, and I can select either seeing the tree (up to the highest common ancestor or project) or just a flat list of these items. An example might be linking to a reference of gifts for my daughter for certain events like #birtday or #xmas where the hashtag #xmas shows the sub-items in the list "Gifts" and not all. One would say, contexts can do that, but between projects, it might even link documentation, future issues to other issues from a bugtracker, ticket or some other administrative reference.

Now to end on a positive note. I tried a lot of apps, MLO beats them all with feature completeness, but like any other app, MLO is also not complete. Here are some apps I tried with strong and weak points:

SimpleTask (based on todo.txt specification)
======================
Strong:
* Share/sync todo.txt through dropbox
* Multi select/modify!
* Input file is editable by either a text editor or in the app (great for backup, or overhaul)
* todo.txt is a spec that all apps can adhere to
* Free form text, good filtering
* Other apps using the same todo.txt file can interact with the database (e.g. ClockWork Tomato)
Weak:
* No structure other than tags or project references
* No sorting or manual ordering
* No reminders
* No planner
* No comments
* No review

TickTick
======================
Strong:
* Web interface next to app
* Hashtaks to relate tasks
* Lists/Sublists
Weak:
* No real projects
* No project progress
* Hard to manage items
* Lack of reviewing / planning

My Effectiveness
======================
Weak:
* Too involved
* Too steep learning curve

.. And some others (more of the same).

MLO costed a lot of money, which in my eyes raises expectations of an app that gets frequent updates or has devs at least listen to it's customerbase (or receive input or be transparent by use of a bugtracker). But this group seems to be just about firing blanks in the dark without any MLO representative present being the voice of MLO. The matter is complicated because there are three types of customers here that benefit from three different code bases, making it harder to maintain them all, and raises a lot of unhappyness amongst them, such as:

- Windows users using the app miss a lot of features (on both sides)
- IOS users miss features from Android
- Android misses features from IOS
- Slow development on all fronts due to the different code bases, leading to "are we abandoned?" remarks

I hope to see a new release soon, but it might help to just post regular progress to the users, a projected release date for what platform, features that are in the pipeline, and by gawd, use a subreddit or a regular forum instead of google groups it feels like the users are stuck communicating in 2002 by email or an outdated web-page, while the rest of the world, devs and customers communicate in a way more open bi-directional manner in 2016.

I work every day in an agile team, communication to customers is key, small release cycles are key, not using sprints is unthinkable. It manages the customer's expectations, gives regular updates, and allows for quick changes if needed. I have no insight in how big the company that makes MLO is, how many devs there are, or how their project(s)  are managed, but internal management is only part of it.

My two cents.
- A (still happy) MLO user..

[Roberto Penzo]

Hi Jorgen.
Read all your post. Quite good. Thank you.

I would only point out one of your important hints.

I wish MLO becomes a perfect planning tool.
This can only achieved by placing task timeslots on a visual calendar like Google, where today most people already places their appointments.
There you can find free times, realize if the planning is really consistent, and eventually drag & drop something on different times/dates. This is the top for me.

So I wish to have a full, direct, two ways sync integration with Google Calendar.
This would also give a easy way to share tasks with other people, even with those using MLO: Google calendar would act, for the calendarized tasks, as a bridge. Wonderful!

[damoski]

Hi,

I've been a user for 4-5 years, and have been asking for this first point. It's the main reason why MLO doesn't work for me, because it means I can't plan my days with it, and stick to that plan.

It's a shame, but in a way this is a killer feature of MS OneNote, to allow easy drag-drop of tasks to/from days in a week calendar view, so you can easily drop or move tasks into a day.

I've posted a workaround to this to plan the week using contexts for days and part of day - see my other posts here.

D