Ask HN: Product "to-do" lists

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108440

by skennedy • 16 years ago

2 6 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Inevitably, when you build a prototype you discover "to-do" items where expanded functionality impacts base functionality. Or, new ideas crop in your head to get to later. Sometimes these items depend on another item to be resolved/added first.

Right now, my answer is a "ToDo's" plugin to Firefox. This no longer meets my growing needs to keep track of items, priority, and dependencies. Especially, when new co-founders are added in the near future.

Can anyone recommend software that would help me better manage these items? If not software, how have other startups managed the priorities and direction of their product?

tonyarkles• 16 years ago

At the last startup I worked at, we used Jira [http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/] as an issue tracker. As ideas came up, we had a separate category for "idea issues". This kept everything in the same place, so when we wanted to work on a feature that was previously a TODO idea, we'd just assign it to someone to work on. Because it had been kept in JIRA for its entire lifetime, all thoughts and comments that people had had about it were already there for the implementer to consider.

romland2• 16 years ago

It's funny that you mention it as I wrote something that might be what you are looking for just a few weeks ago.

(edit as I re-read: doubtful that this fulfill your needs, you are probably better off with a more traditional Bugzilla-type-of thing. Keeping this posted anyway :)

This is an application that I wrote for internal usage. Have you ever heard of TeuxDeux (http://teuxdeux.com/)? Well, basically, I fell in love with the user-interface and it fulfilled that part of my needs. So, I took the look & feel and ran with it and made the following additions to my own version:

- Under the "some day" items I added categories which could be edited by dragging & dropping the category into the "some day" input box.

- Encouraged the usage of "hash tags" to TODO-items (#projectabbr Fix nasty crash bug)

- Added a filtering box which would highlight queried TODO's with that search filter

- Made it so that when you hover over a todo-item during drag/drop: a tree would pop-up with issues that depend on parent. You can drop the todo-item you are dragging and dropping into any of the items in that tree. When a parent is "freed" (done), its immediate children become separate TODO's in the list again. Rince/repeat.

- A detail screen which would appear when clicking on "..." next to a TODO item.

Put in mind here that I like the minimalistic and straight-to-the-point of this layout. I want my TODO lists to act like post-its :)

Unfortunately I have not open sourced it and I really never intended to do that for the very reason that I basically "ripped off" the look & feel of Teux Deux. But this might give you a few ideas, though. And it's not really too hard to implement. Give me a holler if you need a bit more info :)

skennedy• 16 years ago

Sounds like you have an application worth selling back to Teuxdeux or releasing yourself after "tweaking" the UI so as not to steal from them. Just took an overview of their product and your additions seem like good ideas.

romland2• 16 years ago

Ah, I actually sent them a mail telling them what I did and a few minor implementation details (and apologized for, ahem, liking their implementation too much).

Alas. No money to be made here :)

jmonegro• 16 years ago

basecamp or tadalist

citrik• 16 years ago

If you're mac based, I really like things from cultured code. It handles multiple users and they have a great iphone version that syncs to the desktop app. Helps me keep track of ideas better than a stack of napkins. http://culturedcode.com/things/

Ask HN: Product "to-do" lists

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