Well, this inspired me to take a look at 2Do out of curiosity, particularly since I still own a copy for iOS from a few years back when it was a somewhat more basic app.
While on the one hand it seems very powerful and sophisticated, I think they’ve made some of the wrong tradeoffs in achieving that sophistication. The app does a lot, and the UI is nicely designed from an aesthetic point of view, but beyond that, it just feels cumbersome. I guess it’s a matter of what you’re used to, and if I was starting out fresh I’d certainly be tempted to give 2Do some more consideration, but I’ve become so accustomed to OmniFocus’ cleaner interface on mobile that I find 2Do’s a bit, well, frightening ;) That clock interface for setting times on start and due dates is cute, but hugely inefficient IMHO – I think that’s a clear case of choosing a pretty design over a practical one. Alarms are set using the much more practical standard iOS time picker.
I think the Mac app would also be somewhat of a deal breaker there. In that context, I do like the design aesthetic much more (complexity in a desktop app is less of an issue than in an iOS app), but it appears to have been last updated over a year ago, and lacks some features that would be important to me, such as being able to set location reminders on the desktop version (having to revisit a task on the mobile side just to add a location reminder just complicates the process, and I’m not a huge fan of how they’ve implemented that feature on the mobile side either – it seems you can’t just punch in an address… you either have to drag your pin to a spot, or work from your contacts list).
The inability to nest projects within projects also seems like it would be a problem for me, but to be fair 2Do has a slightly different implementation of “projects” in the first place, in that they’re already kind of embedded into “single action lists.” Their help claims this is a function of having to maintain compatibility with a wide variety of CalDAV sync services, so clearly they have issues where they’re hamstrung on legacy data structures as well.
The ability to set alarms separately from due dates/times is also a nice idea as well, but again seems like something that could get cumbersome if you start dealing with both. iOS Reminders has that problem, and it’s even more confusing there… tasks sometimes magically get a “due date” while it doesn’t appear at all for other tasks.
The tags are definitely a nicer implementation, and I’m with everybody else here in wishing that OmniFocus would implement this, but it’s also something that I’ve been able to live without for the most part, albeit it somewhat grudgingly. It’s definitely a tradeoff.
I had also sort of hoped that 2Do would be able to nail the push notification side of things for instantaneous background sync. Sadly, it’s no better than OmniFocus in that regard, since they don’t leverage their own sync server at all, but rather rely on Dropbox. As much as Things doesn’t even come close to doing what I want (NO location reminders, NO time-based notifications), at least they’ve finally managed to nail push-based sync (then again, it took them long enough :) )
Still, compared to when I first looked at it, 2Do has certainly grown up in leaps and bounds. Definitely an app worth keeping an eye on.
