Task Tracker

You use the google homepage? http://www.google.com/ig and if you look for stuff in that I’ve got a ‘To Do List’ thingy, handy out. Simple but effective!
Can put calculators and other useful gadgets on it, love the homepage

If you do use the Google homepage, make sure you don’t put any really important, unmissable stuff up there though, as last week mine got cleared by Google doing an upgrade.

I still use it myself though, it’s still a great feature :)

I often keep a notepad window open, but I find the best todo lists are on paper: they can be added to/edited on the fly in meetings, on the go etc. I dont have the discipline to type them into anything else when I get back to my desk, so I just keep a heavy pad that is hard to lose everywhere I go.

Dave

check out http://www.slimtimer.com

some folk use this;

http://www.rainlendar.net/cms/index.php

And, as a more geeky alternative, you could buy a PDA and use that for tasks :)

loved my PDA..but it got stolen and would only synch with office…

would prefer an open source option…and a less expensive gadget!

thanks for links guys..

Aphra.

Omen, maybe your best bet is an excel sheet ;)

20 minutes and excel is the way to go.
Prob find a macro or vb script which does roughly what you want.

what about one that can be used for a team of 2 or more people?
Im talking about a simple dev log.

Any ideas guys?

SoonR might do you, it sits on your desktop and your mobile phone and can synchronise between them, and has a few different features for self-organisation.
Google desktop has a to do list function, a scratch pad, etc…its quite modular too…
But generally, unless you’ve got more than 7 things on at once, or you’re planning tasks far in advance, I’d go with a (paper) notepad and a pen. You can always use the pen to kill enemy agents…

Google and rainlender are basically calenders, and SlimTimer is a time sheet maker.

I just want something to create tasks and add detail to them and a way to mark them being done. (notepad fails here cos I can’t even colour the font) [/quote:c82a85e942]think you should take a closer look at Slimtimer, Damien – it’s much more than a time sheet maker. You can ignore the timing function and simply create a list of tasks to track progress against. Using the Tag functionality, you can add detail to the tasks. You can also share tasks with others, separate active and complete tasks, and run several different kinds of reports. Using Bubbles, you can have it sit in the Sys Tray if you wish. It’s not perfect, but does add some nice out of the box functionality that many similar apps lack.

Failing that, there’s the two old reliables – the Task function in Outlook (more powerful than it looks) and a customized Excel doc (which can be edited simultaneously by others on your team via the Shared Workbook function)

You might also like – http://www.tadalist.com/ and http://www.backpackit.com/

Does anyone know of one that can share and synch certain tasks between different profiles / people, and will allow you to even assign tasks to other profiles ( eg sending "I need X done for Friday", marked URGENT, to Paddy Bloggs profile )?

Mal

Does anyone know of one that can share and synch certain tasks between different profiles / people, and will allow you to even assign tasks to other profiles ( eg sending "I need X done for Friday", marked URGENT, to Paddy Bloggs profile )?[/quote:7e01742715]Can only think of a few – one free and the others pretty cheap

[list:7e01742715]- RT (http://bestpractical.com/rt) is free but butt ugly, has no reporting features and takes a bit of getting used to. Pretty powerful system though (mainly used for customer support). May be overkill for most small dev houses

– Fogbugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/) great, lightweight system with lots of nifty extensions but $129 per user. Can also be used for customer support and includes time estimate and very simple reporting functionality. Can be used for small – large organisations easily

– Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) almost as ugly to look at and use as RT, but rich feature-set too. May be overkill for most small dev houses

– Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/) from same crowd who did the two apps I posted on earlier. Fuller feature set than TaDa List and BackPackIt, but nice, lightweight app without the clutter (e.g. CPM, PERT, Gantt, etc.) of some other PM tools. Free to use on small projects, I think[/list:u:7e01742715]
All of these can be used for bug tracking, customer support or simple project management.

For anyone who uses Outlook, I’d advise delving a little deeper into the Tasks functionality as there’s some simple and handy features in there including. re-assigning tasks, assigning tasks to others, progress reporting, etc.

I’d be surprised if there are aren’t some Open Source apps (e.g. PHPProjekt, etc.) that don’t offer similar functionality, but haven’t really looked into any of them. Be interested to hear what others have used

BTW, there are a fair few posts on this and similar topics in the Production forums on the IGDA site

New Task: Get time to look at all Tony’s links.
Due: ASAP
Owner: me