14 DAY TRIAL // If you want to run your business or just manage your daily chores, there's no other app like Todoist. The cloud-based task management suite can be used by anyone, anywhere because it has clients on 13 different platforms. One of their most interesting integrations was with Sunrise Calendar. This allows users to see their tasks on Sunrise app calendar.
There are plenty of task managers around, so when you choose one you need to make sure that if you add a task for a year later, the app will still be present on your phone or computer. Todoist has proved they are reliable, since the app has been around since January of 2007.
They have a good approach to native apps and platforms: the user does not need any complicated interfaces and icons. Give him a straight forward app that does what it is suppose to be doing and works on any platform. That may not seem like a big thing, but when you want to send an employee a task, you don't need to ask yourself whether he can install the app or not.
Softpedia sat down with Amir Salihefendic, the CEO and founder of Todoist. Amir is originally from Bosnia and he grew up in Denmark. He got involved in Plurk, a Twitter precursor used by millions of people and then he went on to create the first digital task managers available.
Our discussion started after the Wunderlist (another popular task manager) team has launched their 3.0 version. Apple has heavily promoted Wunderlist for Mac and iOS, and other developers have launched similar apps.
Softpedia: Do you feel a tighter competition on this market lately?
Amir Salihefendic: The launch of Wunderlist 3 has not affected us. I think Todoist is in another class of productivity tools: it’s much more powerful than anything else on the market and it is made for people who are truly busy and want to improve their productivity. Apps like Wunderlist and Any.do are made for people who don’t care that much about productivity.
Softpedia: Wunderlist has a different approach when it comes to updating their apps. That’s why it took them almost 11 months to upgrade to the iOS 7 look. How do you work with Todoist when it comes to design changes? Do you care about HIGs proposed by Apple or Google or you just follow your instincts and design the apps as you like?
Amir Salihefendic: We follow HIGs very closely on both iOS and Android. For example, Todoist for iOS 7 is a pure iOS 7 app without many custom UI elements. The same can be said about our Android app.
Following the guidelines means that we can adopt faster and that our apps look more native. For example, we did our iOS 7 rewrite in about 3 weeks. Wunderlist took 11 months to do their redesign because they use a ton of custom elements.
Softpedia: Your app is spread over 13 platforms. How difficult is it to manage all of them? Did you consider leaving some of those platforms? If so, what would be the reasons for doing that?
Amir Salihefendic: Our desktop apps and plugins are hybrids (meaning that some elements are native while a lot of it is a HTML5 WebApp). This makes things much easier to maintain and we can roll out updates almost daily.
This said, we will probably remove some of the platforms we support (such as Thunderbird and Postbox) since they don’t have that much traction.
Softpedia: iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are just around the corner. Would you be ready to launch redesigned apps on day one?
Amir Salihefendic: It will take us a few weeks to get our apps out. But we will have an iOS 8 enabled Todoist and a special new version for OS X Yosemite.
Softpedia: What features and APIs in iOS 8 and OS X are you most excited about and what will you be using with your app?
Amir Salihefendic: iOS 8 makes it possible to build integrations with other apps much more easily. For us, this could be important as we could enable other apps to easily add tasks to Todoist via a simple API. Other than this we are also excited about the improved notifications (which especially will be very powerful with our reminders).
For OS X we are integrating deeper with the system and we are doing some smaller visual updates. Here’s a small sneak peek: http://cl.ly/image/1K0L472v0c1i
Softpedia: Todoist has simple graphics, nothing fancy. Even the icons are as simple as possible. Did you consider changing that to a more colorful approach?
Amir Salihefendic: Todoist is a serious tool that aims to make people more productive. Adding colors and images distracts users from the important stuff, like managing their life. We do use colors, but, in Todoist, color is more of an organizational tool, not something to make things “pretty”.
Our design is about eliminating all the distractions so only the essential is present.
Softpedia: With a market full of great ToDo apps, how would you convince the users of Wunderlist, Omnifocus, Any.Do or other big one to use your app instead?
Amir Salihefendic: Todoist is for people who truly care about improving their productivity and making the most of their days. This is our focus and something we have tried to do since 2007.
Take a look at the videos below and try Todoist for free. Let us know if you have any other questions for the Todoist team and what you think of their products.
