My todo-list is..huge. For WinMerge and Frhed there are hundreds of bugs to look and and (some day) fix. And few times more of new features and improvements (visible ones). And then maybe couple of thousand things for testing, documenting, refactoring code…
Few years ago this almost drive me nuts even trying to somehow keep up all these things. Not alone trying to track these things. Planning is totally out of the question. Most of the time I try to find the most important things. Based on my memory and experience about what are important things. Yes, I simply forget lots of things. Just reading through most bug reports would take days of my free time. I haven’t even tried to read through feature requests in last couple of years.
Sourceforge.net does not really help software developers. Their trackers are plain awful to use. They are slightly better than putting TODO and BUGS -text files to Subversion and just editing those files. But not much. Recently they added Trac to their software offering. I thought we could finally start using decent tracking software. But there is a catch. You can export data from Sourceforge.net trackers. But there is no way to import it to their Trac installation. So no switch for us.
Couple of days ago I updated to the latest version of the ToDoList by dan.g. It is an excellent advanced todo-list application. I’ve been using it for years tracking everything. Its weakness is it is a quite complicated-looking. Luckily it can be configured, but it takes some time to find a configuration that works best for different needs. And even then it takes more time to find out the best way to work with it.
Yes, there are lots of todo-list applications. Everybody wants to do their own. Just because they can? But most of those applications can only sort by few levels of priority. Some allow even setting due dates. How original. I quess people writing those applications never have more than ten items in their lists. And they never want to categorize or sort their items. No much sorting in two items… When you have even 50 items you really appreciate ability to add categories etc to your items.
One nice thing in ToDoList is its code is available under free license. Few years ago I even borrowed some code from it to WinMerge (the options dialog). Unfortunately the current license (The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License) is not GPLv2 compatible and hence does not allow further code sharing. I suspect the licensing change is pure accident due to code published as a part of the article. But still prevents me updating to latest options-dialog code. Of course I could ask if Dan would be willing to double-license the code with GPLv2 compatible license…
Small annoyance with ToDoList is it doesn’t have installer but just files in zips. So the update is not simply downloading installer exe and running it (which I’ve used to doing for lots of programs). Instead I need to unzip the files with WinRar. That gets annoying when there are frequent updates.
If you need a good todo-list but don’t want to install Bugzilla for it, ToDoList is worth looking at.
