Shut-down FAQ

1. Are you planning to make the code open-source?
Not at this point. A few companies have expressed interest in acquiring the assets, and this is the path we are pursuing right now.

2. Will the private data and the email database be sold?
Over our dead bodies. 

3. Why do you think this app has no future? It is very cool, you shouldn't pull the plug.
It's not just about the project itself, it is a matter of priorities, too. We think we can apply ourselves more effectively elsewhere.

task.ly is closing down

We finally decided to admit that we have failed to turn our idea into a business. We did build a good UI, some really cool tech, and got a couple raving reviews, but it's the ability to make money that counts.

We're closing down April 4.

task.ly began almost two years ago, when we decided to scratch a personal itch and build an awesome todo tracker. At that time we didn't know much about customer development or business model generation and just winged it. And today we see the bottom line of that approach.

So, what comes next? After we wrap up over here, the team parts ways.
I'm leaving to work on the product at yaM Labs. And Roman is going to put more hours in his PhD thesis and making some cool things for the iOS.

However, expect a few postmortem posts from us, including:
- what went right/wrong
- what was under the hood
- what are good alternatives to task.ly

State of the App

Yeah, we know, it's been quite some time since our last update. We shouldn't have kept all of you in the dark. Sorry, guys.

Here's a real quick status report.

As some of you know, we started task.ly last summer, exactly a year ago, with a two-people team. And it has been our only job for all this time - besides research and tiny consulting work for friends.

We were hoping to raise a seed round but apparently it's really tough (for a Moscow-based projects without earth-shattering ambitions) to reach great angel investors. Yes, we were offered financing, but on outrageous terms.

So, it's pretty obvious that we just ran out of juice - own and borrowed funds are exhausted. Right now the plan is to do a fairly big client project and dedicate all of the leftover time to finishing task.ly. After we finish the transition to this new mode of existence, you are going to see more feature releases and consequently - the open beta.

I want to make one thing clear. We are using the the beta a lot ourselves and really feel the pain from unfinished features, bugs and lack of polish. So you can be pretty sure that we'll finish it and ship the public version, come hell or high water.

Just bear with us and you won't be disappointed. We'll bring you the peace of mind you are looking for.

Somehow, we're mobile

Thanks to Ben Smith, one of our testers, we realised task.ly has gone mobile without any mobile clients or even SMS functionality.

Basically, this shows the power of simple data structure - users don't need high fidelity interfaces to reach our app.

So, where we are today.

Every decent phone has an email client these days. And with the email reception feature we just rolled out, creating new tasks on the go has become very easy and quick. (Well, unless your email client is crappy and slow.)

Photo

But there is more. If you tried our Gtalk bot, you probably actually like the way it works - similar to a personal assistant. You can create tasks, view them and get reminders. And if your phone has true multitasking and you can run your IM client in the background, our reminders reach you without a song and dance by some push notification server.

0photo

There. task.ly is on your mobile phone, and no hoop-jumping needed.

But there will be an API and mobile apps - count on it.

Create-by-email

A lot of time at this stage of the project goes into the ‘invisible’ stuff like server config, memory leaks, small fixes here and there. So, some of last week was taken by this.

But one relatively big thing was introduced last week – the app is now able to receive emails and turn them into tasks.

How it works: you send an email to task@task.ly and put the task text/tag/date into the subject field. You can leave the body blank, but if you put something in there (like a forwarded email) the app will put it in a comment tied to the task. Right now, it only takes the plain text from the message, but soon we’ll be able to handle attachments and html.

As a good side effect, the create-by-email thing made task.ly a bit more mobile (more on this in a separate post).

A couple more things:
1. I’m going to release a Chef recipe for deployment of Realplexor – a lightweight realtime updates server we’re using in our EngineYard instance. If you’re a Rails guy – get excited.

2. Last week I let myself off the hook and spent quite some time on my PhD thesis. Hoping to catch up this week. (Yeah, right.)

 

Posted by Roman Kutanov 

Comments (1)

All your Basecamp are belong to us

Meant

After much trial and error we now are happy to announce that the Basecamp sync is working!
As long-time Basecamp users, we are truly enjoying it ourselves.
Having all your working and personal tasks in one place is really, really cool.

Up next: syncing not just the tasks but the comments as well.

One issue that we couldn't sidestep: the Basecamp API is not optimised for regular task pulling, so the sync is not realtime. *sigh* 


Here's how it works:

Read the rest of this post »

Predictability

A good proxy of an interface's quality is how predictable it is for the user. This can be achieved with either a lot of text on top of each button or good visual language.

We got a special case of poor predictability with our command line because our reminder-setting system is based on processing natural language - not on clicking a bunch of buttons and date picker menus. Since there are so many ways to indicate the same day (tomorrow, in one day, April 14th) the system might 'misunderstand' you and miss the reminder date you aimed for (sometimes by weeks or months). Also, the system cuts the date/time data from the task text - so sometimes the wrong words get cut off.

To make sure users don't shoot themselves in the foot in such a way, we've come up with a solution. Some javascript jiujitsu allows us to tell the user where the reminder will be put and which words will get cut - even before she hits the enter key.

Here's what it looks like:

Reminder_popup_ex

PS. We're still working on the on-the-fly text coloring, but the reminder popup is already working on all accounts.

What was new this week

It’s been about a week since we started sending out closed beta invitations, let’s see what changed in the code after we got the feedback.

- Lots of CSS fixes. Those are hard to spot when you mostly code vs actually use the app.

- The ‘nonspecific’ date was introduced. So now you are able to plan a task for a day, but without specific time. Suck it, Google Calendar!

- Email reminders are finally here! Now everyone gets a morning digest of tasks for the day and a reminder about scheduled tasks 15 minutes in advance.

- Reminder tooltip is now working. When composing a task, you now know when the reminder will be set, before you press enter.

What’s coming soon:

- Basecamp integration. All you Basecamp tasks are belong to task.ly. :-)
It’s almost done, watch our Twitter for more news on this.

- More bugfixes.

Hope you are enjoying the beta so far, and it will get better!

 

Posted by Roman Kutanov 

Comments (3)

The Intro

Check out our brand spanking new video about the interface.

Early access

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A REWORK illustration by Mike Rohde.

Wow, big day today, the wait is finally over for the iPad, Square and task.ly closed beta launch.

Today we are rolling out the 'early access' accounts for those people who got an invitation card and registered their code.
If you're one of them - check your inbox later today.

Also, there is a smaller group of people who also will get an account - the testers. Those are the people who convinced us they have a long experience with to-do apps and will provide detailed feedback. And if you think you're up to the task to join those brave men and women, drop us a line at hello@task.ly.

One more thing: we still don't think the app is great. But we finally feel that it's not too crappy to share it with the world. Anyway, please be forgiving. :-)