The Grumpy Editor gets organized with Astrid

Your editor does not normally need any computerized assistance when it comes to knowing what needs to be done next; it's usually just a matter of dealing with whatever is on fire at the moment. Still, there are times when it would be nice to have a task management tool with a longer view, where a different set of priorities can be expressed. Recently it became time to work on one of those longstanding todo items and examine Astrid as a possibility for that role.

A task manager which works with the phone obviously makes sense; one cannot always be at the keyboard when trying to figure out what to do next. Anybody who has an Android-based phone has a long list of task management applications to choose from; simply working through the list is the sort of todo item that can make one decide to just drink beer and mess around on the net instead. So why pick Astrid out of the pile of applications? It comes down to two reasons: it comes well recommended, and it's free software - Astrid is licensed under GPLv2 and can be downloaded from github.

Astrid provides the kinds of features that one might expect from this type of application. One can enter tasks and assign an importance and a deadline to each. This is the 21st century, so, naturally, tasks can be tagged as well. A timer mechanism allows the user to track how much time goes into the accomplishment of each task - a useful feature, perhaps, if that time will subsequently be billed for. And, naturally, one can mark tasks as being done.

There are various options for how obnoxiously Astrid should nag as deadlines approach and just how hard it should be to make the notifications go away. A true procrastinator with a masochistic streak can configure the application to a phone-smashing level of annoyance. For the rest of us, simple notifications and, possibly, a desktop widget will do.

In general, Astrid works as advertised. Entering new tasks is easy, and the notifications work as expected. There is a whole set of options for filtering the display of tasks which must be useful to some people; work-oriented tasks can be separated from shopping lists, for example. The desktop widget works but, like a number of other Android applications, it makes poor use of the space which is given to it. About half of the allotted space contains task information - truncated to the point of near uselessness. Some thought put into the organization of that widget might make it worth dedicating scarce desktop space to. As it is, your editor couldn't justify deleting something else to make space for it.

One of the sticking points with phone-based task managers is the simple inconvenience of entering tasks through an on-screen keyboard. The motivation to turn an "oh, yeah, I have to do X" moment into a documented task fades when it requires using a small screen and a tiny keyboard. The obvious answer to this problem is synchronization with some sort of online service, preferably one which enables access over the web from real computers as well. To this end, Astrid will synchronize with the Google mail task list or with an online service called Producteev. Gmail provides simple online storage and synchronization, while Producteev has (for a fee) all kinds of options for shared task lists, report generation, and more. The fact that use of SSL is a paid option on Producteev is not particularly encouraging, but so it goes.

The online documentation talks about synchronization with Remember the milk, but version 3.7.3.1 does not appear to actually support that service.

Your editor only tried out the Google-based synchronization. It works as expected; tasks move nicely between Google and the application. Of course, using this feature requires providing one's Google password to Astrid and providing one's task lists to Google, but, after all, it's not like Google knows anything else about us anyway.

This kind of synchronization is useful, and, honestly, worrying about storing some todo items on Google's server seems pretty silly if one is willing to take the privacy-reducing step of walking around with an Android phone in one's pocket. Still, it would be nice to be able to synchronize applications like this to a more private backing store - preferably one which does not require a great deal of pain to set up. We need a mechanism by which one can install a simple backup appliance onto a server anywhere on the net; otherwise we'll always be dependent on services provided by companies whose interests will not always align with our own.

(Along these lines, it's worth noting that Astrid, in its default configuration, phones home to a service called Flurry with "anonymized" information about how the application is used. This reporting can be turned off in the settings menu.)

While Astrid is free software, it supports add-ons which are not. The Astrid store offers a couple of paid add-ons. One of which offers timers, "bigger better widgets," voice-based features, and "No Ads!" A fair amount of time playing with Astrid has not turned up an advertisement yet, but, one assumes, that could happen at some future time. There is also a "Locale add-on" which allows tasks to be keyed on the phone's location.

Some of these features, seemingly, could be added by anybody willing to dig into the Astrid source. Certainly, any sort of advertising antifeature could easily be subtracted that way. One can only assume that patches to that end would not be accepted upstream. Some quick searching failed to turn up anybody who has rebuilt Astrid with a different feature set; it is nice to know that a fork is a possibility, though, should Astrid's masters take an overly user-hostile direction.

There could be changes in store for Astrid; recently its developers announced that they had "brought in some external funding" and will be focusing more on Astrid in particular. There will be a new synchronization service at Astrid.com, an iPhone version, and more. Whether this money - and the revenue expectations that certainly come with it - will push Astrid in a less friendly direction remains to be seen. Hopefully the open-source nature of the code will help to keep the developers focused on keeping users happy.

For now, there seems to be little to worry about; the only visibly commercial aspect of current Astrid builds is the "add-ons" button in the main menu. Astrid's developers have been successful in creating a task management application which is appealing to a wide range of people. With luck, it will just get better now that more developer time will be made available.

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