I keeps dismissing my ideas as trivial and already done. When I think I have a new idea, my friends would dismiss it as trivial and already done. Take astrid's todo list or task sharing for example. My initial and only thought would be 'does the world need another todo app', 'another list making app' really? If I take the idea to my friends, they would bombard me with companies who do exactly the same thing. And yet here we are with Astrid being acquired. It seems to have some angel investment/funding even. The founders may not be millionaires but they definitely made more money than I did.
Note to self: do something. anything. and get acquired.
The perseverance component is often overlooked, I personally believe it is the single most important factor determining the eventual success or failure of a business.
> The app will remain online for another 90 days before it’s shut down by Yahoo. In the meantime, it’s not accepting any new users.
Well, crap. Any migration path or alternatives? I don't even need 99% of Astrid's bells and whistles, just your basic "add entries and tick 'em off" todo list along the lines of what the Palm V used to do.
I've found Toodledo (http://www.toodledo.com/) to be the only cross-platform service that supports Getting Things Done (GTD) well. It leaves some things to be desired, but I haven't seen anything else out there that both
1) Supports a GTD workflow
2) Works on both iOS and Android (but also has a web
interface).
Toodledo syncs well with apps like 2Do (available for both iOS and Android) and Pocket Informant.
If you (or anybody else) is interested in migrating to Toodledo, I wrote a Ruby client library for the Toodledo API that may be handy - ping me and I can send you the link.
And if anybody has other suggestions for services that fit both of the above requirements, I'd love to know.
Todoist (http://todoist.com/) is flexible, and can do both of those. They've got native apps for ios and android, and good integration with gmail. It has good support for recurring dates, subtasks, and some other niceities, but is also good as a basic list keeper.
Our desktops apps are really useful to structuring coding projects and I use it all the time while coding (as Todoist supports shortcuts and outline like nested structures) - - and it's really fast to use. Here's one of my recent projects, for an idea: http://cl.ly/image/1C2p1j1b0r3B
This is great because you can assign due dates and priorities to sub-tasks - - and you can hide/show Todoist while you develop (via a global keyboard shortcut).
I rely on this with Gtasks on Android every day as my main note taking vehicle. I find it especially useful for literally instantaneous syncing between phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop.
Here's a way to access it via its own independent window (I keep this pinned in my browser):
Wunderlist is a good alternative. I'm a fan - syncs easily and well, you can create grouped lists if you want, star important items. Or just go super simple. Either way, it's pretty sweet.
I'm a recent convert to Remember the Milk[0], can't recommend it enough (the apparent stable business model is a plus as well, I recall using them back in the Blackberry era)
I recently started using Asana just for my personal to-do list, it's not bad and it's free. Haven't tried the mobile apps yet, but they look pretty good.
We are primarily focused on grocery shopping lists, but it'll work fine for other simple lists, and makes it really easy to share lists and collaborate with other people.
I love AnyList. I needed a super-simple shared todo list (for groceries, actually), and it does the job perfectly. I only wish there was a web client.
Also, thanks for including a list of acknowledgements in the app. I track all of the ones I find at https://www.cocoacontrols.com/apps?o=date, but unfortunately a lot of people simply don't include any OSS acknowledgements.
I'm guessing that the article has been updated, because it doesn't say that any more. The Android client is also open-source and doesn't require a network connection, so it should keep working :).
I wish the web version of Keep was...faster. It takes too long to do some things, like deleting the tasks. And you can't even "wipe" a list. Well you can delete one, but what if it wasn't your last list? You can't even rearrange the lists in the order you want, which I find very frustrating.
I use the Getting Things Done methodology and have OmniFocus on my Mac for that. I'm trying out Trello for simple project management and it seems like it would make a good GTD tool as well. The simplest online tool I've used is Wunderlist, which is worth a look.
The repeat options are far more limited than Astrid and a show stopper for me. (Can't do "once every 3 weeks", for example.) Finding an Astrid replacement is much harder than I thought it would be.
<sarcasm>
I thought Yahoo was in trouble and had a glut of employees. Rather, it seems they have found a pot of gold and don't have enough employees to execute their plan for world domination.
</sarcasm>
Astrid ran hard to make an app that millions of people use constantly. As a startup, they took a risk, ran hard at an idea, and executed their ass off.
We should all be so lucky.
Regarding this "acquihire" talk:
This is something the naysayers like to talk about. Yahoo's scale present an incredible sandbox for the Astrid team. They are a fully contained, highly functional team (across product and engineering disciplines). They know how to build back-end systems, complex web-apps, and cross-platform mobile apps.
The fact that someone found a higher and better use is not a failure on their part. Yahoo is fortunate to have this team join their ranks.
I agree. I left Yahoo during the Scott Thompson time, but see the value in Mayer.
I love Yahoo, always have, but I'm hoping that Mayer cuts out 2-3 layers of management. When I was there, it was embarrassing to talk to my boss, who clearly didn't give a shit about my team or our department.
The dude did nothing but suck up to Sunnyvale. Hopefully they fire folks like him.
> Yahoo Acquires 4M-User ‘To Do’ App Astrid, Will Shut It Down In 90 Days
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what scale Yahoo operates on, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to merge Astrid into whatever their plans are rather than drop them and alienate people who were already users?
Or was it just seen as a potential resource hole (with the value of the users seen as negative)?
Can anyone shed some light on what Astrid's business model was?
it's an acquihire. they are not buying any product. (peanut butter spread too thin, etc)
they just have a lot of money to hire, and nobody wants to work there.
So they do the dumbest thing a company can. Spends 10~30million a head, and they are out the door as soon as their contract allows. (case in point, your host. and he was even a case where yahoo wanted to buy the product...)
oh, and they are so sure everyone is leaving, that the new policy (look it up, was on techcrunch) is to give out annual bonuses instead of pay rises and promotions.
Astid's business model was "Free app, with paid for extra features". The free app was close to feature complete though: the extra features you could buy were fairly small & so buying the upgrades was really just making a donation to the devs. They may have expanded the paid services since I used the app though: I used it for a while and it was pretty good, but I found the UI a bit clunky and difficult to navigate once you wanted to do anything more complex than simple tick-box todo lists and I eventually gave up on it.
I used Astrid for a while and just switched over to Google Keep a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend it for people who just want simple synced to-do/notes.
Yes, they could Google-Reader-it at any time, I suppose, but for something transient like todos I'm not too worried about it.
Sweet, maybe they can afford to address some of the insane bugs they have accreted. I normally defend developers/software when people I know complain about an app - but this is like a year and a half of really bad/frustrating bugs. Disappearing tasks, duplicated tasks, inability to enter tasks at certain times of the day.... And ultimately not responding to emails regarding these issues. If you are going to provide an app which is in essence an augmentation of someones mind you should take the responsibility seriously.
While we're suggesting todo apps - I've been using Clear [1] (Mac + iPhone only) for the past month and love it. The UI is beautiful yet very simple as everything is done with touch gestures.
It seems companies other than people like 37signals and indie game studios don't want to be small and independent? I could be wrong about this analysis, but I find the aquihire trend somewhat depressing.
I'd say some people are in it to get absorbed sure, but there are also people who wanted to make it on their own but can't because of continual funding, the need to compete with free competitors, etc.
Guess I'm picking a new to-do program, then. Honestly I don't spend as much time with Astrid since I switched to iOS, I really got used to its geofencing capabilities on Android.
Anyone got any suggestions for an iOS/Mac to-do program that can do geofencing for entire lists, instead of single todos like Apple's Reminders?
The key feature I used Astrid for was the ability to have recurring tasks based on the date of last completion instead of fixed intervals. Does anything else out there do that?
When "rips off" Clear's UI and looks interesting. Doable has a very custom UI and looks like it has a couple more features, e.g. statistics. It looks like neither supports date-fixed tasks. If you need both you'll likely have to use Reminders or something in addition to one of these.
"regularly" is free of cost and does that. it has no syncing support with I consider a good thing as it contains very personal data that only concerns myself.
Huge congrats to Jon and Tim! I worked with them in 2011 and it's an amazing team that I'd be honored to work with any day. Yahoo! is lucky to have them.
I did AngelPad with them in Winter 2011 and we worked out of the same office building for a year. Awesome guys, great passion, sharp technologists and all around good people. Couldn't have happened to better people.
I don't want to take anything away from Astrid.
I keeps dismissing my ideas as trivial and already done. When I think I have a new idea, my friends would dismiss it as trivial and already done. Take astrid's todo list or task sharing for example. My initial and only thought would be 'does the world need another todo app', 'another list making app' really? If I take the idea to my friends, they would bombard me with companies who do exactly the same thing. And yet here we are with Astrid being acquired. It seems to have some angel investment/funding even. The founders may not be millionaires but they definitely made more money than I did.
Note to self: do something. anything. and get acquired.