At first sight, I thought it as “okay…another web 2.0 brainchild”. It seemed too simple to handle my complicated needs and I did not have high ambition with it. But as days passed, I was discovering new new features of it and gradually it became a part of my life. I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done (GTD) approach and Todoist became my dropbox for all the tasks in my mind.

If you ask me what’s so special about Todoist, I’d mention the following few features:

Simplicity

Todoist is damn simple and hosts one of the most powerful yet sleek web 2.0 interface on the web. It allows you to have an unlimited nested category/project list and under each of them, unlimited nested task list. This is something that most other tools miss. For me, it’s a super MUST feature.

Shortcuts

I was never fond of using shortcuts in web apps, but Todoist has made me use it’s ones. With very simple and familiar shortcuts, you can easily perform the most used tasks in a flash. For example, you press a to add a new task, Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right to indent/outdent your task, Ctrl+Enter to save the current item and add a new one below, etc etc. When you get used to with them, you’ll find that you’re using them unconsciously.

Powerful Date

Todoist features one of the most powerful date input system. It understands any natural date entry you can have: today, friday, next tuesday, tomorrow @ 5pm, last friday, etc. And it’s not limited to that only, you can add recurring dates in as simple way: ev day @1pm, every fri, every 2nd mon, etc.

Task Query

So, you’ve added a bunch of tasks and now want to find out a small set of them. How do you do that? Simple, type the query in the Todoist query box at top left. Example: tod, tom, next 4 days, overdue, @meeting, etc. Btw, Todoist allows you to tag your tasks with a very simple manner. Just put a “@tag” in your task details and it will become a tag. You can later query using that tag as well.

Reminders

Like all other similar applications, Todoist also features a number of reminder methods. You can plug in your jabber client, ask it to send you sms, or fire an email. Moreover, if you’re one of those twitter fans, then it can send msg to your twitter also. What more can someone need?

API

Yes, I knew you’d ask about it. Todoist has a very simple yet powerful set of API functions that you can use to fetch the contents from your account. They return the data in JSON format so you can use it in your JavaScript based applications and also can use in any back-end applications as well by converting them as per your need. And it has a number of different plugins for QuickSilver, Launchy, Mac Dashboard, iGoogle, Netvibes, etc. And lastly, there is a Firefox sidebar which integrates seamlessly into your firefox for a faster and smarter access to your tasks.

Some missing functionality

Although Todoist boosts an array of excellent features and satisfies all my needs in full, I’d love to have a few more features in it: Offline access (using Google Gear), Export/Import of tasks, iCal/RSS, Google Calendar Integration etc. The best part is, they’ve opened a place to hear from the users and are willing to value the user’s voice.

All in all, Todoist is my most favorite tool on the web at this moment. It helps me like a little buddy and keeps my life organized and clean. I’d ask you to give it a try and stick with it for a couple days and I am more than sure that you’ll find its beauty.

Happy tasking !

Now that I have some fresh essentials, this post was inevitable.

18. jQuery UI

This is the official big boss with a number of core interactions (drag, dropping, sorting, selecting, resizing) and few great widgets (accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, tabs) built on top of those. Although its a great collection, I somehow haven’t been able to use it in any real projects yet. It seems small plugins always get a favor than big collections

19. Facebox

This is a cute, little plugin that shows Facebook style dialog boxes using jQuery. It supports nearly all the possible contents you might want to show in a dialog box: image, div, remote pages. It has both automatic behavior and manual invoking. Simple and fun to me.

20. Pagination

Although we generate pagination mostly from back-end and display them in our pages, sometimes AJAX paginations are needed. This plugin outputs a superb pagination display to be used in such cases. If you know the usability issues regarding pagination and can distinguish between bad and good paginations, then you’ll find that this one has all the good in it. Check out their demo to know what I mean.

21. Ingrid, the jQuery Datagrid

“Datagrids don’t have to be difficult to use anymore – say hi to Ingrid. Ingrid is an unobtrusive jQuery component that adds Data Grid behaviors (column resizing, paging, sorting, row and column styling, and more) to your tables.” – I can’t agree more on their say. It’s truly an excellent implementation of grid. And it makes conversion of normal tables to grids very easy.

22. jQuery Youtube

If you have any need to retrieve and show Youtube videos in your site, this plugin will be a life-saver. Specify a few properties and this plugin will fetch the videos utilizing the new GData API from Google. And the author makes an unique display of the thumbnails, but combining it with BlockUI – so when you click on a retrieved video, you have it in a modal for preview.

23. Coda Slider

I am a huge fan of Coda Slider. It’s a slider plugin for jQuery and is much better than many other sliders out there. It has a pile of properties and display options to play with. I have been able to customize and use it in every possible need, so there is a chance it helps you out also. Supports custom height, width, tabs on top/bottom, without tabs, custom arrows, … and a lot more.

24. jQuery Lightbox

The prototyped lightbox was very popular and I used it in a couple occasions. But since I’ve switched to jQuery, I hardly found any replacement for that. Thickbox and a couple other tried (and they were very good implementation), but couldn’t make me feel the same way. Suddenly I found this one and I knew its the one. A one-liner implementation and all the features from my previous fav is back. It has a number of customization also, if you need to modify the way it behaves.

25. Auto Completer

Auto-completes have been there and I mentioned some great ones in my previous posts, but this one has also captured my attention and I like it very much. The author has gone a few extra miles and has explained the inner workings of the plugin. But if you just want to try it out, you can check the demo.

Categorized jQuery Essentials

A lot of people have asked me to categorize the posts so that it’s easy to pick for them. I waited for this post before doing that so I will do a categorized post of the cumulative list of plugins from the 3 posts in the series.

Happy jQuery !