Posts Tagged ‘Shopping List’

Go Shopping with Task2Gather

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Do you remember going shopping with a list of paper where all items that you’d like to buy were inscribed by you? It’s alway been tough to do that. Firstly, you take a list of paper, a pen or pencil and then start making up the list. Another important procedure is not to leave the list at home or the worst not to lose it on your way to the shop. It becomes even more tedious when you try at the same time seek for the products you need and cross out with the pencil the stuff you’ve already put in your cart.

Task2Gather installed on your iPhone or Windows Mobile can make shopping a real pleasure. Having created a  shopping list only once you won’t need to compile it each time from scratch. (more…)

What Task2Gather is

Saturday, May 10th, 2008
    
    We have tried many different ways of managing our projects in VITO Technology, from the beaten Excel spreadsheets to Microsoft Project. About a year ago I set out to find the best online service for this purpose. Unfortunately every solution I have tried (free and paid services) have several shortcomings that make them unacceptable to us. One of the hugest turnoffs was their complexity and aslo the lack of option to create various teams for separate projects.
 
    As a result of my fruitless searches I decided to develop our own project management system, first of all for ourselves, and then after internal testing open it as a publicly available online service.
    At first we planned to develop a service targeted mainly at small teams working on common projects regardless of their field of activity. Later on, when we already had the preliminary vision of user interface and service structure, it occured to us that our target audience stretches much further, right to the personal usage. At the present stage we can already precisely define what Task2Gather is. Actually the name pretty much says for itself - “gather together for managing tasks”.
    So, Task2Gather is a “one-place-for-all-tasks” service, i.e. for a user it’s where he keeps all his personal tasks, personal to do lists, business projects in which he participates, household chores and other family care tasks, etc. Task2Gather is a means of communication within projects between absolutely different people that can belong to completely different groups (family members, colleagues, discussion groups, research teams, etc.).
    While developing Task2Gather we proceeded from the following requirements:  
    

     

  1. Simplicity. The service presupposes there must be no need to COMPEL somebody use it. Project and task creation must be simple, otherwise managers won’t be using it. Reporting must be simple, otherwise employees won’t be using it as well. It is necessary to throw away all excessive information from task description; everything that overloads this form and that is never or very rarely used in real life must be gone. If some task property MAY be omitted it MUST be omitted. The service must be self-explanatory right from the start, without scrutinizing the manual: got signed up - and you are good to go.
  2. High performance. The service must run really fast. The user must feel comfortable while working; it should never occur to him that the service is actually located on a remote server.
  3. Sharing. Task2Gather is the all-in-one service. It contains all user’s tasks: personal, family, business, social, etc. All users of the service can easily get organized into various groups and teams. These can be housekeepers and their kids, businessmen/businesswomen and their spouses, colleagues and their friends, etc.
  4. Flexibility. There must be no restriction as to the area of application of the service - all that requires task and project management: from shopping lists, personal & family to do lists to team-work of small collectives engaged in building, software development, bug tracking, traveling, expeditions, research teams, etc. Users themselves decide where and how to use the provided service.
  5. Mobility. The service must be available from any desktop computer with Internet access through a web browser. Mobile clients of the service for Windows Mobile and iPhone should be also available as add-ons.

    We are sure that Task2Gather will meet all these requirements and that we will find many users who will like our approach and our ideology of task and project management explained in short as “simplicity + sharing”. I know there are many chiefs and project managers who will find our point of view on project management ridiculous since they are used to employing complicated services with complex hierarchy, access rights, graphs, scrupulous task descriptions. Projecting and carrying out the projects for them is something very difficult, something that requires special training, something beyond plain men’s comprehension. We proclaim that this is an incorrect approach! Projecting must not exist for the sake of projecting itself. This is just a tool to gain the objective!

    I’ll be writing about the current state of the service Task2Gather in this blog. I’ll be also making public our thoughts and new ideas as they come in the process of bringing to life and tuning up Task2Gather. I hope to hear your ideas and wishes as well.
In addition you will find here posts not necessarily directly connected with task and project management but interesting to me as to the author of this blog.

Current state of Task2Gather:
1. Desktop version is due for internal release in the second half of May. About a month later there will be announced a free public access to the service. If you want to participate in beta-testing, you can leave a comment and I will send you an invitation before the public release.
2. Windows Mobile client will be available at iWindowsMobile.com at the time of the public release of 
Task2Gather.
3. Apple iPhone version is scheduled for the second half of June.

Â