Some time ago, I revived my mobile website on a new address, westergaard.mobi. It is a super-simple site written in PHP, but benefits from being one of the last projects I did in PHP, so the code is not all crap, and it is very easy to build simple sites including user authentication in a way that is very mobile-friendly (also for feature phones.
5 years ago, I wrote about how I used Evernote and an iPhone app called Egretlist for tracking todo items. I’d use Evernote to make notes for this and that, and whenever I’d have to do something I’d just add a checkbox. I still do that, but Egretlist has been defunct for ages, and I’ve not found any other apps that actually work for this.
So, I decided to make one. Here’s the first preview. Here’s my demo Evernote account with two notebooks and a great note:
There’s a couple checkboxes for todo items, some text, an image and more todo items. If we head to westergaard.mobi, we get a list of tools (not all tools are available to to people who fail in the category of being me – for example, the todo list is still in progress and not available):
We select the Evernote todo list. The first time, the site will redirect you to Evernote and ask you to allow it to have access to your notes. The application asks to be able to look at all your notes and to modify them. This seems like a lot of privileges (and it is), but it is necessary for the application to work. I’ll see about making it work in a more restricted mode as well. When we start the application, we get a list of todo list groups:
These groups just correspond to notebooks. Right now, all notebooks are shown. I plan to filter out notebooks without todo items and show the number of items or lists where a placeholder question mark is currently showed. Unfortunately, the API is not the fastest in the world, so I’ll have to rely on caching and/or AJAX for this, so that is still on the todo list. Which is amusing as hell because this post is all about todo lists. When I click on the “First Notebook” above, I get a list of todo lists in this group:
We get a list of lists in this group. A todo list is just a note with todo items. All notes without any todo items are not shown. Even though the Evernote web screen shot in the beginning of this post contains 5 notes, we only get two todo lists as only these contain todo items. The question mark is a placeholder for a todo/done counter which also needs caching. Selecting the top “Britney List,” which corresponds to the note in the Evernote web screenshot, we get:
We get a list of just the todo items with the same status as in the note. Auxiliary text and pictures are removed for the cleanest look possible – Evernote Todo is a mobile-first todo list based on Evernote, not a note viewer or something. It will be possible to change the state of items. I might make it possible to add items as well, but right now the focus is on getting a simple overview of all those todo items hiding in my notebooks.
