My latest project, voo2do, is now available. If you have too much work to track it all in your head, try it out.

It's got task tracking with projects, time estimates, and priorities, plus fancy editing and sorting and colors pretty enough that you won't dread looking at your to-do list day after day. I've been using voo2do (pronounced voo-to-do) for a few months now and I'm convinced it's made me more productive.

Now let me reflect a bit on how I approached this project, and how it differed from frassle and other stuff I've done.

In voo2do, my priority from the beginning was to make something highly attractive and usable. As part of this, I wanted it to shine from the first moment you laid your hands on it, so I didn't announce it until it was fairly polished (i.e. now). This was very much unlike frassle, which focused on testing new ideas, has an excessively confusing interface, and was released piecemeal as I worked on it—and still isn't shiny.

Because the genre of voo2do—task tracking—is hardly new, the challenge was in making the tool easy to absorb and fun. I spent way more time than I ever thought I would crafting little 16×16 icons, experimenting with different color schemes, and fiddling with javascript fade effects. I made general attractiveness, ease of use, and ease of learning key goals in this project, and focused on those challenges. I also used this project as an excuse to teach myself about Ajax and other "web 2.0" gobbledeygook, so you'd better be using a recent browser.

I think I hit my target of creating an app that's useful, fun, and responsive, because I use it every single day and I don't cringe at anything. Of course, I'm biased, and I hope the early voo2do users will point out many areas for potential improvement. My own list of voo2do tasks has plenty of possible next steps.

Try it!