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Pretty un-frigging-believable, if you ask me.

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Amazing… my little application is more popular than "Babes of Flickr". This is either a huge compliment for me or a terrible sign of our work-obsessed economy.

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Voo2do, my recent project, is up to #2 on del.icio.us/popular—just below a site that contains photos of hot girls from flickr. In order to avoid dying under the huge burden of my own ego, I am going to attribute this to the recent trendiness of task tracker applications. But it's nice to see mentions of it around the web, my favorite so far being one written in Portuguese at meiobit.com, which Google translates as:

Other mentions include Worcester-based entrepreneur Pete Caputa and my coworker Girish Bharadwaj who is hacking a windows tray client for Voo2do.

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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!

I keep on hearing good stuff about the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's like the Republican party—one of the highest values of its supporters is to tout its greatness. But the Rubyblicans have evidence: cool projects like Basecamp and sibling Tadalist, wiki+hierarchy tool Hieraki, and the aforementioned Web Collaborator. Not to mention very nice documentation, such as this tutorial on making, guess what, a to-do list.

Perhaps it's too late to turn my own (upcoming) to-do list application into an experiment with Ruby on Rails, but my beloved Perl on PageKit still let me get a prototype of voo2do kicking in about a day. Definitely, the vast majority of my time on v2 has been spent tweaking CSS and Javascript to make the interface work.

But I'll save the rest of the hype until you can actually visit and try voo2do…