Today marks the end of Week 1 of the App Showdown, and the start of Week 2! So, as a conclusion to Week 1, I’m going to talk about why I chose Ubuntu Tasks as the app of my choice for the Showdown, what features it currently offers, and what I plan to work on in the upcoming week.

So, why did I choose Ubuntu Tasks? According to the Review criteria, one of the criteria is

General Interest – apps that are of more interest to general phone users will be scored higher. We recommend identifying what most phone users want to see, and identifying gaps that your app could fill.

So to best find apps that a general phone user might want to see, I looked the list of all the apps installed on an iPhone by default, and removed all the ones that were provided by the Core Apps project. This left me with Maps, Passbook, Reminders, Newsstand, iTunes, Compass, Voice Memos, and Game Center. I’ve never used Passbook, Newsstand, or Game Center, so have no idea how they work or what could be improved. A compass seemed too easy, and I don’t know if the Ubuntu SDK supports voice input yet, so that left me with Reminders or Maps. I’ve used Trello a lot for organizing homeschool work and stuff for work related to the Ubuntu File Manager, so I chose that because I’d love to see a really good task management app for Ubuntu & Ubuntu Touch.

Nekhelesh Ramananthan, one of the App Showdown judges and a core app developer, recently posted a useful article with advice about the showdown. He lists four import things to keep in mind while developing the apps. I’ll discuss two of them: having a specific goal, and the wow factor.

I’ve already identified the goal for my app – to organize tasks and task lists. Here are a few intended use cases:

Keep track of work or school assignments

Function as a general todo list

Keep track of things to do related to a project (home improvement, software project, etc)

Function as a temporary bug tracker. What I mean by this is that I find it often very useful to jot down a bug and notes on it before I file it later. The notes function can also be used to keep track of how to reproduce the bug.

Shopping lists. There is already another app specifically designed for this use case, so it won’t be one of my top goals, but it is still something I want to support

For the wow factor, I plan to concentrate on a beautiful and clean design, along with a nice feature set. I want to provide a large range of useful features, without providing so many that the app becomes cluttered and unmanageable. I also am going to have simple animations that make the app look very polished, like the animation when a user completes the task.

So, what can Ubuntu Tasks do? Listed below is a list of features it currently has:

Add, edit, and delete tasks

Add notes to tasks

Assign priority to tasks

Assign tasks a due date

Complete tasks

Add, rename, and delete categories

Assign tasks to categories

Quickly add tasks from the task list page

View task statistics

Suru theme

What do I plan to work on in the upcoming week?

Possibly move task storage to QtOrganizer

Checklists

Possible Trello integration

Tags

Sorting of tasks

What else do I want to add in the future?

Notifications of upcoming tasksScheduling tasks in the calendar

Related articles