We are a high-school team building a world-class + open-source todo list app taking a different approach to task management. AMA!

I have yet to find a todo app that has everything I feel I need, and I don't feel I'm hard to please...

All I want that is usually missing is an API, and the ability to create recurring tasks with a set interval, like "Water plants" recurring 3 days after last completion. I don't want 100 "water plant" items if I don't do/complete the item for 300 days. I want 1 item that's 300 days overdue, and a new one 3 days after I mark the previous one as complete. Is that to much to ask..?!?

Oh how I hate not getting devs of these apps to listen to reason :p

Downloading and giving it a go :)

Great! Thanks so much! Let me know how it goes ;)

Yeah, +1 on this feature request.

A similar, but distinct feature, would be fuzzy dates. Like I need to clean my living room rug every 3 months or so, but I don't need an alert at midnight every 90 days. It'd be awesome to be 'smart' enough to put it on a weekend, and on a day when I'm doing other at-home tasks.

Cool, heard. You can keep tabs on our progress here: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/89

That feature request has very little to do with what was asked for .....

whoopsies. I sent the wrong Issue — https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/89. Edited original post too.

So, how do you handle recurring tasks like this? ;)

Currently, our recurring tasks is calculated after you complete a task... As in, if it is, say, repeating daily, and you forgot to do it yesterday, checking it off today will cause the task to repeat as if it was checked off yesterday — updating the due date to today.

I just downloaded your app and while I am trying to create an account, there are some issues I found. Using iPhone 6 running 12.4.1.

1) to create an account, you must enter an email and a password. A) the password box stays red even though I got a confirmation email B) There is no pop up showing what the password requirements are or if any. C) Only after the confirmation email was sent did the pop up for “What do we call you?” appear. 2) Once confirmation email was received, the link sent me back to the email and password boxes that were STILL highlighted red.

3) Once I was in the app, I wasn’t able to view more than about 25 characters because the text didn’t wrap. So, I could tell that I was supposed to click on the buttons in order to continue but I wasn’t able to see what they were trying to say.

4) If I went to completed, I still wasn’t able to see what those items suggested for me to do.

5) When I click on “condution yourself” I am unable to add a task or a project. The only thing that I can do is add an item to the inbox.

6) You should create documentation with indexable items that explain what you can do.

Can you update the IAMA to show what iOS is needed in order to be compatible?

Once I was in the app, I wasn’t able to view more than about 25 characters because the text didn’t wrap. So, I could tell that I was supposed to click on the buttons in order to continue but I wasn’t able to see what they were trying to say.

Sorry about the troubles! We will investigate the onboarding UI further and see how we could improve it.

p.s. the completed view is meant to show tasks that you have already completed, not what you have to do. We designed Upcoming for that function.

As a consumer, I would like to know how your app is different from current to do list apps? And does it work on windows pc?

We tried to incorporate all of the best (we think) features from the various apps we tried. Platform independence a la Todoist (and yes, it works on a PC, go to condution.shabang.cf/#downloads), smart folders/perspectives a la OmniFocus, start/end dates+times a la OmniFocus, intuitive, single-view UI a la things, and home page + upcoming a la RememberTheMilk/MS Todo. We are also striving to be more active on the user front — building not only an app but also a global community of people who like to nerd out about To-Do lists and productivity. To this end, the app is open source and our work discord is public on our website.

RELATED xkcd.

as another fellow redditor already said, an API is allways nice. would enable all sorts of easy things like Discord bot integration, smart Mirror integration etc pp.

Haha, already got that one! And yeah, we're working on the API. Thanks for the +1 :)

This post is going to be exhibit 1 in an IP lawsuit one day if this thing ever becomes popular.

IP lawsuit

What specific features are copyrighted/trademarked? We tried to do some digging before starting the app and don't thing there were any. Our official copies don't mention GTD either, for it's just GTD inspired.

I'm required to pose a question, but I don't have a question. I found a typo on your GitHub, if you'd like to fix it?

Due Dates:
Yes, you heard it right! Unlike some of the other apps out there, we know that timing is important to people! Every task is hidden until a certain time and due at precisely at a time, so your know day could be managed right down to your needs.

Ah. Thanks so much! https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/commit/5c55a64fc0a9e2eaa9d24cbd7a685bc4a20e0ba6

What are the most bizarre or interesting disagreements or hot points of discussion you've had with fellow developers?

Well... us being friends makes it easier, but perhaps the biggest disagreement was whether or not to use the react framework. React us (in my opinion) a very unconventional framework in that it encourages the mixing of front end and backend code. Others on the team disagree though...

React doesn't mix backend and frontend code? React is just a frontend framework. If you're hooking it to a backend, then that code should be completely separate.

Sorry I typed that in a rush — I meant mixing view and viewcontroller... Whoops!

Awesome! I'm always on the hunt for new todo apps to try. It's a super crowded field, but good luck!

Two questions:

1. What's your business model plan? Open source is great, but y'all have to eat
2. what app(s) did the team use before making this? Did everyone switch to it?

1. We're high school students, so we don't actually eat or sleep. Condution is a passion project of ours that we work on in our free time, and it does need to eat (and in fact we have just gone over the database limit). In order to pay for the database, we set up a Patreon.
2. Team members have all the big GTD apps we could find, OF, Todoist, Tasks, Notion, etc. But we couldn't find a consolidation of all the great features spread across the landscape. So, we created Condution. One team member actually actively avoided GTD apps but eventually started using Condution because it just worked.

Do you allow for integration with other services whether it’s pulling in existing lists from Google or O365, or streaming data to a service like Dakboard?

Not yet, but thanks for the 1+ on that! We are building out an API that could plug into these services though... stay tuned!

We are a high-school team building a world-class + open-source todo list app taking a different approach to task management.

What's different about your approach to task management?

What do you think makes your software "world-class?" (stats wise, it looks like you have 2 ratings on the Apple app store, and 6 ratings on the Google app store (with "50+" (aka 50-100) installs)

Yes, we are by no means a "world-class" app in that sense as we just got started. However, we are building an open-source app that includes many features of industry standard applications used for task management and more. This is what we think makes us "world-class" in features and design.

Fair. I hope you do well!

But you didn't answer my first question: What's different about your approach to task management? It sounds like you're intending to have many of the same features.

We are trying a few different approaches to task-management that's not used by many of the leading apps right now: 1. Although this may sound cheesy and slightly over-said: we are open-source. We aim to be fair, transparent, and open to suggestions from a public in a way where people could interact with us directly as closely as possible. 2. As avid-productivity nerds ourselves, we are combining what we saw was the best out of every GTD system that we used and take out what we think is the worst. Our approach is not holistically different, perhaps, but we try to combine everything together to make an excellent app.

Does it distract you from your regular school work and extracurriculars?

Not really... Simply because during quarantine this is my main extra-curricular.

Possible to use in teams?

You could use the same account, and it will sync in near real-time. Otherwise, true "team-usage" (Google Docs style) is being worked on. Thanks for the 1+ on that feature! Track that project's progress here: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/86

Cool. Would like the ability to assign different members different tasks within a shared project.

Noted! We are looking to basically take todoist's system and add a few GTD features.

I just read the Privacy policy.. What do you precisely do with 3rd parties that do collect information? They are very vaguely described in the policy.. Maybe making the app paid or adding a subscription service would make me more likely to get the app, so you won't have to worry about profiting off of data. I just don't know if I can trust my personal information being vaguely addressed.

Good on you for reading the policy, and we will take your feedback to the text editor! The only 3rd party that we use is Google's Firebase (hosting service).

To be clear: We don't and never will steal (because that is what it is) your data. We are working on a version/setting with which you can avoid sending your data remotely at all, the progress on which you can keep track of here.

We don't have a paid app or subscription because that goes against our ideals of making it accessible. We do appreciate Patreon donations which help pay for this our servers, and if you are willing to support, we can work with you to create data handling polices that you can feel good about!

Thanks, will do! Expect payment Friday as that's my payday. I believe in what you guys have going on here. I appreciate the efforts on your side to protect user data, as it's passed around quite frequently nowadays. I know online donations only go so far, (wikipedia for example) so if you ever plan on making the app paid, or making a subscription service I will happily pay for it, especially if you guys keep consistent direct communication with customer's needs and wants. By the looks of it, this app can potentially go a long way. Best of wishes.

Thanks so much! We really believe in what we do, and I hope that with the OpenSource + To-Do community, we could grow together :)

I'm in high school too, could you share how you learned to program and how you were able form your group (who I assume also know this language)? I'm really curious as to how you were able to pull this off as there's no way I could find people to do this with me in my school.

I learned to program just by working on projects I enjoyed! I've found that when it comes to trying to learn a new programming skill, diving in head-first is the best way to learn.

My team is just a group of friends who were also fed up with the current apps on the market.

ps. use vim.

Thanks for the response! I'm currently learning Python and advancing my knowledge of C#, but I'll be sure to check out vim once I start learning more languages.

Haha yes #vimgang let's go ;)

A question (or questions) on your choice of platforms. You seem to be using electron to deploy on ios and android. Why not on desktop os's as well? Also, why did you choose to deploy as an app instead of web/PWA?

It's on the desktop OSes as well! Check the download link here: https://condution.shabang.cf/#downloads. I honestly think our desktop app is better then our mobile app >.<. Converting this app to a PWA/react app is in the works, but we feel like a native app-app is still better for things like todo-lists.

Can you talk a bit about what your "approach" to task management itself is, and how it's "different"?

I've been using Trello with my wife for doing Agile at Home for task management, and it was definitely a bit of a struggle to get to something that was both easy to use, but also supported more of the data-driven organization that we're using to keep track of everything. Eventually we were able to cobble together a combination of Trello, the custom fields extension for Trello (for story points and marking items as completed), the Ultimello chrome extension with some... very questionable hand written javascript (for color coded cards by points, and summary displays for planning and review), and an Excel spreadsheet (for planning and review).

The other options I'm familiar with would either be Jira (not free, and I assume a massive amount of effort to set up and configure, probably not very lightweight for daily use when most items will take 10 minutes or less to complete), Aptana (incredibly obtuse to configure, and poor mobile support) or some sort of to do list that would inevitably fall apart due to not actually having any systematic structure to support interacting with it.

The basic idea of the app is a sort of modified GTD: we took what we liked about GTD(powerful perspectives, do, delegate, defer(coming later!)) and put it into an app in the likes of todoist/things (think clean UI, intuitive). The other guiding principal was making powerful tools accessible. While this may not be as much of an issue for you, we wanted to make sure that this could be an app for a beginner or an experienced do'er like yourself.

Are you guys offering any internships to high schoolers with software development experience?

Well come hangout on Discord: https://discord.gg/QgxUCyj... We could get you sorted, I'm sure ;)

Can you explain why spaces are superior to tabs?

2/4 members of our core-devs are vim users... Tabs don't render very well on vim

high school team

vim users

That’s not high school, that’s advanced high school

Haha thanks so much! Half of our team (including me) comes from https://www.nuevaschool.org/, so shout out to Nueva there ;)

Do you plan on having it integrate with Alexa or Google assistant via a skill anytime soon?

Alexa or Google assistant ...is on the blocks for us: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/97

The mac App throws a:

"“Condution.app” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software." Error on launch.

Is your signature out of date or something?

Also the app is over 500 megs while Things is 48 and I am sure the memory footprint is just as bad.

Why did you choose the use the bloat that is Electron?

Hmm Electron apps tend to have a large memory footprint. What version of the app did you download? The most recent versions should be notarized.

I see there is a server in the github repository. Could you add setting to the app that everybody can self-host their own server? Would be nice for privacy protection and spares you cost and load.

That's definitely on the blocks for us: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/88 ;)

How does this compare to todoist - Your previously promoted task management product?

Did we ever promote Todoist? I personally was a big Todoist fanboy, but the lack of start dates and the baffling lack of TIME specificity was, well, confusing.

How does your app compare to Nirvana?

Nirvana

We are a more general-purposes to-do app then Nirvana; we just are inspired by GTD ;)

I love nirvana, use it daily and I have only one major complaint, which if you alleviate, I'd consider switching: nirvana web app makes shit use of keyboard shortcuts and generally feels bit outdated - I have to use mouse for nearly everything. Just food for thought.

This app is pretty mouse heavy! Check it out ;)

Is it possible to get sub tasks that are three levels deep and looks good? That’s really what I want. All the to-do apps are like 1 level deep. And ones that are deeper look awful.

It is definitely possible. I think it looks pretty good personally ;)

Will this truly help me get more things done? How is your app different than others like it?

We aim to incorporate the community better into the process of designing the app. Furthermore, we aim to incorporate the best features of various to-do apps in one, affordable (free!), and easy-to-use package.

Can it be connected to google calendars so that the tasks would show up there? Because I use google calendar for scheduling my day, and this to manage my tasks would be very helpful.

Feature requested! Keep track of progress here: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/107

Thank you so much! I don't know if you know this, but google calendars already has an 'import calendar' feature making it easy to use other calendars. Also, wanted to ask, (I didn't understand clearly from the post itself) are you all working at a high school, or high school students? Or something else?

Thank you once again for the suggestion! We'll keep that in mind. To answer your question, we're all highschool students.

What about privacy? Do you share anything with 3rd party? If yes what all? I know there is privacy policy in app but can u tldr here in simple layman’s terms?

We use Google Firebase to sync your data across devices. Neither us nor Google accesses your data. We're working on letting you keep your data local too, so that it never touches a third party or even leaves your device: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/88

Data is securely backed up in the United States regardless of sync. No registration needed if sync is not enabled.

That sounds like you back up my data in the US, even if I don't sync at all. Is that the case?

Yes. We are looking to add a self hosting option; but even if you don't sync we securely back up your data in case you would like to upgrade to a synced account. Here's the issue on the progress of adding self-hosting: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/88

Thanks for the reply! You should definetly make it clear, the data does not stay local, but stored on a server. For me this is an absolute no-go, but it's good to know that you're working on a self-hosted option.

This might be aalso be a problem for the EU market due to the GDPR. Just something you should keep in mind.

Yup! We are looking into how this works on the EU end. When we started the app we did some digging and thought we are fine at that moment, but if this picks up momentum we may need to adjust accordingly. Your data is securely stored with either AWS or Google Cloud. Amazon/Google is blind to your data, and our internal code and policies, along with our privacy policy, disallows us from disclosing, reading, or sharing your data.

[deleted]

Sorry. It is not at moment. Per the notice when you choose not to sync, we still securely back up the data in case you "upgrade" (don't worry, it's free) to the synced version. However, a self-hosted option is in the works: https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/88

I’m currently trying to do a similar personal project on python as programming practise and have been stuck on implementing an overdue functionality where the program reads all saved reminders and updates the class attribute “reminder.overdue”. Did you ever have such problems and could you please share on possible ways to go about fixing it? Apologies if this isn’t an appropriate question.

Well, we are an open source project! You can see how we do it here https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution.

Withought actually looking at the code, it is hard to diagnose the issue, but you could join the discord and work to solve the issue!

A bit late but, are you planning to allow people to create customizable versions to suit their needs?

We are an open source project, so yes, of course! We are also actively taking feature requests, so in a way, you can help customize the entire app!

What’s your unique value-prop compared to other products on the market? What problem does your software solve that others do not?

Might want to lead with that in your initial description in the post

We first are aiming to build a world-class productivity app, intergrating the best features from every platform we have tried. Furthermore, we have also open-sourced the app + opened ourselves to active discussion from the world to try to create a community of todo-ers who could, in a sense, build the app together.

So is the value proposition that it is co-created with others? Still trying to figure out what it does better than existing products without opening up your project myself (not a techie). Succinct value prop will be a must have for scaling adoption

Yes the app is intuitive, cross-platform, and we seek to harbour feedback from the community more actively as our primary goal is not ultimately to make lots of money.

yes the app is intuitive

Says who?

I just find it a convoluted mess on iOS.

Sorry about the inconvenience! Happy to answer any questions you may have. We are pushing out an update that should address some of the issues — this should be getting by code review right now.

Congrats on your app, that's a pretty decent achievement for highschoolers. I just wanted to give you a but of feedback but don't have a question. I tend to agree that it's not that intuitive. There's quite a few options in the Android app that I couldn't tell what they were for even after tapping on them. I feel like your whole app is kinda lacking UX principles in general. Also you should focus on mobile first design, at the moment it's a desktop app wrapped as a mobile app. Many of the touch points were too small and overflowed off screen. Anyway good luck! Reddit is a harsh place so don't let some of the other blunt criticism get you down.

Got it, thanks so much! We don't really have a UX concept that we are going off of (material + friends, for instance), but we will definitely be focusing on making things bigger and more mobile focused.

Did u get any sort of funding? If so, from whom and how much?

Not really: but if you are willing to give us some — https://www.patreon.com/condution ;)

Is this worth switching away from the buttery-smoothness of Things? my mind is open

I think so! Why don't you try it out? We are still in active development, so Condution is not as stable as Things, but we are actively improving and creating new features all the time!

Along with the IOS app, are you by chance going to have a companion Apple Watch app? Seeing a quick view on the wrist would be fantastic along with the phone app.

We are not looking to do any companion right now simply because that would require bridging our cross-platform code and native code, which would take a little bit of effort. Thanks for the 1+ on that feature! https://github.com/Shabang-Systems/Condution/issues/114

I myself am a high school students, and I am interested in coding too! So could you give me some tips about starting such projects? Also, many people at my school aren't good at or even know programming or any such thing! So could you tell me about connecting with such people, starting these projects and even completing them and making great apps such as you have done here. A bit about the process and the starting of these projects would also be helpful! Thanks in advance! PS: Any other tips and bits of info would be appreciated.

We would love to chat with you and answer these questions in real time on our Discord! This is also a great place to connect with other coders to start your own projects! https://discord.gg/kX5QRu

Thats so cool youre in a startup, but if 2% of startups succeed long term, what makes you stand out over Monday, and other task management companies? It seems like other task managers (if not already) can easily implement such a feature.

We are not a startup, we are not trying to make money. We simply created what we believe to be a better productivity solution, and now we're here to share it!

are you hiring?

Well.... We are not but I guess we are open to offers...? This being an open-source app means that you will most likely not be paid; but you could join our community and (our actual work channel!) here: https://discord.gg/QgxUCyj

Why is it so fucking hard to connect these platforms to Gmail?

I know it’s a little less on the pure “to do” end, but productivity apps like Copper, Monday, Asana etc are always insufferable when it comes to connecting to gmail. Whyyyyyyy???!!!

We apologize for the difficulty, we have been throwing around the idea of calendar support but weren't sure if people would actually want to use it. I'll take this as your +1 for this feature!