Remember the Milk, a popular task management Web and mobile app, recently launched their long-awaited offering for the iPad.
Although the desktop Web version of Remember the Milk works fine on the iPad, the interface doesn’t quite take advantage of the tablet form factor. Their new native iOS app fixes that problem with a fancy layout reminiscent of Twitter’s iPad app.
The app’s functionality isn’t any more complicated than it needs to be. All of the basic to-do list management features of Remember the Milk are present: entering tasks, tagging and prioritizing them and marking them as complete. You can view tasks by list, tag, priority, due date or even location. Are you sitting in the kitchen at home or at your desk in the office? Depending on your location, you can display different to do lists.
Owners of the WiFi-only iPad will appreciate the fact that the app works offline and will sync with Remember the Milk’s servers the next time you’re connected.
The design itself is stripped down and simple, yet still maintains some personality, thanks to some hand-written-looking titles and labels. The larger form factor of the tablet seems to suit a to-do list management app quite well, as it’s more akin to interacting with a physical paper-based list than a phone or desktop computer is.
The user interface is so intuitive and effective that we hate to nit-pick about the little things. It took us awhile to figure out that to mark an item as complete in a single list, you have to touch it with two fingers and swipe up to display a “Complete” button. It’s a common enough convention in iOS interface design to be able to swipe sideways on a single item in a list to reveal a “Delete” or “Complete” button that we naturally expected that experience. Again, it’s a very minor detail, but it’s often the little things that add up to an exceptional user experience.
Overall, it’s a solid app and one certainly worth downloading for existing Remember the Milk users. For those looking for a new task management tool that works across platforms, it’s a viable alternative to products like Things (Mac only) and Producteev.
Remember the Milk accounts are free, but power users will need to upgrade to a pro account for $25 per year in order to get unlimited syncing between the iPad app and Web version.
