Divide and Conquer
TreeTask helps you follow the age-old strategy of breaking down your large tasks into groups of smaller ones. Tasks can have subtasks, subtasks can have sub-subtasks, and so on ad infinitum. Each project (any task that has subtasks) has a progress bar that updates proportionally as each of it’s subtasks are completed. When all of it’s subtasks are complete, the project is automatically checked off. Leaf tasks (tasks that have no subtasks) do not have progress bars and are manually checked off by the user when complete.
Task Manager and Project Manager
TreeTask was designed to be as easy to use for simple personal to-do lists as it is for more complex work projects. To group your tasks into categories such as home, work, etc., simply create separate projects for each category. If a particular subtask represents a significantly larger or smaller portion of the work than the other subtasks in the project, you can set it’s weighting higher or lower than the default equal weighting. That way, once it gets completed, the progress bar of the project will more accurately reflect the change.
Reorganize Your Tasks
Tasks along with their subtrees can be moved, copied, and even linked to other parts of the task hierarchy. TreeTask will automatically check for potential recursive trees (infinite loops due to links) and not allow moving or linking tasks into such locations. For simplicity of the user interface, tasks can only be moved, copied, or linked up or down one level in the task hierarchy. To move/copy/link them elsewhere, simply move/copy/link them one level first, then move them up or down the tree repeatedly as needed to the desired final location.
Project Templates
Templates for commonly used projects can be created and then the entire template tree can be copied to new projects as needed.
Shared Dependancies
The linking feature allows a single subtask to be a dependancy of more than one project. When a change is made to a linked task, such as checking it off, the other linked tasks (including the original) in other projects are all changed at the same time. This is similar to the file alias feature in Mac OS X, however in TreeTask, there is no functional difference between the original task and the links, at least from the user’s perspective. Linked tasks show a little blue chain-link in the lower left corner of the task row. Deleting a linked task only removes that link, the other linked tasks are not effected.
Other Features
- Task priority, which effects label color and sorting
- Optional deadline date, with countdown days listed under task label
- Task notes, for attaching longer amounts of text
- Tasks with the same priority and deadline date can be manually reordered
- Show either all tasks, just not-complete, or just complete
- Editing of existing tasks and task deletion
- Optional manual weighting, to allow some subtasks to represent larger or smaller proportions of the total work
- Landscape mode is fully supported, including landscape keyboard
Screenshots
Here is an example of a view of root (top-level) tasks.
High priority tasks are in red, normal priority in black, and low priority in grey.
Subtasks can be viewed by simply selecting the parent task.
Uncompleted leaf tasks can be turned into parent tasks by selecting them and adding subtasks.
Tasks are sorted primarily by deadline date, secondarily by priority, thirdly by manual ordering (if any), and fourthly by entry order. Tasks that do not have deadlines are treated as having a deadline date of infinity as far as sorting goes.
Here we are showing the subtasks under the “Homework” parent task.
We selected the “Not Done” button at the bottom to show just the uncompleted tasks.
To add a new task, select the plus sign at the bottom.
To edit a task, select the “Edit” button at the top and select the task.
The above screenshot is an example of entering a task label in landscape mode. Surprisingly few iPhone apps today allow landscape keyboard entry, which is a shame because it is much less prone to typing errors when using two thumbs. It also allows more text to be seen on the screen at one time. Of course, portrait mode is also supported.
Here we have the Add Task screen.
This is the same screen seen when editing existing tasks as well.
The deadline date can be set by selecting the Deadline row to bring up the Edit Deadline screen.
In the above screenshot, the task weight setting represents how big a job this subtask is in comparison to the other subtasks within the parent task. This tells TreeTask how much to move the progress bar of the parent task when this subtask is completed. Auto weighting (the default) causes the task weight to be evenly distributed based on the total number of subtasks. But if this subtask represents a much bigger or smaller job than it’s sibling tasks, the weight can be manually set instead to allow this subtask to represent a larger or smaller proportion of the total work of the parent task.