A retraction, an apology and a task management app you have to try.

Some time ago I wrote a post that called out an application for, at least in my opinion, completely replicating an extremely popular Mac task management app called Things.

This post is to officially retract what I’d originally said, make an official apology and introduce you to a todo list app you’ll find difficult not to love.

First off, the retraction, why? Well I’ve just received an invite to the service. My initial review was based solely on screenshots placed on the sites homepage and “features” page. Thanks to the wonders of the web – I have the power to do this, and I have deleted my original post and with any luck, the cached version will be unavailable before long too.

Secondly, a sincere apology. Despite the app I’m about to introduce you indeed being a web based take on Things, the team behind it have created a tool that in some respects outshines Things – at least for now. Design and UI are very similar, but it’s clear that the application developers have put a great deal of passion into creating something unique (at least in the online sphere), and the care and attention to detail is undeniable.

Finally, what I’m sure you’ve been waiting for, an introduction…

Nirvana is an elegant, web based task management app based on David Allen’s “getting things done“. Offering a great way to view and organize projects, its also a wonderfully simple way to tag, file and schedule tasks for the future.

Nirvana provides a wonderful number of keyboard shortcuts to make adding and navigating its interface possible without a mouse, that said I’d love to see a desktop app, if only to let me add tasks without needing to visit the site.

Nirvana’s most useful feature is it’s ability to manually reorder tasks place. Again, this is also possible with Things, but not on any other online task management app I’ve seen and for me personally, it’s a deal breaker. Being able to organise tasks due today is critical to my ability to get things done. I’m constantly changing the order of stuff I need to do, and being forced to change a todo “priority” (when ordering by priority) or having rename the todo to ensure it appears near the top of a todo list (when ordered alphabetically by name) is just too much trouble. With Nirvana it’s as simple as dragging and dropping.

Now, the missing ingredients. Aside from not being to assign tasks (something it does say you can do on its ‘features’ page) and no repeating tasks, the most notable missing ingredient is a decent mobile application. The tool does have a gorgeously designed iPhone (web) application with a great deal of functionality, but boy am I looking forward to something that stores my tasks locally and syncs them when I have an internet connection available.

Despite blatant comparisons with the likes of Things, Nirvana has managed to provide a feature many Things users have been craving for for some time – web based access.

From my perspective, this is now a race. Either Things creates a web based interface and/or cloud sync (they’ve publicly stated they are working on this), or Nirvana creates a splendid mobile app (iPhone, Android and ideally Blackberry and Windows Mobile too).