widefido

widefido

Jordan Sherer  //  Howdy! I'm Jordan Sherer, an experienced software developer and entrepreneur. I work at def6 and run widefido. You seem interesting. Let's chat!

 
Feb 6 / 4:35pm

UI Minimalism

Todopaper
I went back and forth for a while on the toolbar. Textual buttons, image buttons, rounded corners, non-rounded corners, etc. I think I've solidified the most minimal approach to it all by removing all of that clutter. (Which is surprisingly very close to the original layout of TodoPaper 1 with a bit of polish).

So why did I go this route? Well, after talking to a number of customers and testers, there were very few people actually using the toolbar buttons. Most of you opted for either keyboard shortcuts or just typing into the edit area. This is because TodoPaper makes creating todos, notes, and projects incredibly easy with the keyboard. (Sometimes as simple as pressing a single keystroke to quickly create a new, properly indented todo.)

I think this minimalistic UI is what you'll see in the final release. I feel it really promotes what TodoPaper is all about:

Provide you with a simple tool then get out of your way so you can actually get stuff done.

Thoughts?

8 comments

Feb 07, 2011
geekosupremo said...
I'm a fan of an interface that gives me what I need w/o clutter. I like having the option of having it visible if need be, say as a preference option or as a contextual drop down. So this looks good to me. :)
Feb 08, 2011
Mat said...
The only suggestion i can think of would be an option to hide the colon on project headers. It would look much cleaner.
Feb 08, 2011
Jordan Sherer said...
@Mat: The todos are plain text files so the hyphens (-), colons (:), and at sign (@) are a part of the syntax and are essential for delineating the functionality and styling of the text. Unfortunately without the colon, the project lines would turn into notes, and we would no longer get the project header formatting.
Feb 09, 2011
Mat said...
@Jordan, To clarify a little bit: the suggestion was to hide the colon in Todopaper. But keep the colon and formatting in the text file. Like Taskpaper does for the iphone. The colon is there its just not displayed by Taskpaper.
Feb 15, 2011
hasuie said...
todo paper very good tool. I hope version 2!!
Feb 15, 2011
Matt Crider said...
btw, I'm a different Matt from the other Mat (with one "t").

I like the minimalism very much with one exception. I do like the ability to hit the "@" symbol and see the list of tags already created. Will there be another way to see the tags that have already been created? If so, then I don't have any problems with the new layout.

Matt

Feb 19, 2011
Jordan Sherer said...
Yep, you'll still get the autocompletion of tags in a dropdown. I'm still experimenting with other ways to show the same information. (You'll see more of that on the blog soon)
Mar 03, 2011
Joshua Cearley said...
By the way, will we still be able to use the old style checkboxes? I really preferred the little dots in the margin of the original Taskpaper 1.x line, but they were removed in 2.x and the theme system isn't powerful enough to bring them back.

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