Building Tasktic

Next November 5, the project I’ve been working on since February will see the light of day.

Tasktic is a task manager app for iPhone and iPad that is very easy to use, and yet offers many power-user features usually reserved to much more expensive productivity apps (Tasktic is free, with a $4.99 Pro version that unlocks the most advanced features forever). You can find more info, screenshots and a quick video preview everywhere else on this website.

In the days leading to the launch, I’d like to share with you some thoughts about the development of Tasktic: I enjoy “behind the curtains” development posts as much as the next guy 😏, so I can’t help myself…

Let’s start today with the elephant in the room: why did I feel the need of another task manager app and how do I think Tasktic can gain traction in such a crowded market?

Well, at least we aren't all going with the same idea for our icons...

Well, at least we aren’t all going with the same idea for our icons…

It’s true that there are a lot of task manager / GTD / to-do list apps out there, and some of them are really great and fully-featured products. But the good and most powerful apps in this category are often rather expensive and not many people want to spend 30 or 40 bucks on an app, so they’re stuck with built-in options that are quite basic or, worse, with fully-featured apps that are only apparently* “free”*, but instead collect and analyze users data (more on this in one of the next posts).

So, I thought that a task manager with a really friendly learning curve, but many advanced features, and with no entry price (but with absolutely no access to users data) could make a lot of sense for a lot of people. Not everybody with a smartphone is using a to-do list or a task manager, but almost everyone needs one. So, the market can be crowded of apps, but people buy new iPhones and iPads every second of every day and not every potential user is well served by the current options.

I think there’s still lot of potential for productivity apps, and I believe Tasktic has a place in this crowded category because:

  1. It’s very easy to start using Tasktic and adding new tasks never requires more than a few seconds and taps.
  2. The workflow can be as simple or as advanced as the user wants, with due dates, notifications, projects, tags, priority and notes. On top of that, Tasktic offers Siri and Reminders integration, a feature usually available only in the most expensive apps.
  3. It is a free universal app for iPhone and iPad that syncs via iCloud, so we have no way (nor we want) to access users’ data. Power users who need the most advanced functionalities can of course (and, please, do 😍) upgrade to the Pro versions (more on why I wrote “versions” instead of “version” in the next few days).

I’m not hoping to have millions of downloads (that’d be nice, though), but I do believe that happy users will find out that Tasktic can be a very helpful companion, and therefore they will tell their families and friends about it.

Feel free to start telling people about Tasktic now, if you feel so inclined, and please subscribe to this website via RSS to get the next posts about the design decisions and building process behind Tasktic.