Ta-da List Greased Up!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been swamped with life and work. As a result, I’ve tried to get more organized by applying GTD techniques to my day (even though I haven’t read David Allen’s book yet). One thing I’m beginning to do is make more lists of the things I need to get done. I’ve tried a few solutions like the GTDTiddlyWiki, Backpack, Basecamp, and Ta-Da List. I hear there are a bunch of other web based GTD tools… if you know of others, please comment.
The one I found to be of most use to me is Ta-Da List. It’s a super simple web based to-do list. However, it’s almost too simple in that it lacks some usability features that could make it more useful. The one thing that pains me is the number of clicks needed to switch between lists. 37 Signals, the company behind Ta-Da List could have made its service more usable. However, that might defeat their goal of up-selling Backpack or Basecamp to its users.
So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. With a bit of Greasemonkey‘ing around I came up with a user script that enhances Ta-Da List so that switching between lists is a bit easier.
Ta-Da List Enhancements Greasemonkey User Script
This script will add your lists to the right hand side of the list page. Here’s a screenshot:
To install this, you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey. If you have both, then navigate to this link then look in your “Tools” menu and select “Install User Script.” Accept the default configuration and install.
Update: I just added the ability to sort the lists by items left or by alpha.
Update #2: Your sorting preferences are now saved!
June 1st, 2005 at 2:45 PM PDT
Great stuff! Fantastic use of Greasemonkey. One thing I noticed, though, is that it doesn’t remember my “Sort by” setting. In other words, imagine I’ve clicked “Items left” to sort by the number of remaining items in the list. If I then click into a list and then click “My Lists” in the header (which I’ve been doing because that’s the habit I have after using this for a few months) I have to click “Items left” again to get it to sort that way.
June 1st, 2005 at 3:30 PM PDT
Great suggestion Dan. I’ll try and incorporate a cookie to remember your sort settings. Also, one of the things I’d like to add is the ability to drag and drop an item from one list to another… that’s for the next release. Thanks for the comments!
June 1st, 2005 at 4:48 PM PDT
Good to see you posting Rich. Ive only just started using Backpack. Cant wait to get into it.
June 1st, 2005 at 5:26 PM PDT
Really great work! I am using your script flawlessly with TA-DA lists already. Excellent add-on–made the website worth using!
June 1st, 2005 at 6:53 PM PDT
Hacking Ta-da List
Hot on the tail of Get Organized with Ta-da List, we’re going to show you how to hack Ta-da List to give it some nice extra fuctionality using Greasemonkey and a script.
What does it do?
The Greasemonkey script adds a list of lists in a sideba…
June 1st, 2005 at 9:57 PM PDT
I’ve been using Notational Velocity to keep lists in. Not sure if I’ll use Ta-Da for a list minder but it does seem slick - and your GM script makes it slicker still. Nice!
June 2nd, 2005 at 4:28 AM PDT
Thank you very much, very usefull script! Keep up the good work.
June 2nd, 2005 at 8:58 AM PDT
Beautiful!
June 2nd, 2005 at 9:19 AM PDT
[...] s: “This script will add your lists to the right hand side of the list page.” (more..) Updated: 2005/06/02 CustomizeGoogle - enhance Google search results by ad [...]
June 2nd, 2005 at 9:31 AM PDT
[...] have now added it to my long lasting post on Greasemonkey and put this script to Rank #2! Ta-da List Greased Up! - [manalang.com]
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June 2nd, 2005 at 9:34 AM PDT
Ahh, this is enough to make me finally install greasemonkey. As you noted, its the most salient shortcoming with ta-da (which I have started to use daily). Thanks for sharing with the world.
June 2nd, 2005 at 10:37 AM PDT
[...] marvellous Basecamp project management solution. Then along comes a Javascript hacker and greasemonkies up a massive usability improvement without requiring any input / kno [...]
June 2nd, 2005 at 11:18 AM PDT
Thanks for the script. I kinda feel that tada list is so bare. Btw, you said you’re practicing GTD but you still haven’t read the book. How so? What I mean to say is, i’m also interested on what your references/sources are regarding GTD concepts. I still haven’t read that book (and I don’t think that I can buy one anytime soon) but I also want to practice it. Any advice? Thanks. again, great script.
June 2nd, 2005 at 11:56 AM PDT
The thing that I find most annoying about Ta-da List is how hard it is to sort items. I wonder how hard it would be to add drag-and-drop sorting with Grease Monkey.
June 4th, 2005 at 1:33 AM PDT
Is there some way you could add a fix to the Tada Description/Notes to allow CR/LF? Right now when it displays the Description/Note it strips out the CR characters and the whole thing runs together as one paragraph. I wanted to add some bullet items in the description and they all displayed as a hard-to-read blob. I ended up padding out the lines I wanted to break with “_” but that looks like garbage, as you might imagine.
Perhaps if it’s hard to determine where the line would break based on parsing the already-munged text as returned from Tada, then a special character could be used. I’m thinking a double period at the end of a paragraph, one of which could get stripped and replaced with a CR/LF or something.
June 5th, 2005 at 11:25 PM PDT
Oops. Never mind. I cooked up a script with Platypus that let me type in a ‘~’ that gets replaced by a I’m not a developer and was all excited that it worked. Then I realized I can just type into the Notes field and the paragraphs will break. Didn’t know I could use tags in that field. But it’s still fun to play around with Platypus and GM.
July 7th, 2005 at 4:10 PM PDT
Really great work! Thanks for the script, is perfect for me.
July 7th, 2005 at 4:14 PM PDT
[...] Para los usuarios de Ta-Da Lists, un excelente agregado para mejorar sus funcionalidades mediante este script de Greasemonkey. Muy recomendable. Sólo para usuarios de Moz [...]
July 26th, 2005 at 9:21 PM PDT
Had a great few weeks using your script until about a week ago when all of a sudden it stopped working? I re-installed and no change?? Is anyone else experiencing the same problems?
July 28th, 2005 at 7:12 PM PDT
[...] rogrammers Suck
Code Updates
For those of you who use my Ta-Da List Greasemonkey script or WP-Amazon, you might be interested to know that [...]
August 22nd, 2005 at 5:48 AM PDT
Thanks so much! I know nothing about script but this just made ta-da so much easier. And now I’ve got a cute little monkey icon too. Brilliant!
December 6th, 2005 at 1:50 PM PST
Hey, could you update this script to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4 (Firefox 1.5)? I’m feeling crippled without it!
December 7th, 2005 at 1:11 PM PST
Yeah… just need to find time. Sorry.
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:53 PM PDT
Thanks for the Great work!! you might also want to check taskbin.com http://taskbin.com/todolist/default