Preview: Task2Gather — Share Your Projects Across Platforms and Across The World

Posted by: dgoldring on Jun 07 2008

One of the real perks of my position at sites like JAMM, My Today Screen and Gear Diary is that I frequently have the opportunity to talk to the developers and take a look at some of their upcoming projects.  Most recently, my friends at Vito (aka iWindows Mobile) let me take a look at an early version of their new cross-platform project manager, Task2Gather. 

Task2Gather is a web application, however, if you try to visit the site, all you will find is this:

 

Sorry, coming soon.  Not very helpful, is it?  Don’t worry, I have a back door.  We can sneak on in and take a closer look.

OK, what is Task2Gather?  It is Vito’s answer to how can I keep track of all the stuff I have to do?  Task2Gather allows you to group your tasks together by project, and even share them with others.

As you can see, the left hand portion of the screen includes all of your major project headings.  To add a new one, just click the "+" button on the top of the column.  Select any of the projects, and you can add as many subtasks as you need to.  Keep going and add as many levels as are required for your project.

I did find entering data to be a bit cumbersome, and hope this will be ironed out soon.  In order to enter any text, you must select the item you wish to name or change, enter text in the text entry box and then hit save.  There is no easy way to quickly edit text or change the name of an item on the fly.  It would be nice if you could select an item, just type the information, and then have it save automatically.

The best part of Task2Gather, however, is the sharing aspect.  You can invite as many different users to participate in each of your projects.  This is one of the true advantages of having an online application.  Sharing is as easy as knowing an email address.  This is a fantastic resource if you are involved with a team working on a large project.  you can easily track all of the components of the project, regardless of which team member is handling it.  All of the information, from all members of the team is right there under one roof.

Of course, you may notice that the interface is a bit stark.  Obviously, this is currently a Beta, however, I do hope Vito continues to work on the user interface to make it a little more graphical and pleasant to look at.  I would love to see this look and feel more like their iWindows Mobile line of programs.

In addition to accessing Task2Gather from your computer, there is also a very handy Windows Mobile applet, which you can use to access the site from any Windows Mobile device.  just log on and you can view and edit any of your ongoing projects.  This means any authorized users can all view the information from anywhere in the world.

I first heard of Task2Gather a few weeks ago, and my interest was instantly piqued.  So, I was pretty excited when Vito invited me to help them test this one out.  Sure, there are still a few bugs to work out, and the user interface needs some polish.  But I was truly impressed by the usability of this one.  Sometimes on large projects, simply tracking all of the different resources and action items involved can become an overwhelming project unto itself.  With Task2Gather, Vito has tamed this beast, making even the most complex tasks fit nicely within an easy to use, easy to share framework.  Vito is off to a great start with this one, and I will be very interested to follow the further development of Task2Gather.

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