I’m starting to think that Google’s main goal is to produce the productivity tools that everyone uses. Search, email, contacts, chat (video too!), documents, spreadsheets and now they’ve announced a Labs version of Tasks.
The announcement article hits the high points and I’ll trust that you’ll click through and have a look. I just wanted to take a moment and share a few things that I’ve noticed after a few minutes of playing around.
First off, this is probably incredibly obvious to most, but for some reason it took me way too long to find… Adding tasks is dead simple. You can edit them too – add notes and due dates, for example. Just click the little arrow:
I circled it in red. Frankly, on the laptop at high resolution I just plain didn’t see that little arrow there. I was actually a bit confused about how a person would edit a task! Now I know…
Here’s what you get once you click it:
Covers the basics, yes?
Looking back at the first picture, the row of “dots” on the left is the handle. Use that to quickly drag/re-order your tasks. Or use keyboard shortcuts. Or find it under the “Actions” menu at the bottom of the screen.
When a task is selected you can hit Tab to indent or shift-Tab to “out-dent.” This makes it very easy to do a nice little outline structure with your tasks. Be aware, however, that if you check a parent task, all the child tasks will get checked as well. You can, however, then individually uncheck the children if so desired. Just be aware of it as it caught me by surprise! And no, I can’t tell you how I expected that to work, but I guess checking all wasn’t it.
Wonder if we can hope to see this in a mobile version someday? Perhaps part of the mobile gmail web site or the recently announced Gmail for Mobile java application? And how about a Google Desktop gadget for it? Boy, that’d be handy.
Amazing how much we can now get done all from that one “simple” Gmail screen.
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December 9th, 2008 
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