News, updates, tips and tricks about TaskAnt.

If you are using a Mac, and want to use TaskAnt as a Mac-native app, there is a simple way.

1) Go to http://fluidapp.com/ download Fluid. It’s a software for transforming Web App into Desktop App.

2) Run Fluid. Fill in the simple form below:

URL is your team login url. And you can download http://cl.ly/8TnN for icon.

3) You got a TaskAnt.app in your application folder. Run it and keep it in Dock!

Hi, everyone, here comes our new logo:

And this is the real world version:

Is that cool? BTW, “TaskAnt for iPhone/iPod touch” is a corner of this bottle.

In the past few months, there are thousands of teams choosing to try and use TaskAnt, although it’s in Beta, even Alpha. Based on all great feedback from them, we’ve designed a brand new TaskAnt with you in mind.

Out of beta
After much hard work, TaskAnt is finally out of beta, and GA (General Available)! TaskAnt is never so cool, and we like it so much. Of course, we’ll keep in improving it, and hope to hear more your suggestions and ideas.

Unlimited projects, and unlimited users
From TaskAnt alpha to beta, we removed the user number limitation. Now, from beta to GA, we removed the project number limitation! Your team account can have as many projects as required, add as many members as needed, and all free!

Although this decision will increase our cost, and maybe let us bear a big risk, we still want to put this great tool in front of you fast, let you feel it. Because TaskAnt has already helped ourselves a lot, increased the productivity much. It’s really really helpful.

iPhone app, available in App Store
TaskAnt for iPhone/iPod touch is now available in the App Store. With this app, you can bring your entire team with you. Of course, the entire team to-do repository. Anywhere, anytime, you can manage tasks, track projects, share ideas or just find what to do next. It’s fast and easy.

And the push notification, will notify you in time, when new tasks/comments arrived. We thought it’s the most important reason to use a mobile device in task management.

Use it on iPad (web app)
For iPad users, we still have surprise. Simply visit TaskAnt.com (or your login URL) on your iPad’s Safari browser, and you’re good to go! It’s HTML5!

Tap ​ and “Add to Home Screen”, and you’ll see a TaskAnt icon on your home screen. It’s the Apple official’s way to make shortcut for a web app. Then you can enjoy your TaskAnt like a native iPad app without installation.

Besides above, there are many other improvements in details. May be little, but important. All in all, we’re not on vacation on the beach in the past months.

1. If a task is not completed, it’s in Inbox.
2. If a task is not in Inbox, don’t do it.
3. If a task is not in Inbox while need to do it, add to Inbox.
4. Once a task is completed, mark it done (so others would know).
5. Assign a task to people whom you need to do something, and set Due Date when necessary.
6. Inbox stuffed? Set task Priority.
7. Split complex job into smaller tasks, and make their description clear, so people could get it completed easily.
8. Merge duplicated tasks.
9. Cancel task rather than delete, because your workmates may have different opinion.
10. Smart ants people organize tasks by # tags.

Last month, we re-designed the login entry of TaskAnt.com. To go to the new entry, click “Login” at top right menu, or enter the below address directly:

https://taskant.com/in/

If you haven’t logged in, you’ll be prompted for your team page URL. If you logged in, the page will redirect to your team and show your inbox. If you logged in many team accounts, the page will show a launchpad and let you choose account from list.

BTW, we also made a Chrome App, which you can find in the Chrome Web Store:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fekikgehlpkhfpjigmfpofpfafbcgllh

It generates an icon in your Chrome new tab, just like a bookmark. Try to install this app if you’re a Chrome+TaskAnt user.

Last year, we launched a brand new web app, TaskAnt. Although still in beta, TaskAnt has developed a large user-base and received broad acclaim from our users.

TaskAnt is a task and project management tool for flat teams. It brings graceful balance between usability and functionality. Practical and easy-to-use, simple and well-designed. Flat teams, no matter big or small, will fall in love with it.

There are many “task management” tools in the market today. Most of them are for personal usage. The other ones, which are designed for teams or enterprises, are either too powerful or too simple. The “too powerful” ones generally focus on the powerfulness and the variety of their features, rather than the seek of usability. Team members often found that they are unwillingly pushed to learn the complexity of how to use these tools and finally gave up with them. The “too simple” ones, on the other hand, usually declare themselves to be some kind of GTD tools. However, a GTD team doesn’t simply mean some accumulation of each GTD member. What’s important to a team is not only everyone doing their own job, but also, probably the more important, the communication and coordination of all members. TaskAnt keeps a perfect balance between these two kinds of applications.

There are also many “project management” tools in the market. In the light of Basecamp’s success, most of project management tools learn an idea from Basecamp – “making web app a toolbox with some simple tools in it”. It seems working that customers pay a little money for a lot of things, but the truth is that they are not using all the tools every day and not all the tools are well-designed, and therefore the “feature wars” begin. At the mean time, some other companies chose a different way – they focus on only one aspect of the “Project Management” concept, and did a really nice job. For example, we see a lot of professional Time Tracking tools, File Sharing products, and Group Chat services. TaskAnt chose not to be a “toolbox”, but to do the most significant thing in project management – the Task Management. Many people claimed, in the video interview on Basecamp’s website, that Todo is the most essential part of their comprehension of project management as well as an tool they use every day.

So, we started our research from this “tool people use every day”, and soon found that Basecamp’s Todo List may not be the best way to do task management, because people spend plenty of time on managing lists, and it’s harder and harder to do this as the amount of tasks grows larger and larger. Our first idea is to give TaskAnt a look like a mail system, a kind of interface people all get used to. Then we tried our best to simplify the process of users’ manipulation. And, rather than to categorize tasks for management, we encourage doing query and search for tasks.

Now, what’s new in this year, actually?

In 2011, we will keep turning our innovation into more and more “elegant” and “tiny” improvements to TaskAnt. What’s “elegant”? The only reason we bring out a new feature is neither the requirements of some particular users nor the fact that some competitors has it, not even to mention some twinkling sparkling ideas, but rather that we have completely considered over it. Elegance of a product only comes out from a professional team. What’s “tiny”? Our improvements are basically optimized in background. Foreground updates will be as quiet as possible without disturbing your work.

Besides, you will finally see TaskAnt on iOS platforms this year. Just imagine managing your tasks on iPhone/iPad/iPod touch with TaskAnt!

Last week, we launched TaskAnt Pro. It releases the limitation of active projects via subscriptions and plans, and provides several advanced features. At the same time, we will maintain the old TaskAnt as a free plan forever!

I hope, in 2011, this old and “formularized” market (of online project management tools) will face a tiny little impact with TaskAnt.

We’re looking forward to your satisfaction of what will be done by us during this year! Thank you for supporting us!

Every task in your TaskAnt account has a id number (a.k.a. Task#), like #123. This number is GUID, which means,

• Unique. It’s impossible that two tasks have the same Task#.
• Even these two tasks belong two different projects.
• Even the task has been deleted, its Task# will not be used by another one.
• If the task is merged to anther task, they still have their own Task#.
• The Task# never changes.

Because the Task# is GUID, we can use it to identify task. For example, “Stephen, your task #866 still has not been updated!” “God, I cannot understand my #987. Are there something wrong? Shouldn’t it assign to Vivian?”

Useful tips: type #123 in the search field and press enter to go to task #123′s details page.

By the way, we can mention a task by Task# in another’s text. For example, “Please give me a report for task #866″, “Please arrange the time & place of #987″, and etc. The quoted Task# will become a hyperlink. Clicking that link will bring us into this task. The two tasks have relationships now! Cool?

Sometimes we want to mark a task as another’s subtask. People may say TaskAnt cannot do this. Although TaskAnt does not have the subtask function, but Task# can really help us to achieve that. For example. We have a task, #1024. Now we have to add some subtasks to #1024. When creating a new task, we append “(see also #1024)” or just “#1024″ to the text. This will express the parent-child relationships between them clearly. Searching “(see also #1024)” will show all subtasks of #1024. Now, do not go away and click “New Task”. We will see the create task dialog with text “(see also #1024)” pre-filled. And the task we created must be listed in the search result above.

All in all, just like what we said on twitter, TaskAnt is designed to be “a simple tool that works”, which looks simple but tries to be the best in every tiny detail! We may not add any “powerful but no-need-to-use” feature! We may not add any “powerful but hard-to-use” feature! We may not add any “they all have” feature unless we re-think over it and believe it should be put into TaskAnt. We hope after a while using TaskAnt, you still have surprise sometimes!

Two core jobs in TaskAnt are tracking and browsing. This post will talk about browsing.

Browse Panel

There is a “Browse” button with a black arrow on the right of the search field. Clicking this button will pull down our browse panel. This is the fastest way to find tasks assigned to someone or created by some person. By default, the browse panel is hidden.

Search Commands

You must notice that, while you navigate from one page to another, the “terms” in the top search field are changed as well. And the terms follow some rules. That is a Search Command, a big designed feature in TaskAnt. You can read more tips on Search Commands in another post.

For convenience, we can press “/” to focus on search field as a shortcut and type new search terms. In our opinion, after be familiar with taskant, people may prefer typing search commands to clicking browse panel. What about you?

Search Command as a Template

Search commands show the common properties of the current list of tasks. So if now clicking “New Task” button, the create task dialog will take these properties as default values. It means we’re using the search command as a template!! And we can save it as a SmartList.

By the way, default values are only default values, you can still create a new task which does not fit the search command. So it will fade out of the current list.

SmartList

If you need to search some special tasks every day, the best solution is to click the “Save as SmartList” button besides the search field. Then this SmartList will stay on the sidebar, and you just need to give it a meaningful name for future using.

A SmartList is also a saved template to create task with given properties, like a hashtag or due date.

In fact, Inbox/Sent/Starred/All Tasks and all active projects in sidebar are all System SmartLists, which you cannot delete.

Share your SmartLists

In fact, SmartList is the most important feature for myself. One my favorite SmartList is “All Due & Overdue”. It’s “due:?-today“. It can find and list all tasks due on today or before. It saves much time and is cool.

Welcome to share your SmartLists! People can learn more from each other. If you’d like, please leave yours in comment. Thank you!

In TaskAnt, we can find out tasks quickly via typing certain terms in the search field and find. Below are some examples we can learn it clearly.

#123
Go straight to the No.123 task

to:brian
List all tasks assigned to Brian

from:brian
List all tasks created by Brian

in:Project1
List all tasks in Project 1 (if you’re not in this project, you can’t see anything.)

in:Project1 to:brian
List all tasks in Project1 and assigned to Brian. “to:brian in:Project1″ will have the same result.

due:today
List all tasks which due date is today

due:?-thisweek
List all tasks which due date is before this week (including this week)

due:tomorrow-?
List all tasks which due date is later than tomorrow (including tomorrow)

status:canceled
List all canceled tasks (You still can’t see tasks which belong the project you’re not in.)

is:starred
List all tasks starred by you

pri:3
List all tasks labeled with highest priority (red)

P.S. We can combine these terms to search, except using task number directly.