Tasque: Keep it Simple

Sometimes simplicity is best.

Tasque is a personal task manager. It's available for download at http://live.gnome.org/Tasque. I tried Tasque on Fedora Core 10 (Fedora Home Page) and OpenSuSE 11.1 (OpenSuSE Home Page).

The top of the Tasque window has a bar for adding new tasks. Fill in the name of the task and click the Add button. New tasks are placed in your list under the catch-call "future" time category, meaning they have no due date.

Click on an existing task edit the name, or open a drop-down menu to move task to a specific day in the upcoming week. New time categories automatically appear and break up the task list.

For one-time tasks, clicking on the checkbox will strike through the task and begin a five second countdown. If the checkbox is unchecked, the task is restored. If the countdown finished, the task is removed. In this way, tasks are marked completed in a single click but can still be restored if the user accidentally clicks on the wrong task.

Tasks that pass their due date are placed in an overdue time category at the top of the Tasque window. Overdue tasks can be moved to today by simply clicking on the date drop-down for the task. Today is the default date. Or they can be left as overdue.

To create new task lists, click the "v" beside the add button to select a task type. The default is "work". Other categories include "family", "personal" and "project". category button in the add bar. All tasks are shown in the list unless the filter menu on the left of the add bar is used to show only one category. In this way, one can have four task lists or only one.

In addition, there are various backends that can be installed to use Tasque with other task lists. OpenSuSE includes a backend to support the Evolution mail client task manager, for example.

On the downside, Tasque occasionally crashed on Fedora Core 10, though maybe that has more to do with Fedora than Tasque. Despite its simplcity, a shuffle button might be nice if you have just too many tasks to decide what to do. But limited multiple task lists, hierarchal tasks, tasks that refer to each other, no attaching references to files or trouble tickets, and no way to manage priority criteria, Tasque may be too simple for business use.

Tasque is an exercise in simple design: focusing on the most common task list functions, making goals and delivering them in an uncluttered user interface.

But for marketing, Tasque gets an "F" for a terrible, confusing name.

September 19, 2009