Sunday, March 23, 2014

I Sync Tasks

I'm a big user of various cloud services. As I mentioned in that post my wife and I were using a text file in Dropbox for grocery lists. That turned out to be painful as you had to tap in just the right place to put a cursor in a line so you could mark that you had gotten that item. I know it seems trivial but it was a nuisance and the WAF was low. Remember that I have my private domain hosted by Google Apps.

For my own "to do" lists, I've been using Google Tasks. There are interfaces to Tasks both from the Gmail page and the Calendar page. On Android I use Tasks. On iOS I use Go Tasks. They both work seamlessly with Google Tasks.

So I wondered if I could use Google Tasks for a grocery list. The presentaton is a natural list with a check-off box. Just what I needed.

But Google Tasks are specific to a single user. They aren't shareable. So began the quest.

First I found this blog post with a description of how to create your own Google App to share. It worked but the presentation was a unique web page and didn't seem to be readily presented on a mobile device.

Then I found I Sync Tasks. It simply just does what you want it to do.


You register with them using your Google account.


And tell them what Tasks list you want to share and with whom.


That's it. You can contribute $1 per month per user and make it sync more quickly. Seems well worth it.

Initially the sync was quick. Then after a while the frequency slowed down. I read the FAQ and it didn't specify the sync times. So I tweeted the author.
fastoy: @isynctasks I'm using isynctasks.de. What is the duration of the trial period? What is the sync frequency DURING and then AFTER the trial?
isynctasks: @fastoy 7 day trial; sync times vary, depend on multiple signals; within a minute during trial or if paid; within hours on the free plan.
Sign me up.

2 comments:

adriene said...

Hi there. May I check with you if you are still using I Sync Tasks after all these months? Has it met your expectations? I'm considering using it. Thanks.

Ben Moore said...

Yes, I'm still using I Sync Tasks. Somewhere it was inferred that only one of the parties sharing tasks had to subscribe but if both didn't the syncing was very slow. I subscribed both of us and it works good. I'm not sure that the syncing is as quick as advertised but it is quick enough for us. Works fine for building a grocery list but I'm not sure that it is quick enough to share as you check off items in the grocery store.