For the past month or so I’ve been organizing my work life with Remember The Milk, another in the growing line of AJAX todo list implementations. It’s “in beta” (what isn’t?) and shows it at times with the odd glitch. Generally though it’s very nice to use, is free and allows you to set due dates on items.

It’s idea of being able to send you an instant message on any of the networks, email or SMS to notify you when a task is nearly due is great, but unfortunately completely undependable so not yet useful in practice.

The worst part of it is a boneheaded interface decision where when you select a different task it’s added to the selection instead of becoming the single selected task. This frequently leads to me changing multiple tasks at the same time. Fortunately they thought to provide an undo facility so it’s easy to fix.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that you shouldn’t create a webapp that never refreshes the page – it means that minor errors that occur along the way build up instead of being rectified when the page refreshes. A couple of times I’ve had to refresh the page manually to clear things up but I intuitively want to just switch to a different page and back so that I can be sure that refreshing doesn’t cause the previous action to be done again.

I’m a big fan of the fact that you can enter due dates as “today” or “tomorrow 3pm” etc in a very loose, user friendly syntax. Oh and you can email yourself tasks as well.

Basically, lots of potential but needs some more polish yet. I’m also not sure how they plan to make money off of it – there’s currently no ads.