ani ruhama

Hiveminder is a new service from Best Practical, the guys that made RT, which is the world’s coolest ticketing system. It was announced at OSCon a couple weeks ago, so it’s still brand new. And very shiny. Like everything else interesting and worthwhile, it’s still in beta and requires an invite…but today was just like Christmas, because I got one. Ergo, a review, just for you.

EDIT (8/7/06): Jesse, of Hiveminder, has just informed me that they’re now open to the world. No invites needed…so go sign up!

For those of you that have to read the last page of a book to decide if it’s worth it, I’ll go ahead and put my summary up here at the top. I know, I know, I’m too kind.

What is Hiveminder? In short, it’s a to-do list organizer. So now you’re sitting there thinking, “But [blank] site already does the same thing.” Nah, not really. It’s like all the other sites together with a dash of sprinkles on top. Because it rocks. And if you’re familiar with RT, you’ll feel right at home with the interface. Hiveminder gives you the flexibility to be vaguely organized or anal retentive, to work all by your lonesome or collaborate on the tasks with a hundred people. It has more cool features than a candy stores has candies. Or something like that.

I don’t yet know if I’m going to regularly use Hiveminder. Since I’m too cheap to buy a PDA, a site like this might come in handy. However, if I do decide I need a website to organize my entire life, Hiveminder’s definitely the one I’ll use.

Guess what it’s time for now?

Adding and Editing Tasks

Before you can start checking things off your to-do list, you have to have something to do. So let’s add a couple tasks; of course, there are several different ways of doing so.

Braindump allows you to type all the relevant task information in one long string of text, instead of entering it in different fields on a form. I can access Braindump on my home page or just use the ever-present Braindump field on the left side of my screen. The first text on the line is my title, and then I can put any tags I want to use in square brackets. In theory, I can put a due date after the tags, but it wasn’t working properly at the time of this review. If I want to add more information to the task, I go to the next line and put a space. This adds anything on this line to the task description. In the below screenshot, I’m putting the “Breathe” task as my highest priority with the plus signs, since it’s slightly important to do.

Couple downsides to using Braindump: Of course, you have to know the right syntax to enter information properly, or it won’t work. Also, you can’t set dependencies, and using the sidebar, you can only add tasks to your personal list, not to groups.

After creating the tasks with Braindump, it kindly lists my current tasks, including the new ones I just added. Looking at everything I have to do today, I just remembered another important thing: Lunch. So let’s add that, this time using the “Add a new task” field.

Now here’s the fun part. If I’m too lazy to log into Hiveminder, or I’m in Siberia with no internet connection but my handy cell with SMS, I can just send myself an email to add a task. After setting it up in Preferences, Hiveminder assigns you an email address, or several if you want them (to give a unique address to each individual allowed to edit your to-do list, for example). All I have to do is put my task title in the subject line, and the description in the body of the message, and it whizzes over the internet into my Hiveminder account.

Of course, if I want to edit a task, all I have to do is click the Edit button next to the task. Or if I click the drop-down arrow, there’s a list of different options I have, including setting dependencies. Because I’m a girl, I’m allowed to be fickle and moody, and right now I’m not in the mood to discuss dependencies right now. But if you’re familiar with how RT handles them, it’s just about the same. And if you’re not familiar with RT, then Google it.

Viewing tasks

Now that I’ve created several tasks, of course I’ll want to look at them. So many options…I can’t decide.

Maybe I want to view them by tags. The tags are displayed in a cloud view on the sidebar, and you can toggle it between displaying the tags for all your tasks, or just the tasks on the current page. Click on one of the tags, and it’ll show you everything under that tag. In this screenshot, “Survival” is the only tag that’s a little bigger, but I don’t really have enough tags to make it stand out. But you all know how cloud view works, right?

Since I’m not interested in my tags anymore (refer to the fickle-moody-girl bit above), I just want to see everything I need to do today. I click on the Lists drop-down arrow on the top navigation bar, select the “Due Today” list, and voila! I see everything I need to do.

Tasks can be sorted out to different groups or given different owners. Below, you can see the basic interface for viewing the tasks in a group. I’m not sharing with anyone right now (obviously because I’m an antisocial loner that doesn’t like playing with others), but you can get the general idea of how that all works. If I ever come out of my shell and make some friends, I can invite people to be part of a certain group, or maybe, if I’m cool enough, even get invited to one myself.

When all the tasks are building up, and you need to take a quick look at everything, you can use the Task Review feature to quickly run through every existing task. It’s a dangerous world, though, and Hiveminder kindly warns you about the health hazards before you head on in… After that, there’s a simple interface to let you make any changes you need, and then head on to the next task in line. It even has hotkeys (N for “Do this today”, D for “Done!”, S for “until Saturday”, W for “until Monday”, and M for “for a month”)

And there’s always the search box in the upper right of the screen, or I can use an advanced search.

Of course, each task is assigned a unique alphanumeric code, so it won’t get confused with anything else, no matter how busy you are.

You can also view your task lists via an Atom feed, iCal and Google Calendar (two-way syncing will be available shortly), email, HTML file, or even plain text (which you can easily edit and upload from your favorite text editor). You can generate different feeds for different lists, perhaps some for public distribution and some for top-secret use (if the URL is ever compromised, they even let you delete and recreate it. How nice of them).

There’s about a hundred gazillion more things Hiveminder can do, but I’m tired of writing. And more importantly than that, my lunch break is over, and I’ve wasted all my time writing instead of eating. So I guess the lesson learned here is that just because it’s on my to-do list (and really, I put it on there…go look at the screenshots!) doesn’t mean it’ll get done. Hiveminder’s all about free will, not predestination, I suppose. Ah well. I’ll just be hungry till dinnertime.

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