Google recently released a new “Task List” feature for their mobile customers. It is a very nice feature, better than anything I have written for GITI, but it does not easily snap into my existing application without special API coding.
My complaint with Google on this is very simple, the way in which they promote this tool in their blog post announcing it. The article is simple and direct in its task, comparing their Task List on an iPhone to paper. They make many assuptions that are simply not true, 1. you will always have signal, 2. your iPhone will have battery past lunch, 3. Everyone carries a giant phone/PDA/MP3 player/paperweight/pocket blender. These are the limiting factors including their own admission in the article that you can not fold an iPhone.
The “limitations” of paper they list can also be true of an iPhone. The limited availability of the iPhone in this case may be the battery power in short supply, or any variety of weird things that Apple decides to push to the device. Contraty to popular belief, if you leave your iPhone in one pair of pants, it does not follow you to the next pair of pants (however, you might still have access to your tasks from GMail). For difficult to organize, that applies more digitially than it does to paper. There is limited space for physical paper, so eventually you go crazy and find a shreader. In the electronic paper space, you can add things to lists and let messages and things pile up infinitely.
Paper has its advantages, including, you can easily stick a post-it note on anything, and you can add a post-it note of tasks to someone else’s desk (or coffee cup) and have them see them along with their own, otherwise, in the electronic world, you have to either hack their Google account and add it (not considered ethical in the western world) or send them an email begging them to add the tasks. Some people do not respond well to being begged to add things to a task list, but a bright canary page is a friendly request for attention.
Anyway, Nice feature Google, but next time, don’t put down the 5000 year old technology that has served society well before your creation.