How to: Tasks with notifications for iPhone

As much as I love my iPhone it has been as backwards step for me from my Palm Treo for certain productivity functions.

Top of the list was a todo or task management system that synced with Outlook and gave me an alarm when something was due.

Today I have that functionality but it isn’t perfect. As with most iPhone work arounds it involves third party web services.

I decided on the Toodledo app some time ago. It has a lot of functionality, was getting good reviews and has a third (fourth ?) party application that syncs with Outlook. Today Toodledoo updated their iPhone app so it uses the new iPhone 3.0 push notifications.

So my system involves:

• Outlook
• A Toodledo account
• The Toodledoo iPhone app version 1.5.0
• The Outlook sync from Chromatic Dragon (there is a warning on the Toodledoo site but I have had no problems.)
• An iPhone running 3.0

Once you have these things in place follow these instructions. The key things are to allow notifications on the phone when asked on startup and sync THEN go to the web site Reminders/Alarms page and select the iPhone as your reminder location.

I took some time to get this to work.

My problems were:

• I was creating a task with a reminder on the phone and not realizing that it the app only auto syncs on startup not exit.
• The task has to exist on the website.
• When I was getting to the point that I was about to give up I checked my account settings ON THE WEBSITE and realized that the time was set for 2 hours ahead of what it should have been. Once I fixed that my next test worked fine.

The other thing to know are that Toodledo has two service levels- free and pro. With the free account, such as I have, you only get one notification choice, i.e. iPhone or email or SMS, and one choice of alarm time- one hour before the due time. Don’t rely on the exact time – they state that its actually 1 hour +/- 5 minutes.

The other not ideal thing is that I choose to manually sync with Outlook. My Outlook file is vast and any auto syncing (including Google Calendar sync) was slowing it further. Between that and that fact that the iPhone app only syncs on startup I have to remember to consciously sync everything.

I would be interested to hear of other iPhone users experiences setting up tasks with Outlook sync and notifications.

Dinner with librarian bloggers

Had a lovely dinner tonight with flexnib and her M, sirexkat, and exploded library who was visiting Perth for a conference.

Exploded library with iPhone. We were comparing notes.

Sirexkat and Flexnib

Sirexkat was taking a movie of us discussing three questions about librarianship today

We talked librarys and gadgets and blogging of course.

The great news is that I get to do it all again in November with free range librarian. I hope that I will not be a TOTAL fan girl and will talk sensibly.

This is not just about my social life. Its also by way of a part 2 review of my iPhone blogging experience.  I have discovered that, although handy, the WordPress application that I used to do my earlier post is pretty basic. It is fine to do a quick post with a photo or start a draft. It is not immediately obvious to this noob how to add a link especially since the IPhone does not support cut and paste. Apparently they are working on adding comment moderation. And the application is open source so I will expect many further enhancements.