Denis Perekhrest (Денис Перехрест), who runs a Russian-language blog on web-services, firefox, lifehacks, and GTD at inforedesign.com, has posted a comparison of voo2do and backpack. Backpack is a productivity tool by 37signals based on a personal wiki. Denis also emailed me an English translation of his article; here it is posted with his permission.

For some time I have been using two time managing — voo2do (not for a long time but often) и BackPack (for a long time but not so often). And now it is time to compare those two and choose the one, which will stay on my computer.

A little bit of graphics to learn those two: screenshot V2D and screenshot BP. You can notice at once that bright colours of V2D set you into positive mood, whereas BP says: «Don’t look aside, continue working…»

The main element of V2D is task. The task can be assigned to a certain project. Each task can have end date (dropdown calendar), priority, estimation (using any units), current executing and actual cost. And to each task some number of notes can be attached.

Disadvantages of V2D :
- while creating new task the name of the project is to be typed manually from the list of all tasks. If a task is created from the project page — then the name is filled in automatically. The is no automatic name pre-filling
- all changes are to be saved also manually, by means of ‘Save’ button, that is placed far from the «entry», in the upper right corner.
- till the recent time the service was often inaccessible (perhaps because of the large number of users).

But V2D has tray application , greasemonkey userscript and blog, where the news and other information is published.

In the BP the situation is a bit strange. The projects are replaced by pages (in a free version — up to five), tasks by a — lists. There is also a possibility to add notes, and images, but they do not seem to be connected to certain tasks.

Big advantage of BP — is reminders (they are the only part I use in this system. And also in comparison to V2D in BP AJAX technology is wide used. All is transparent, appears and disappears fluently. And all managing buttons ( ‘Save’, ‘Add’) are placed next to the element, and all is made automatically.

What is missing in V2D? Reminders, simultaneous access to the account (for example to give a customer a possibility to view the state of the whole project), autosaving, images storing and ajax using.

And there is a hope, that it will come. I choose Voo2Do!

hmm….looks like an Ad?

Author: Denis Perekhrest ( http://inforedesign.com)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Buzz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.