Voo2do is having a small spike in new user accounts this weekend, apparently because of a mention in the Lifehacker blog thanks to a nice pointer by Simplehuman.

We’ve also been picked up by a few directories of Ajax services: eHub, WSFinder, and ProgrammableWeb. Voo2do is also noted in the “Similar Initiatives” page at the AjaxOffice wiki. Thanks, everyone!

A voo2do competitor worth noting is NextAction. NextAction is a fully-browser-based web application, and makes good on the promise of Save-As Deployment that I predicted on my blog in March. In NextAction, not only can you save the app to disk (actually, that’s the only way you’ll be able to save your data) but you can bring up an IDE and edit the code, query the DB, and run tests right in the browser. This is exactly the sort of craziness that will bring us even better web applications over time.

In closing, I’d like to quote one of my favorite kinds of voo2do mentions: the foreign-language review. This short one is from Dr-Leech’s Blog:

Voo2do – Muy buen administrador de tareas y proyectos, a mi gusto mejor que TadaList.com

Muchos gracias, Dr-Leech!

(Oh, and by the way, some nice improvements are in store for deployment this weekend, like project name autocompletion and time zone support.)

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)

Voo2do recently got a couple of mentions in media that haven’t before, to my knowledge, noted it. The first is a real dead-trees paper, although I can’t tell whether the Site Seeing column in the 8/19/2005 St. Petersburg Times is actually printed or an online-only feature. Here’s what author Jules Allen said:

PDAs are passe, so you don’t want to risk looking unfashionably retro in front of the office “in” crowd. Paper isn’t green, so what’s an industrious wanna-be to do? A free account on voo2do might be just the ticket. It’s a nothing-to-install application that runs through your browser and can neatly separate the tasks in your work life from what you call a personal life. Nifty.

Also, Amber in CommandN Videocast Episode 12 chooses voo2do for her “web pick of the week”. CommandN sent quite a few hits over to voo2do yesterday, according to voo2do.. Thanks for the mention!

Over the past few days, the server that powers voo2do has been plagued by responsiveness and stability problems. I believe these have been caused not by voo2do itself, but by another application I wrote which runs on the same server. That application, the frassle weblog system, is currently down. In the next couple of days, I will attempt to correct some performance problems in frassle and bring it back online. Voo2do service should, in the meantime, be better than ever because the server has much more capacity to dedicate to it.

Thanks for sticking with voo2do and let me know if you continue to experience slowdowns.

Shimon Rura

I found a few other sites linking to voo2do thanks to a referrer log analysis. Not counting link logs, there are a few mentions I missed before:

• German: voo2do -Aufgabenmanagement mit viel AJAX (Google translated: “The application is easily operated, makes fun and shows, how applications of Web should present themselves today.”)
• Undetermined Cyrillic language Ukrainian: postman31′s livejournal
• Undetermined Chinese/Korean/Japanese(?): Jacky’s Blog, yam.com and Xuite
• Spanish? Catalan Oriol
• And finally English: zen damage, decomplicate, and blog blog blog.

Oh, joyous day! Several bugs that have been inconveniencing voo2do users have been fixed, and are now live at the site.

Note: To make sure you have the latest changes, click your browser’s reload button while on the tasks page. This will ensure you have the latest version of our script files.

• International Character Support — MOST REQUESTED BUGFIX — voo2do now uses UTF-8 Unicode encoding, supporting many written languages on recent browsers. (Note that there is not yet timezone or localized date format support, but I consider those missing features, not bugs.)
• Edit dates in IE — users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser were unable to edit due dates in any of the tasks views; the date would appear to change but was not saved. Fixed.
• Excessive navigation confirmations on browsers based on development versions of Mozilla Gecko — some browsers, including Camino for Mac and Deer Park alphas for Windows, popped up a warning dialog (Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?) in between any link, whether or not you had unsaved data. I still think this is a browser bug, but I’ve put a workaround in place to fix this misbehavior.
• Saving on the history page — you can now save from the history page, even in MSIE.

Thanks to everyone who’s been trying out voo2do, and especially those who found these bugs and sent me helpful messages.

The Inforedesign blog, a Russian blog on (as far as I can tell) web design, has a mention of voo2do and a few comments. One of them is from someone who also emailed me to ask about voo2do’s problems handling international characters. Which I think is almost fixed…

By user request (!), there is a now a way to donate money to me. I’ll use it to pay for the server that runs voo2do. If you really like it, or have a special feature request, even a nominal donation is a good way to get my attention.

Look for the pink donate box on the right sidebar of the Voo2do Blog.

Although Voo2do now has 1180 users, I think that attention is mostly due to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. From what feedster tells me, here’s the round-up of discussion about voo2do:

• Update: Chris Beams posted a mention and a greasemonkey script that adds a keyboard shortcut for creating a task. (Sorry for forgetting this, Chris!)
• Update 2: Paul Craig has tried a lot of different systems, and they were all terrible. Until voo2do…
• Update 3: Slackah calls it “my new love”.
• Martin Gordon has the most substantial review I’ve seen so far.
• Lifehack.org suggests that readers try it out.
• Alinobairro appreciates my “license” – if you like it, smile at a stranger today.
• miss thinks-too-much says whee!
• Irubin asks about the underlined shortcut keys (I replied)
• Tao of Mac is skeptical — do all Ajax apps really use the same yellow? (Actually yes, otherwise sunlight leaks in and degrades the code.)

Please comment if you see something I’ve missed.

My friend Girish has written an awesome Windows tray application for Voo2do. It sits in the corner of your screen and lets you easily add a task, browse tasks by project, and see tasks that are overdue or due today. It uses the Voo2do API. This program requires Windows and the .NET framework. It is released under the MIT license and the .zip file includes C# source code.

Descriptions: one and two

Download directly: voo2dotray.zip

Girish and I are both using this client app, and I will continue hounding him to add features just as he hounded me for voo2do.com.