Review: Quick Milk
Score:
30%
To Do applications have always been popular in portable computing - be it the PDA or the smartphone, keeping track of what needs doing is an admirable goal. In a way it upsets me that nobody has really been able to get a killer-app in this space. Yes, there are some efforts that get close, but one To-Do to To-Do them all? Not yet. And that includes Quick Milk.
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With the rise of cloud computing, the portable nature of the To-do list, needing to be available in a number of locations, made it a prime target for a number of services, and one of the most popular ones is "Remember the Milk". It provides a competent range of fields, groups and filtering options. Now we have a new Symbian application to talk to the main website in Quick Milk.
Is this the answer? No. Is it a good start? I'm not sure.
First up, being an application that uses the cloud, you need connectivity to make it work. I can just about live with that, but it does leave some issues if you do a lot of travelling. I'd be scuppered if I was roaming in the US for example. If there's anything that these cloud to-do apps need it's offline caching .
The other major issue is with entering and editing items. Rather than have a nice dialog based UI, with tick boxes, time fields and areas for text, Quick Milk has one text entry box, and if you want to add in date fields, priorities or all the other things that make a to-do app useful, you need to use arcane codes, tags, and modifiers in that one text field.
That's just wrong. Yes there may be an argument that it's more efficient if you totally understand what you want, but for a general application this is a missed design goal. You want another missed goal? You can't edit your To-dos.
Right there, that's a fail.
Even if the developer comes back and shows me how to do it, they've failed in the UI. Filtering, sorting, searching the lists? Nothing there either. Quick Milk appears to be a test-bed awaiting the developers to start actually coding the bits that would make it worthwhile. Which is disappointing, because it does look nice, the animations are smooth, and what's there is on show is easy on the eye.
Quick Milk also has a fundamental problem, and it's actually nothing to do with the application itself. Remember the Milk has a functional mobile web page presence (http://m.rememberthemilk.com/) and that can show me everything, let me filter tasks, and let me edit what I'm doing. The sort of things that I think everyone needs to do with their lists.
In short, you can find me on the main website - this third party application unfortunately can't be recommended.
-- Ewan Spence, August 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at