After talking about nowdothis, and discussing its simplicity, an idea occurred to us to kill the ability to group tasks and just keep all tasks as separate, since it was responsible for complications on the development side, that remains up to this point unsolved.

Now that’s not a trivial feature to kill, as it was part of Rida’s original idea and the reason we decided to do the idea in the first place, but since the deadline is the only thing set-in-stone with this experiment, we had to let it go.

nowdothis is a very simple web app for tasks, which revolves around one of “Next”’s core ideas which is “One task at a time”. It has no registration, simple text box that contains all tasks and a very plain interface.

Very strange synchronicity that astounded the whole team.

We make todo lists when we’re under pressure because they work. Imagine how much better they’d work – and how much more rarely we’d reach that “freaking out” stage – if we simply integrated the list-making into our day-to-day routines.

That’s why it feels so good to write that task list – your brain lets out a sigh of relief, knowing that now, at least, it doesn’t have to try to keep track of all that stuff. Your brain doesn’t want to be remembering all the things you haven’t done. It wants to be doing them, so it can feel good about itself. The neurology of all this is a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.

Quite coincidently we designed “Next” to be as per the recommendations mentioned in that post, as in:

Keep it with you: with a web app, desktop app and a mobile app, you will have your to-do list wherever you go.
No context: for a quick and practical task list, no contexts are necessary.
We also added the limitations idea because although it’s easy on all of us to start with something elegant and organized, with time we always tend to get ahead and overwhelm ourselves, unless there were some set-in-stone limits.

You’ll be able to give “Next” a try in a few hours time “fingers-corssed” and tell us how useful it is to you.

Those tools are:

Macs as our machines, duh!!!
Ruby on Rails as a development framework.
Textmate as a development environment “IDE”.
Git for version control.
iPhone SDK 2.0 and Xcode 3.1 for building the iPhone app.
Adobe Photoshop for graphics and design work.
Adobe Fireworks for image editing.
Coda for CSS work.
jQuery and Firefox+Firebug for UI and creating HTML.
Adobe Flex for creating the Adobe AIR app.
Scrivener for drafting the posts and ideas.
MarsEdit for blogging.
Wordpress for running the Zero2Beta blog.
Twitter for pushing updates.

Alex Iskold wrote an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb where he discussed that the success of future applications depends on them either being helpful or being fun for the sake of entertainment.

Apps don’t have to be polarized like Alex suggests, on the contrary, I think one of the most inviting opportunities is finding the sweet spot between offering something really useful and making it fun to work on at the same time.

We took that philosophy to heart when we designed “Next” our App1, as we planned and evaluated everything, starting from the name of the application down to the finest details to create a helpful, productive, quick, short, cool, casual and fun to use application.

We made sure to add subtle pieces here and there to make it entertaining, and remind users not to take everything seriously, even when getting things done.

Those subtle additions were quite a challenge on their own, especially when combined with the obvious minimalism and limitation behind the concept, but it was a great exercise.

We believe that everything should be fun, and your task list is definitely one of the most important things.

Considering that we’re facing the challenge of designing, developing and deploying a product in 2 days, we decided to take killing features as a sport, and went on with removing stuff and deleting features from an already simple idea, even to the extent where we had to remove the core idea that started the whole project, because we couldn’t find a suitable way to convey it to the user within the time limit.

It’s so easy to add “one more thing” and that “nice little touch” but it doesn’t matter at the end of the day,and it ends up cluttering the product and pushing back the launch for a few days/weeks/months.

What’s the downside to killing features? Adding them later! And correctly so.

It won’t be the end of the world, if we discover later that users are asking for a certain feature and just go ahead and add it. On the contrary you will be adding features according to real-world scenarios, actual feedback and within the right usage context.

It’s definitely better than imagining what people may want/not-want and just keep going at it without any reality check.

Killing features is such a pleasure, it’s definitely going to remain our favorite sport even after the end of Zero2Beta App1 and going back to working on our own projects.

You might wanna give it a try.

Rida: Development of the web app
Mohannad: Graphics and Design
Cloves and Michael: iPhone app
Fouad: UI and Adobe Air
Waseem: Adobe AIR
Baher: Blogging, Marketing, PR and Photos.

You can browse through our photos on Flickr.

“Next” is Rida’s idea, and everyone contributed to the design decisions during a couple of brainstorming sessions to make sure everyone agrees and understands the various details.

One of the sessions is recorded on video and will be posted tomorrow.

A part of the experiment is to use the limitations to our advantage, which drove us to adopt the following guidelines regarding “Next” our simple to-do list:

- Reinvention: we decided to take a whole new look at to-do lists and took a radically new approach that involved dumping time all together and focusing instead on a manageable amount of tasks that most of us handle in couple of days. It’s a substitute for the sticky note or the notepad that you use for a day or so worth-of-tasks.

- Minimalism: instead of taking the whole domain of to-do lists and simplifying it, we decided to start from scratch taking one task at any time, and then building up the app bit by bit to reach the minimum acceptable level for a practical and intuitive to-do list.

- Enforcement: the tricky thing about to-do lists is that we “as users” tend to overwhelm ourselves and instead of using the to-do list to simplify our lives, we end up creating monstrous lists that are scary even to look at let alone try to tackle. Next is about directed enforcement to achieve:

• Drive the user to handle one task at a time.
• Keep tasks short and meaningful in less than 140 characters.
• No more than 20 tasks to tackle in the conceivable future (next couple of days).

- Focus: by limiting the user to one task on the homepage at any time, we encourage users to focus on the task at hand, without any consideration to the other tasks or what’s next until you’re done.

You will get a feel of those idea when you get to try the app tomorrow.