January 8, 2007

Zirrus: Not Quite There Yet

Zirr.us is a sexy newcomer to the web-based To-do list scene enjoyed by 37Signals and activeCollab, among others. But instead of listing, they’re tagging. Your default view is a cloud, with a slider to adjust the priority (size) of each task. I was initially very impressed by the simplicity and beauty of the website, and the potential of the idea. But I quickly discovered some quirks that sent me right back to Ta-da Lists for the mean time.

Hey InterfaceThis - listen up! Here’s what needs fixing before you’ll have me as a user.

  • Stop poaching the Ctrl+T hotkey - Firefox, IE, and Opera all rely on Ctrl+T to open a new tab. This alone is a dealbreaker for me.
  • When I reedit a task containing characters such as ” they are converted to their HTML entities. This is bad.
  • When I mark a task as completed, where does it go?!
  • If I set the priority too high, the phrase is truncated. Is there perhaps a better way to handle that? It seems backwards for the highest priority tasks to be the ones that are partially hidden.
  • I would like to see some way to share certain tags in a non-writable mode with the public. This could be done simply by employing the use of a reserved tag (”public”?). “http://zirru.us/userid/public/taghere/” would be sweet.
  • Why no RSS feed on your blog? I’d love to get updates - there’s no way I’ll remember to check back on my own. Update: I found the feed, it just wasn’t obvious.

I’m looking forward to seeing Zirrus mature over the next few months. Please don’t disappoint me!

Thanks for posting a review! (We’re psyched to be sexy.)

Good suggestions all, and here are some quick responses:

Ctrl-T is no more. You can now create a new task with the N key. We’ve also added Ctrl-S to save a task.
Saving and viewing of completed tasks is at the top of our To Do list (which, of course, we keep in Zirrus). Stay tuned…
Interesting point about high-priority tasks being truncated more. Of course, we want to show a reasonable number of tasks in the available space, so there’s a balance. Suggestions welcome, and otherwise we’ll keep tweaking as the product matures.
Public tasks: really cool idea, and it will fit nicely into the more general RSS support we have planned. Again, stay tuned. Out of curiosity, what do you see yourself using public tasks for?
Hmm…maybe we should stick one of those little orange “XML” buttons on our home page with a link to the InterfaceThis blog RSS.

Anyway, we hope to hear more from you as the product matures. Welcome to the Zirrus community! (I could say “Zirrusphere” but that would be getting carried away…)†

Comment by Dave at InterfaceThis — January 10, 2007 @ 5:59 pm

Haha - Zirrusphere might be a little over the top, yeah. I’m impressed by your quick response, and thanks for taking the time to reply to my suggestions!

With regards to the truncation issue, one solution would be to simply cap the priority at the level beyond which it would need to be shortened. If the user then edits the text making it longer, the priority is reduced automatically allowing the new text to fit. If it’s shortened then the max is increased. As a Zirrus user I’m not concerned with the actual priority value, but rather with it’s visual size in proportion with the tasks around it - ideally nothing should ever need to be truncated. On that note, it would be great if the input box could be resized live as you adjust the priority slider.

If the “public tasks” feature were available, I could foresee using it for A) communicating with clients on the status of their project (an invite-only mode would be helpful), and B) communicating with the public on the status of a software project, event being planned… who knows. You could even use javascript/iframes to create embeddable task cloud for people to use on their site. I for one think it would be incredibly cool to have a todo cloud on a project’s website that can be updated as simply as using Zirrus.

Point of interest: those orange XML buttons are called chicklets, and yes, please add one. :)

If you could use an extra hand shoot me an email and we can talk more. I have some other technical ideas and I would also like to bounce an idea off you on the business side of things.

Thanks again for responding!

Comment by Logan — January 10, 2007 @ 8:49 pm

[…] It’s been a big week here at InterfaceThis: Zirrus gained over 800 registered users. We’ve received a lot of feedback. Here are a couple of our favorite quotes: “Zirr.us is a sexy newcomer to the web-based To-do list scene…” — Skin Deep […]

Pingback by InterfaceThis — January 16, 2007 @ 10:22 am

I’ll take most of the discussion to email as you suggest, but wanted to let you and your readers know that we’ve posted an update today. Completed tasks are now saved, and you can show/hide them via the new View menu.

Comment by Dave at InterfaceThis — January 16, 2007 @ 11:22 pm

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