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New Features: Tagging, searching, and Smart Lists

emily (Remember The Milk) says:
Details are on the blog.

We hope you like our new features, and we'd love to hear your feedback :)
Posted at 7:14am on January 26, 2006
ernal says:
Had a little play with each of the cool new features. I can see tagging and searching will come in handy. I need some time to let smart lists sink in a little more before I decide how much I can use it. ;) The examples I was thinking of for a "supermarket" list would work better if I could set an email address for that list seperately, or print the list. Any thoughts on introducing these additions?

Posted 18 years ago
emily (Remember The Milk) says:
Once you save a Smart List, you can print it in the same way as regular lists.

I'm not sure what you mean about the email addresses -- if you create a Smart List that shows, say, all of your tasks tagged with 'supermarket', then you can email in a task and specify the tags in the email. (The help on email in has been updated to show how to specify tags in an email.) The tasks will then automatically appear in your supermarket list. If your request was for something else, please let me know :)
Posted 18 years ago
ultrapasty says:
Great new features! Thanks :D
Posted 18 years ago
chadcrowell says:
WOW the features are awesome. I think the combo of tagging and smartlists almost eliminates the need for multiple lists, in that I could create one master task list and then just tag all tasks and have smartlists that show me all "work" tagged, "home" tagged, whatever, and I can also view all my tasks in one list just by using the main list.

Is it me or can I not tag multiple selected items at the same time???
Posted 18 years ago
markdbd says:
Great news to see new functionality in RTM. The features are great :D
Love the tags. I only miss to see my tags when I try to add one into a task. The solution could be something like Google suggest.

Well, great work :D Keep it going.
Posted 18 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
I'm with Chad - the new features are great. I have followed various conversations online about achieving this sort of capability since 1998 or earlier - and now it's here. Just terrific.

Chad asks the question that's chief on my mind: is there a way to assign tags to mutiple items? I am going to migrate from 12+ lists down to one, and it'd be a lot quicker with multiple assignments.

Thanks again - I love the search and the tags and the saved searches - I use greasemonkey to do this in Gmail, and you've got it built in natively. Just great.
Posted 18 years ago
clandestine says:
The Smart Lists are genius, especially the way they're implemented. I also think that I might just condense my lists down with these.

However, it would be really nice -- like the people before have said -- if one could assign tags to multiple items at once. As well, if you adopted something similar to del.icio.us' tag prompting and highlighting, that would make it even better.

That said, these are a lot of nice features, and you guys have done a fantastic job. Thanks!
Posted 18 years ago
mose250 says:
I like the new features - but sometimes it seems like there's a glut of features, which can make the site harder to use. For instance - as mentioned above - if you have tags and smart lists, do you really need multiple lists? I feel like most users will tag, then make smart lists based on the tags, and the extra layer of organization seems to get in the way.

I love the tasks cloud, but could it be put on the tasks page too?

Finally, multiple selections - I'm a bit confused as to exaclty how the selections are working. The system doesn't quite seem intuitive - there are checkboxes and color highlights, yet I don't seem to be able to change the attributes of everything that I've selected (tagging multiple items at once, for instance).

All of that said, it's a great site, and I use it frequently. Thanks for it.
Posted 18 years ago
gmonty says:
Fantastic additions.
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
Really nice! I like being able to have a "Today" tab now where I can check things off from there, rather than jumping from the overview into various lists.

Personally, I would like to have the option of simply specifying a date range rather than "within X days of Y" (e.g., "between January 25 and January 30" or "from yesterday until Sunday") I know this can be achieved with the search you have now, but that format is easier for my brain somehow.

And a related question -- is this dynamic? If I choose "within 1 day of tomorrow" will that smart list always show "tomorrow," or is it using a fixed date?
Posted 18 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
mose250 has a good idea with the task cloud on the tasks page, as well, and argotnaut's idea of specifying a date range would be a good addition, too.

Another task cloud suggestion... currently inbox and sent appear as tags in the cloud, yet I have nothing in them. Could a list with zero items please be omitted? Thanks.
Posted 18 years ago
msg35 says:
Excellent additions!! Just three brief comments thus far:
1. I think it would be great if you updated the RTM browser button so that there is field for tags in it too;
2. I second some of the users opinion about the need to assign tags for multiple tags at once;
3. The tags cloud is wonderful, but it would be even better if it appeared in the Tasks page too.
Posted 18 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
Here's another idea, related to advanced searching...

Could we search for things on a true/false basis for recurrence and/or repetition?

I have all sorts of repeating tasks, and Smart List that omitted them (e.g., repeat:false AND recur:false) would be slick.

I could assign a repeat tag, I guess, but that seems like a kludge.
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
So very happy that I can now have a "Today" tab with time estimate for all tasks. I can see immediately if I'm overcommitted. And boy, am I ever.

Also see the answer to my previous question -- smart list searching for "today" does appear to be dynamic.
Posted 18 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
I like the task cloud. It seemed gimmicky at first, but it's a dense way to navigate very easily and rapidly.

I have already mentioned wanting the task cloud to appear in more places than just the overview. I also requested that inbox and send, at least when empty, not appear.

My next suggestion is that the size of the text refer to things that are either due or have no due date, but not to items with due dates in the future.

To explain, I use RTM as a lightweight calendar, and thus tag many items with "Events". None of these are overdue, and nearly all are in the future. In my mind, Events should be very small, as it is under control. Using the task cloud, events is enormous, and this seems off kilter to me.

I don't know how others use the task cloud, so peraps others think the current behavior is spot on. Anyway, just my two cents. Thanks.
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
Regarding the other comments about using tags and smart lists instead of multiple lists -- maybe I could get behind that, if smart lists could also be published and shared. It doesn't look like that's possible currently. Could it be?

Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
And I'd definitely need to be able to assign tags to multiple items in one go before I'd commit to giving up separate lists. :)
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
My 2c on the tags: I'd be amused to see them sized based on the amount of estimated time tallied up for the tasks in each tag. It would be interesting to see what's eating up all of my time!
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
Not to hog the thread here, but ... :)

I would really like to be able to _exclude_ certain tags when searching.

e.g., search for:
tagged with "chores"
isn't tagged with "odious"
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
Last post for tonight, I swear! It's just that I like the new features so much that I'm spending way too much time on this now. Lest you think that all anyone wants to do is complain...

Anyway, my basic idea is that I would like to be able to _exclude_ anything that can be _included_, such as lists and priorities.
Posted 18 years ago
emily (Remember The Milk) says:
Thanks for all the feedback here :)

First off, I just wanted to mention that we're working on allowing editing multiple tasks at once (we knew everyone would want this feature, particularly after we added tags :)

msg35: We'll see if we can tags to the quick add feature -- thanks for pointing this out!

ranbarton: Great suggestion -- we'll add repeating to the advanced search operators. It also makes sense to remove inbox and sent from the task cloud if there's nothing in them.

argotnaut: Yes, if you enter 'today', 'tomorrow', etc then the Smart List will be dynamic.

argotnaut: Unfortunately it's not possible to publish or share Smart Lists. The reason for this is that Smart Lists are simply filters on your existing lists, and there's no way for the Smart List to know whether every single task comes from a list that's been published. Similarly, Smart Lists cannot be shared because if you shared a filter with someone, it would be applied to their tasks and not yours. If your Smart List was for tasks due today, and you shared that with someone, they would see their tasks that are due today.

argotnaut: You can already do exclusions with the searches. Try tag:chores NOT tag:odious :) This works for any task properties.
Posted 18 years ago
ultrapasty says:
What about the tag cloud being on the Tasks section as well as the overview? This has been mentioned several times here, and I'd really appreciate this as well.
Posted 18 years ago
steadicat says:
I'd also like to see the tags of a task in the list right next to the title, like GMail does with labels.

This would also be useful if you have GTD-style next actions and need to see at a glance what project they are for (e.g. Register domain name [mynewsite]).
Posted 18 years ago
argotnaut says:
Ah, I see. I don't mind not being able to publish/share smart lists, but then I would have to disagree with the person who wanted to eliminate multiple lists.

Thanks for the "not" tip! Very useful.

Great job all around!
Posted 18 years ago
emily (Remember The Milk) says:
There have been a few requests for the task cloud to be displayed in the Tasks section -- we'll consider making this an option if we can figure out where to put it :) We didn't want to have too many 'floating' and moving things on the right, so we'd have to figure out how to include it without it being annoying.

I know that a lot of people are now using tags to quickly navigate their tasks (either instead of or in addition to using lists), so it's something that we'll look into.
Posted 18 years ago
emily (Remember The Milk) says:
Regarding msg35's suggestion for tagging with Quick Add -- this feature now supports adding tags.
Posted 18 years ago
tobias382 says:
Don't know if it's been mentioned yet or not, but I'd like to see the option to have multiple lists searched for a single Smart List. Loving the new additions!
Posted 18 years ago
tobias382 says:
Also, an option to order the results by something other than priority would be nice (ex: name, due date).
Posted 18 years ago
emily (Remember The Milk) says:
tobias382, you can search multiple lists by using advanced operators e.g.

List:Personal or List:Work

Hope this helps!
Posted 18 years ago
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