A few days ago I wrote about a problem. There’s not standard for todo apps, they just can’t talk to each other.

Now, there’s a weird thing that I can’t explain to myself. There are tons of gorgeous todo apps out there. Every ones in a while some indie developer or some important software house release a new “todo app” with great features. The experimentation on UI in this kind of apps is mind-blowing. The problem is: there’s still no standard. These apps don’t know how to import and export data to share it. When you want to try a new one, you have to start from scratch. When you want to move back, the progress you made is lost.

I proposed a solution, based on XML. In my post there’s also an example of XML file with a DTD and a sample task. I’m writing this post to show you how the community reacted and if my idea has a future or not. Tom Bush (mentioned in my original post) wrote a nice comment:

Good post, much clearer than mine (thanks for the mention)! And you give some example code too. I don’t know if you saw it but there was an attempt to create an XHTML format for tasks at http://microformats.org/wiki/t….

Something that I was wondering about (I don’t know enough about XML or practical implementation) is whether an XML format would make it easy to have multiple levels of nested tasks/lists (something which it would be a shame not to include in a specification meant to be universal). Any ideas?

Like me, he believes in the idea, and he actually wants to develop further. My fellow blogger Gianfranco Lanzio also likes it (and a guy reblogged his post, enjoying the thing like us):

You should really read the rest of the article, as it’s very thoughtful and interesting. When I read it, it was like if a light sparkled up in my head: how comes something so obvious still doesn’t exist?

Developers are not in the same mood. Jesse Grosjean, the great dev behind TaskPaper, has a good point:

It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure that it’s right as a standard TaskPaper feature, plus I just don’t have the time right now. […] For task apps, I think probably 90% of the reason people switch from one app to another is so that they can start over fresh and forget about everything they’ed written down in the first.

True story, but it doesn’t seem fair that developers won’t even allow users to move. That’s not who apps are supposed to work. Mick from Cultured Code, the software house that made (the abandonware?) Things, gave me a very technical, thus interesting, response:

The standard database format on iOS devices is SQLite. On our Mac app we had been using XML for years, but in our new Things Cloud beta app we’ve just switched to SQLite, so we’re actually moving away from XML : )

Either way, it’s not really very practical to develop an app with features limited to a standard like that, and I doubt that easily exporting data to move to another app probably isn’t a priority for most developers.

First of all, the word limited sounds weird, given that XML is an extensible language. But the main problem is the same: we make an app, you stick with it. End of the story. Some sort of good news comes from Brendan, a guy working for Remember The Milk:

We don’t currently offer the ability to export task data to an XML format, but I’ll make sure that the development team gets this for review.

Sounds like a “default” answer, but it’s definitely something. Another sort of even nicer answer came by Nik Fletcher, the Product Manager of Realmac Software that made the todo app that I actually use the most, Clear:

Whilst we don’t plan to integrate with third-party services with such a schema this is something we’ll consider!

So, even if someone actually would implement something like the standard I imagined, I learned that open/standard solutions are not something to achieve when the main goal is just to make a product, and then make people live within your “environment”. In a scenario like this one, nobody seem to really want to make users’ life easier. Also, my solution doesn’t seem to be ideal, but of course this is not news as I’m not a dev and I just wanted to make people think about the aforementioned problem (that is the missing standard). There was some enthusiasm around the whole thing, but now I’m pretty sure that as long as this is not a priority for “bigger” developers, there will be now further development.