Ta-Da!

Published 20 January 05 by Justin French, 5 comments

David pointed me to the new site a few hours ago during it’s “soft launch”, and I instantly moved my to-do lists out of OmniOutliner (a desktop application) and into Ta-Da in a matter of minutes. Yes, before Ta-Da was even publicly launched, I’d moved all my lists, and changed my entire workflow. I’m hooked already.

Obviously it borrows heavily from Basecamp’s to-do lists, but this isn’t just a copy-n-paste… there’s some genuine innovation and new code in there, and a really clean, stripped down interface. I particularly like the way they’ve removed a lot of the submit buttons, making extensive use of JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest.

To add items to a list, you just type in the item, hit return/enter, then type in the next item, etc. That’s right, no submit buttons, no waiting for pages to reload, and virtually no lag at all.

In my experience, this is the closest a browser-based application has ever come to the look and feel of a desktop application, and it excites me to think where web applications (in particular, Rails apps) will be in 6–12 months.

Unlike Basecamp, you can also choose to share your lists for public viewing (just like this one), or even invite trusted people to view and edit your list by sending them an email.

And to sweeten the deal just a little more, there’s an RSS feed of each list and you can email a copy of a list to yourself at any time. Oh yes, and it’s completely free!

The downsides are few. It’s limited to just 10 lists, I’d really love a way to view all my lists at once in some form of overview, and the pages are scattered with links and marketing material for Basecamp, but let’s be realistic here – Ta-Da is a free service designed to sell Basecamp accounts, and I don’t mind that one bit. I’ll use it, I’ll encourage my clients to use it (and share it), and with any luck, they’ll all upgrade to Basecamp.

Once again the 37Signals/Rails combination has delivered something I can really use, as well as something that inspires by for it’s marketing, business and technical muscle.