A little bit ago I blogged about how I was using Remember The Milk in order to get some things done around the house and to remind me about stuff that I want to do. Things have been going pretty well on that account, I have been using it to great effect for basically everything that I need to do outside of things that I need to get done at Honeywell (I keep a separate todo list for there). However, when using it these past weeks, I have noticed a few things that I wish it would have or things that could be improved upon, I think in a big way.

I think the twitter interface should have some enhancements. For example, it is impossible currently to mark off an item that repeats through twitter, because you always have more than one of them on your list. I would love to do this with daily tasks so that I can mark them off as soon as I finish them with a few button presses on my cell phone. Also it would be nice to be able to add things to lists and not just the INBOX through twitter. Possibly another command starting with ‘!’ that takes a keyword.

Remember the milk has as a major component the map of locations that items in a list can be placed at. There are a couple improvements that I would like in this area. The first is to have multiple locations that are all just as valid in order to complete the task. Remembering the Milk (the actual task) is a great example. There are literally hundreds of places that I could get milk, and two or three of them that I use regularly, depending on which one I am driving by at the moment. If you could place these three markets in a group of some sort, then they could all be associated with the item and you could see it on your mobile or however you’re viewing the map.

The other map improvement is fairly simple - offer to give me directions from one place to another. I don’t know how to drive to a random location I’ve just put in because it is where I need to drop my car or pick someone up or whatever, and a small link to a google maps directions would be nice. Even just a link to google maps (where I could then click on the “directions from…” link) would be a big improvement.

The last improvement that would be nice is to be able to click on the URL or visit the site in the URL field for tasks in some way. Currently the URL field is pretty useless as a URL, because there is no way to click it and actually visit the site. If I click on it, the editing field pops up and I have to do all the hard work myself of cutting and pasting the URL into the location field. It’s also a mis-cue because the URL looks like a link before I click it, just like I could click on it as I want to. A keyboard shortcut for visiting the site would be nice as well since I do use the keyboard interface quite a bit.

These improvements I think would make a big difference to RTM users. The map improvements alone would be a big upgrade in my opinion. As for now, I will continue to use RTM whether these are implemented or not - it’s a good way to keep an online list in any case. It’s kept me writing blog posts at the rate of about once every two days. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not yet..