Review: Delegate 1.0
- Article 11 of 19
- MacUser, July 2010
To Do lists are one of the most popular ways for busy people to get things done – there’s even a “getting things done” (GTD) methodology for how to get the most from To Do lists.
App4Mac’s Delegate 1.0 is GTD-compliant, trying to simultaneously make To Do lists powerful yet easy to use. It has a streamlined interface for creating and listing To Dos. Each To Do, as well as a due date and notes, can be given a colour-coded priority, tagged or flagged as important.
Each list of To Dos can then be sorted by name, due date, tags or priority. Lists can also be exported to iCalendar, PDF and CSV format or to iCal, although it won’t synchronise, only export.
Clearly, however, collaborative projects are the intended market for Delegate. As a standalone piece of software, although tagging does make filtering easier, Delegate’s still fairly anaemic even compared with iCal. You can’t import To Dos from iCal, only from Projector and CSV files, so you’ll have to set up any existing To Dos from scratch. There’s no SyncServices integration. There are no options to create repeating To Dos, no way to create alarms as reminders and no warnings if a To Do is overdue. Even with the imminent Delegate companion app for iPhone/iPad/iPod, it looks overpriced and under-featured compared with the likes of Appigo’s equally GTD-compliant To Do.
As a collaborative application, Delegate shows more promise. Any list can be assigned an owner from your address book and set up to be shared remotely, so it can be edited by other users on other Macs or using the companion app. At the moment, you can only share a list through a free service run by App4Mac’s for registered users of Delegate, but a Delegate Server will also be forthcoming for those who want to share their To Do lists with large numbers of people within a firewall.
However, given the features available in online service Toodledo or other enterprise collaboration tools, such as a Windows client or the ability to create workflows, there seem to be few reasons to take it over its competitors.
If you can stomach the price and your needs are relatively niche – you have a large number of To Dos and you want to be able to tag and organise them in a standalone program with a pleasing interface – Delegate might just win you over. Otherwise, there are better alternatives out there.