Here's the "almost" list of tools that support some sort of task dependencies, but then fail in one manner or another.
Nirvana was mentioned by former Producteev users as one of the few tools that supports task dependencies. As it turns out, all it really has is the ability to select whether a project's tasks can be completed in parallel or if they have to be in series. There's no support for arbitrary dependencies, and no support for subtasks. I'm honestly not really sure how that helps. Otherwise it seems pretty nice.
Midnight Inbox Classic is a Mac OS X application. It supports task hierarchies, but not arbitrary dependencies. It has a to-do list that shows you the tasks that you can work on right now. That list also shows upcoming tasks ordered at the bottom of the list in a different color, which could be handy for letting them not get completely out of sight. When I first started trying Inbox Classic, I thought it was going to be the one. But then I realized I was confused by how it was selecting what tasks I could perform. I finally realized that it was marking the first task in every list as doable, regardless of the depth of the location of the list.
In my mind, if I have a list that looks like this:
- Purchase milk
- Drive to store
- Get driver license
- Get car keys
I have to perform steps
i and
ii in any order, then proceed to step
a, then step
1. Inbox Classic told me that I could perform any of steps
1,
a, and
i; and after I completed
i, I could then proceed to step
ii.
It's possible that I could reverse my ordering so that this makes sense, but this seems to cause the incompatible dependency problem even earlier, plus it makes the final goal seem insignificant. Somehow I feel like I should be working up a hill, not down it.
TodoPlus supports hierarchies, but doesn't seem to have a doable task list. It also only runs on Macs through Mono (an implementation of Microsoft Windows .NET framework), so it looks like a Windows application, and a notably ugly one at that.
ActiveInbox is a Firefox and Chrome plugin that deals with your tasks directly within Google Mail. First off, this is a paradigm used by Microsoft Exchange, and it's never worked well there (IMO), so I'm immediately turned off. It also seems to support only hierarchies. To be honest, I was so turned off by everything being an email that I didn't really explore this one in depth. It did not appear to have any sort of task dependency.
Google Tasks is the tasks widget available in Google Calendar. It supports hierarchies, and if you check off a parent, all of its children autocomplete. But that's it. It even forgets which children you'd already completed if you accidentally complete a parent task and then uncomplete it. Again, not very useful. (BTW, it wasn't obvious to me how you can subordinate a task in Google Tasks. Simply press tab when a task is highlighted and it moves it in one level.)
GQueues is a third-party Google Apps plugin. It supports task hierarchies, but it doesn't appear to have any way to show only the doable tasks. Not really all that useful for me. I might as well just have a list on a piece of paper that I cross off as I go along.
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