Now we're into tools that meet my criteria. The first is Task Coach.

Task Coach supports both folders and arbitrary task dependencies. Filters can be used to hide inactive tasks. It does pretty much everything I want.

However, the user interface is not so good. In order to define dependencies, you have to edit the task in a new window, select the "Prerequisites" tab, and then select the task or tasks that I want it to wait on. To be honest, this is too much work for what I expect to be a primary staple in my workflow.

Also, the UI is built in wxwidgets, which is better than Mono, but not by a lot. Nothing about it makes me want to use it.

On the plus side, it supports basically all desktop operating systems, and they have an app for Apple iOS. Plus they have SyncML syncing built in, so you should be able to sync with a variety of providers.

But I don't think that this is the one for me.

The next tool is Hiveminder.

It also supports task dependency, and, in a nice addition, you can set forward and reverse dependencies. It doesn't require that you go into a special edit mode to assign them, either. And by default, it only shows you the tasks you can complete, which is nice.

But, in order to assign a dependency, you have to enter a task ID. There's no dragging or any other gesture-like selection. And task IDs are short alphanumeric strings, like "3O8XO". Notably, it doesn't even offer a way to autocomplete a task ID based on entering the title or anything like that. You have to know the task ID. Since it hides dependent tasks, the task ID you need may be hidden. But even if it's not, it displays it in hard-to-read light gray.

Also, if you do want to look at all of your tasks, you're forced to use a search. And while you can save searches, that's only a feature of the pay version.

That's just the tip of the iceberg for UI problems, really. Okay, most of them are not problems, but newer apps (albeit without the feature I need) do so much better on this front. They're nice to look at and work with, and Hiveminder is just not. I tried to use it for a day, and it was just really a pain. Everything felt like a struggle.

But the thing that bothers me the most is that the last time that the developers mentioned Hiveminder on their blog, it was 2009, and even that was only the announcement of a third-party iOS tool. I feel like it's basically been abandoned.

Taskwarrior also supports task dependencies. It has a lot of similarities with Hiveminder, in that you have to specify dependencies as task IDs, though it's a little more flexible and less opaque than Hiveminder is. But there's still no gesture support, and that's because Taskwarrior is a command line tool.

I think of myself as being a command line junkie (I'm far more likely to do math by bringing up a shell and running "bc -l" than any other calculator), but I think this is taking it a little too far even for me.

It seems like Taskwarrior has a lot of features and is really solid. It even supports synchronization through a few methods, and it's open (in both the source and API senses) enough that people have gotten a variety of layers working over it, including a web interface. (Which, sadly, I haven't had the time to get working.)

I really like the concept here and I totally support these guys, but, for now, Taskwarrior creates too much overhead for it to be a successful tool for me.

The tool I've settled on, at least for now, is Tracks. I wish that Tracks was hosted somewhere for free, but I'm happy to host it myself. That may be a problem for some of you, though. (Also note that there are some Tracks installations out there to be demoed, but many, if not all, of them are old versions of Tracks. I almost dismissed Tracks because of this.)

Tracks runs as a web application. It allows arbitrary dependencies. It allows you to drag dependent tasks onto the tasks they depend on to assign dependencies, but you can also enter tasks manually into the task description, and it offers autocompleted suggestions based on the beginnings of task descriptions that you type in. It only shows you doable tasks by default.

Honestly, the only things that I would change are that it would be nice to see the ability to also define a task as a being a dependency of another task instead of only marking tasks as being dependent (not that that's much of a hindrance), and an easier and/or better way to see every task than just searching for nothing.

There are also prebuilt packages at http://bitnami.org/stack/tracks for when you're lazy like me and don't feel like mucking about with its dependencies.

It also has a RESTful API for if and when I want to write a tool to interact with it. (Which I will probably do very soon in order to create a reminder app. I get distracted easily.)

Tracks is pretty much the web app I was looking for when I started all of this, and it took me an awfully long time to find it. I hope that this series of posts will help someone else who has similar requirements to mine.

Now, hopefully, I can get some things done.

After having dealt with Tracks for a few days, I still like it, but there are some problems that I'd like to point out.

While you can put notes on tasks, there's really only one note. You can append to it and change it, but it would be nice if you could just add more and more distinct notes.

There is no field for priority. It would be nice if I could mark tasks as low priority so that they would be shuffled to the bottom of my to-do list.

It's not a multiuser system. Yeah, you can have multiple users, and they can see each others' tasks, but you can't assign a task to another user.

None of these are huge problems for me, but it would be nice if they were fixed.

Bitt, this is awesome. Thanks for letting us see the work you're putting into this.

After all the tools you've tried out and all this work you've put into it, I love to imagine that your list - with dependencies - looks entirely like this:

1 Buy milk
1a find car keys

Is it open source?

Are the authors/company fairly open to feedback/patches/bug reports?

Perhaps you can get it to be a little closer to perfect with some appropriate communication.

EDIT: Looks like it's Ruby-on-rails/MySQL and licensed with GPL. Nice.

And on GitHub.

Here's a simple new app that doesn't quite match what you want in that, while you can sort of specify prerequisites, it doesn't actually track or constrain based on dependencies. It's still very young and I like to think if you pointed them in the direction of this thread they would see the utility in the functionality you're seeking.

https://hollyapp.com/