Smthngs is a nice designed web application based purely on GTD. It is not very widely known and I admit until recently I wasn’t aware of it either.
We are looking at a pretty fast application with quite a few functions. The user interface made a good impression on me, having metallic-like stripes of menus at both sides of the screen, without much clutter, showing you exactly all of the applications functions.
Users can create and filter tasks by a dominant text box at the top of the screen. Adding tasks is quick and easy, but the use of the same box for filtering could be confusing to some people.
There is full support of tags (or contexts if you like) and projects which they can be created when needed from the task editor or in bulk from the left sidebar. I admit I had a bit of a trouble creating first some tags from the sidebar and tried to use them afterwards (they were gone) but when I created them from the task editor there was no problem.
The task list panel is very good designed, separating projects from single tasks and I loved the ability of changing the views from flat to fold and to tree where sub items of projects are shown differently or hidden depending of the view setting. This is really useful because Smthngs support multi-level projects or subtasks.
I did not full understand the application’s sections though. Although there are the classic buckets of inbox, today, next, archive and someday where each of them is used in GTD systems for special situations there is no sections where all tasks live. I guess the developers consider everything that cannot be done today or next should live in the someday or archive folders by default. I think this is confusing for many users who think of these sections as putting away tasks for future reference.
Apart for that, the application can also work offline, share tasks with other users and send notifications for tasks via the notifo.com web service.
There is also an Android application available which is designed the same way and will sync data to the applications servers.
In conclusion Smthngs is a nice application which needs some work in terms of usability and documentation. Although it does not take much to learn using it, the lack of visible help screen, keyboard shortcuts or tutorials can be a turn off for many users. Let’s hope it will grow better because it has a good potential.