Organize tasks professionally with Nitro

Searching and Finding

The usefulness of a task manager very much depends on its search and sort functions. Users who adhere to the GTD way of doing things in particular may have 100 or more tasks open at one time. The GTD approach is namely predicated on keeping all your work and private tasks listed at all times, to better clear your head.

In addition to organizing by lists, Nitro organizes by tags. The tags for a task are listed immediately after the title field. You can add tags by double-clicking on the task item. You can add multiple tags by separating them with commas.

Unfortunately, Nitro doesn't provide autocompletion of entries, so you explicitly need to enter the tags each time. One keystroke too many and you might create an unwanted extra tag, such as Project and Projects . A mouse-click brings up all the tasks with the same tag assigned. Clicking a tag in the list does the same thing.

The search function of the program is impressively fast. Press F to move focus to the Search field. Now you can enter a term or part of one. The search begins even while you type, and you start getting a hits with the first character alone. The search relates to the currently active list only, so it helps to have All Tasks showing before performing the search (Ctrl+4 followed by F).

To search for an entry based on a day, you can prefix the search term with the pound sign (#). Often, however, you may not be so interested in a specific task or keyword but instead want to filter a list. Nitro developers thought of that and provided a sort function, which is available with a mouse-click on the icon bar.

In all, five sort options are available. You can sort by task title, due date, or priority. Two entries in the list differ from what's found in other applications. If you choose Manual , you can sort elements anyway you wish.

This approach is not very useful, however, because you can always change the search elements to another order with the mouse. Because of a bug, Nitro doesn't make the manual sorting persistent: If you move to another area and return, default sorting is restored.

A Nitro filter missing in other applications is the Magical sort, in which Nitro tries to group the open tasks through an algorithm based on tags, due dates, and priorities. Try it for yourself, and you're guaranteed new insights into the tasks.

Synchronization

No version of Nitro currently installs on a smartphone, so you will need a mobile browser. However, if you're working under different operating systems on different computers, you can set up synchronization among them. This approach works either through Dropbox or Ubuntu One. Unfortunately, the latter is being phased out by Canonical, so you won't be able to use it for much longer.

The setup is identical in both cases. Click the gear icon to open the settings and go to the Sync tab. Choose between the Dropbox and Ubuntu service to set up Nitro Sync (Figure 4). If you don't yet have an account for one of these services, Nitro can create one for you.

Figure 4: You can choose between two services to synchronize tasks between systems.

After making the choice, a little window opens so you can enter the URL for the service. Next, log in using your credentials. After you're in the system, you need to set up access to the service for the app (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Both Dropbox and Ubuntu One ask whether you want to authorize access to the data, which you need to do on each system.

Be sure to choose a name that you can remember. If you want to prevent access by external applications to the cloud storage later, it's good to recall which computer had the access.

Once the system accepts your authorization, you're prompted to close the window. At that point, you start the synchronization process. You need to repeat the authorization steps on each system where Nitro is installed. In the options, you can choose between manual synchronization or doing so at regular intervals.