I agree completely. But before they even get to that, they're going to have to make the Leopard-style To-Dos and Notes work properly with the iPhone's user interface. As it stands now, when I try to view (on iPhone) my To-Do items from my .Mac email, I get a terrible listing that looks more like a broken mailbox than a task list. And synced Notes aren't available from Notes.app? Man, that's just like egg on Apple's face. Their best bet is to have standalone apps (Notes and ToDo) that simply manage the IMAP mailboxes for Notes and Apple Mail To To. With checkboxes. And such.

That the iPhone isn't a true iSync client demonstrates Apple's lack of support for it's own technologies. iSync was a great idea, and I'm lucky enough to have a Sony cell phone that works with it to back up my phone's phone numbers and carry my computer's calendar with me.

But the iSync compatibility list hasn't been updated since I don't know when, it doesn't take into account that new phones are constantly coming out, and despite it's initial prowess, it hasn't been developed and grown in capability at all.

It's a shame that Apple's on phone can't sync calendars & to-do items with Apple's own iCal ap, running on an Apple computer.

It's almost as bad as the complete dearth of QTVR tools since OS-X was introduced... yet Apple still uses QTVR to show off its products on its web site.

Anthony Burokas
http://TechThoughts.org

You guys really hit the nail on the head with this article. This is something I'm gagging for. I already use OmniFocus and would be delighted to have a version for my iPhone that I can use for my work related ToDo heavy lifting.

But I'd also love to see multi-calendar support in the iPhone complete with iCal ToDo support AND the ability to share selected calendars and ToDo lists via .Mac with my wife, on the move, without having to go via my MBP first!

She has an iPhone too, and it would be so very useful for us to be able to share and update common calendars and ToDo lists for social events, shopping lists, etc between our iPhones.

And what about shared AddressBook groups via .Mac? I can't describe how useful it would be to us to share common lists of friends and family members details, along with the associated Birthday calendar that we could both view and update when we're (sometimes) in different cities!

I wish Apple would think about things like this more. Social functionality like this can really make a difference to peoples lives. We don't live on information islands any more. We need slick, native, integrated ways of sharing information with the people who need it.

One more comment in support of to-do lists, in hopes that the lords from on high in Cupertino read this forum:

Apple: Please add to the iPhone what even the ages old Palm Pilots of the 90's did beautifully: a to-do list. How bizarre is it to carry this beautiful iPhone, and then have to refer to hand-written list when shopping for groceries.

And if you want to spur some real sales for iWork 08, add document support. Again, Palm was doing this beautifully with DataViz Documents to Go.

Hmm, maybe Apple should just BUY the remnants of their predecessors, unless Microsoft beat them to it.

I have been looking for the same thing and using notepad as a workaround since purchasing my iPhone in June. Recently I ran across a great web-based task manager modeled after GTD, called Nozbe. I've been a Covey fanatic for close to a decade and after using this application for a week I was sold. The problem I would have with a native task list, is the attachments I like to save with my projects. That would seriously eat into my storage space which is already filled to capacity. I guess I could just sell my 8gb and go for the 16gb John

Actually, the iPhone IS an iSync client, at least when it comes to bookmarks, contacts, and calendars. It interfaces to iSync via iTunes, but the actual syncing is entirely handled by iSync.

Developers wanting to sync to iCal (including myself) will (hopefully) be able to do so pretty easily by piggybacking on the iPhone's own Calendar Store - iSync just syncs the Calendar Store wholesale, so any to dos SHOULD go along for the ride automatically. This is a bit hacky, though, since it forces you to modify the central Calendar Store (if something goes wrong, you'll corrupt data for not only your program, but the official Calendar app as well), and also limits the metadata you can place on the to dos to the limited stuff Apple supports in the framework (priority, calendar, due date, alarm), making life a bit harder for us GTDers who want contexts and tagging and those sorts of fun things

And yes, I am developing an iPhone task manager of my own called AutoPilot, which will sync to both the Mac & to PCs running Outlook (which is where I'm worried, no lovely iSync there for me to cheat - unless Apple lets developers write custom sync conduits for iTunes itself, I'll have to hack together a really ugly Outlook plug-in or iTunes hack of some sort to pull off syncing...). You can follow the development at autopilotapp.wordpress.com. With the big guns at Omni throwing their hat into the ring as well, this should prove to be a VERY interesting sector to develop in

• Bill Kline, Developer, AutoPilot