Rationale for Lack of Task/To-Dos

Hi all,

Why did Apple leave out a Task / To-Do application as part of its iPhone package? What was the rationale? This is by no means to complain, I was just wondering if anybody knew the reason, and if this is part of a strategy for a more robust system to be rolled out with Mobile Me, Snow Leopard, etc.

I see a lot of task applications in the Store - and some of them are quite nice - but I still don't quite understand why Apple didn't create this application, especially to sync with iCal. I thought Apple did a great job with the tasks in iCal - a simple, persistant system of showing a list of tasks with due dates - and the lack of such an application on the iPhone puzzles me.

Any ideas?

 

In my mind, there are really two kinds of tasks - the kind that has some sort of deadline, which you could put on a calendar as a specific time, and the kind that needs to be persistant, regardless of time. For the first, you could definetly put in an event, but for the latter, not so much.

For example, say you were to put a reminder to return a DVD to a friend. So you put it on your calendar as 7:00pm event on Friday. If you end up being busy, you would put it off.

Then on Saturday, that calendar event is already past and you would no longer see any reminder of it.

A task list would offer persistance based on completion, rather than a specific time. A non-elegant solution is to have a repeating calendar event. But that's just ends up clogging your calendar.

 

It's in the side panel, to the right of the calendar.