Wunderkit – First Look

You’ll recall that I did a little write-up a couple of months ago on Wunderkit, the new cloud based time management suite from the 6Wunderkinder team who make the awesome multi-platform to-do app Wunderlist. Well, along with a whole load of other eager people, I got my invite to the Wunderkit beta through and have been taking the new system for a spin. I should preface everything I’m about to say by pointing out that this is early days for Wunderkit and anything might change before launch and/or work differently.

The first thing to point out is that at this stage, Wunderkit is purely browser based. I’m sure that there are iOS, Android, OSX, Linux and Windows applications waiting in the wings, but they’re not available yet. Once you’ve created an account, you log in and are offered the opportunity of importing your friends lists from Facebook and Twitter. Personally speaking, I like have separate accounts for my online services, but if you want you can log-in with Facebook.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the basic interface of Wunderkit is pretty similar to Wunderlist. You get your project areas over on the left and your tasks over on the right. Projects are referred to as Workspaces on Wunderkit and they can be customised to stand out on the bar. Clicking on a project takes you into a separate screen for that particular workspace.

The most obvious difference between Wunderkit and Wunderlist is apparent when you enter a project’s workspace. There’s a dashboard, a tasklist and a notes area, not just a tasklist. This is because Wunderkit has been designed to be used by groups as well as individuals and so for instance the dashboard screen lets you quickly see what updates, task changes or completions have taken place by other people.

When you create a task, you’re given some new controls. There’s a calendar window that enables you to set the completion date and, more importantly, repeat that task daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. You can also assign the task you’re creating to someone else. People can be added on a per-project basis, so it’s easy to tightly control who is allotted which tasks. The other big addition to tasks is that you can now comment on them.

Along with the dashboard and the tasklist, there’s also a notes section within each project section. This is for saving any information pertaining to that project that doesn’t warrant a task of any kind. As with tasks, any notes you add can be tagged for quick easy searches in the future.

One key area that deserves mentioning is notifications. Tasks, notes, comments, requests, invites, followers and friends joining can all trigger notifications either within Wunderkit or by email or both. By default all of those notifications are turned off – I hope that’s something that’s carried through to the 1.0 release.

Of course the big story with Wunderkit is the social aspect. It works in the same way as Twitter or Google+ in that you can ‘follow’ interesting and/or like-minded people and view their public status updates. So for instance, if a band signed up then they could use the app to arrange gigs or studio time and the public update page to keep fans informed about developments. It’s early days of course, but I can’t say I’m convinced by this particular aspect of the suite, but I thought Twitter was a load of crap when it first came out, so who knows.

Anyway – I’m very impressed by the task management side of Wunderkit. I like the project management definitions, I like the interface, I like the easy management of people within projects, I like the repeating tasks and I like the dashboard functionality. Once the smartphone, tablet and desktop applications are released, I’m pretty sure Wunderkit will have as much success as Wunderlist. All that remains to be seen is how much 6Wunderkinder will charge us for that ‘Pro’ account when it goes live.