If you take a look, you can’t argue that it has a superb no-frills interface, and you can shoot out and manage tasks very easily. It supports inline tagging (use @tag to quick tag a task) and priorities (use !p1 or !p2 or !p3 to quickly add a priority), notifications, task indentation for hierarchy, and a handy search box, which you can use to search based on any word, or task data.

So far this is not unheard of for task managers, I just simply connect with this one better than others. However, where I feel Todoist excels is that it offers a wide range of ways to add tasks, best of all, complete Launchy integration.

If you log in, and go to Todoist Help (if you have no tasks yet, you should see this page displayed anyway), you can see a section named plugins. Apart from finding Netvibes and iGoogle and a Mac dashboard widger (all excellent), you can find instructions on how to use Launchy to add tasks without even opening your browser. I usually find that ideas come in the stupidest situations, where I don’t want to be distracted from my work, so pressing alt+space and quickly typing a task is much easier than going to the site.

Another way you can use laucnhy is from your iPhone, using the application named Doings. I have not tried this personally, I will purchase it in the next few days, so if any of you have first hand experience, share your thoughts in the comments please! It looks as simple as the online counterpart, and supports offline mode too, so you can be sure your tasks will all be there wherever you are. Apart from the name sounding like something you do on the toilet, this seems like a perfectly usable application.

If you really love Todoist, you can also opt for a paid version. The developer stylishly chose to include features in the paid versions which only the most avid users need, so the free one is extremely useful on its own. The paid version gets you Email, Phone, or Twitter reminders, an improved label system and SSL security. At $3 a month, if you really need these, I think they are at an affordable rate.

The interface is beautiful, simple lines, simple design all round. The text is a wonderfully ambient gray, bullet points are simply round dots, even menu graphics are refined and un-flashy. This is a big plus in my book, it looks great, while remaining subdued.

Creating a list and editing the entries is pretty much all the functionality right now, with clipping from the web as an added bonus. You can use bold text, linking, tagging and so on, but nothing like the advanced geotag features of Remember The Milk. There are some nice features though for ordering your lists, like indenting, collapsing all and showing all. While simple tools, these are really enough for creating an organized list.

There is also a community behind the whole project, as you would expect in a web 2.0 app. If you make a list viewable to the public, people can come and take a look, if the proper setting is applied they can even edit it. Hot lists will be featured in the community page for all to see as well, so Microsoft is trying to put a “social engine” behind it.

That’s actually all there is to it right now. It’s already a solid task manager and I await the release of new features, there will undoubtedly be some tie-ins to other Microsoft online apps, we’ll have to see what happens. I’m optimistic, since I think Microsoft realized that the only way it can keep on competing if it can show its strength in free online stuff as well. Let’s hope there will be huge competition, since we all profit from that.