After my last adventure into task manager reviewing with TaskPaper, I was about ready to give up on writing about these things. It was by far the most hateful comments and emails I ever got. One guy threatened to kill my sister. And I don’t even have a sister. Comment thread trolls will be happy to hear I have mostly positive things to say about my newest iPhone task manager/toy, Dunnit!

I’ll go right ahead and say this, Dunnit! is not for the GTD hardcore among us. If you use a todo app on your Mac as well as your iPhone, you’re not gonna be replacing them with Dunnit!. Dunnit! has no desktop counterpart, and that alone is gonna make this app persona non grata for a lot of people. As much as I like a lot of what Dunnit! does, the simple fact that I can’t sync to my Mac (or even a website) kills it for me. If, however, you’re cool with only keeping track of your tasks on your iPhone, Dunnit! does a lot of cool things that most other todo apps haven’t even dreamed up yet. I’ll start off with the first thing that got my attention: it’s got achievements. You heard me. It’s got achievements! It connects to OpenFeint, and you earn achievement points for making and completing tasks. You get points for clearing out completed tasks. You get points for tweeting what you completed. (I appreciated that they warn people to tweet responsibly in the preferences.) You can even get points for procrastinating and completing tasks up to a month late. (Seems counterproductive though.) It’s gotta be the most retarded and awesome thing I’ve seen yet in an iPhone app. I gotta congratulate RunLoop for having the balls to implement this little piece of genius. I waste hours doing the most menial shit in video games to get PSN trophies, and here I would’ve never thought to include achievements in a todo app. Bravo.

Aside from achievements, Dunnit! does cool things with text importation. If you want to quickly add tasks that have the same due date and tags, you can import text from your clipboard, and Dunnit! will create tasks for each line of text, and you can deselect lines that you don’t need to make into tasks. You could copy in a list of stuff you have to do from an email, and get it into your task list way faster than you could in any other todo app on iPhone. They also have a format that if adhered to, will let you import text from another app and will auto set due dates, tags and priority settings. It’s extremely robust. Once you wrap your head around its power, you’ll be filling up your task list in no time.

But that’s where Dunnit!’s big problem pops up. It doesn’t make dealing with large numbers of tasks easy. There are tags, but there are no areas of responsibility, no scheduling of tasks beyond due dates, and since “Someday” tasks just show up at the bottom of the list, your task list is bound to turn into an unmanageable mess if you use your task manager the way I do. Every little thing that I might want to do eventually gets dumped into my task manager, and everything is organized into different areas of responsibility and projects, and tagged for easy filtering. Dunnit!, while easy to add tasks to, doesn’t handle tasks that are being tracked over a long period of time. If you are the type of person who tends to do things right away, and doesn’t organize your tasks as meticulously as I do, Dunnit! might work just fine.

I’ve gotta say, while Dunnit! isn’t powerful enough for me and my GTD-obsessed brethren, it might just be perfect for the unwashed masses who just want a slick todo app on their iPhone. It also doesn’t hurt that its achievements are like crack. I managed to break into the Top 10 on Dunnit!’s online leaderboards in a matter of days. It is possible to game the system and rack up a ton of achievements in a small amount of time, you’ve gotta be a lonely nerd like me with lots of time to spare. Dunnit! is a good todo app if you’re okay not having a desktop version to sync to and don’t really follow a GTD workflow. It goes for $4.99 in the App Store.