Tada Lists -- A New Toy

I’ve just discovered Tada Lists (via Jim Weirich’s blog and I’m very impressed, while I’ve seen the Rails video and read the hype it’s only when i use an application like this, written in 579 lines of Ruby code that it becomes clear how powerful Rails is.

Tada Lists itself is a very neat site in both the technical and design stakes, it uses XMLHttpRequest (which seems to be very popular at the moment, thanks Google!) to interact dynamically with the host and cut out the submit, delay, refresh phases. It’s UI is very polished (reorder a list and watch the element fade) and it provides both RSS feeds and the ability to Email yourself copies of the list. Add the ability to share public, shared write or shared read only lists and you’ve got most requirements covered.

Any down-sides? Well two and they are both small, firstly where’s the source code! I want this on my laptop and I want to see how it actually works! I assume that we won’t get the code due to the projects relationship with Basecamp but fingers crossed. Secondly the custom description doesn’t display in the RSS feeds. However I can live with these if it means I get to use such a pleasant (and free) site!

Update: I managed to cause a small problem (I’m good at that :)) and I got a fix and an email telling me everything was fine with in a couple of hours; I’m impressed.