The features of Wunderlist Pro will come as no surprise, as 6Wunderkinder accidentally revealed them last month, but here’s the gist anyway: tasks can be assigned among friends or colleagues, and subtasks can now be created. This should make Wunderlist Pro an effective replacement for the axed Wunderkit, which was a project management counterpart to Wunderlist’s task manager.

The Pro version costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually, and is available now for iOS devices, OS X and the web. 6Wunderkinder tells me the Android and Windows versions will follow in a week’s time.

“Wunderlist Pro allows you to easily delegate to-dos and effectively track the progress of each task, yet this is just the beginning. There is still a whole lot more to come,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber said in a statement.

The first installment of that “whole lot more” will be the ability to attach files to tasks, which can then be shared for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the sharing functionality of the original Wunderlist has also received a boost through the addition of an “action bar” that allows one-click access to email and share lists.

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The extension is available today for Chrome, Firefox and Safari users. It allows the saving of any URL to the service, but also more specific content from sites such as Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Hacker News, IMdB and Twitter – on Amazon, for example, an “Add to Wunderlist” button will show up next to the “Add to wishlist” button if you have the extension installed.

6Wunderkinder was able to add its button to these sites through the use of their APIs, and it has also released the code to help other sites also allow the button’s addition. The content that the service saves differs from site to site (it may include URLs, prices or ratings, for example), but the user can always just highlight any text and hit the button up in the toolbar to save it.

Why is this important? For a start, it makes Wunderlist a much stickier service. It also makes it much clearer how the consumer and pro versions of Wunderlist are beginning to diverge: Wunderlist Pro, the details of which were accidentally leaked earlier this week, is shaping up to be a replacement for the axed Wunderkit team productivity service, while the normal Wunderlist is, well, it’s starting to look a bit more like Evernote, right?

“We definitely have the same kind of strategy,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber admitted today. “When we build the product, we definitely say all the time that we want to own every single task … we want to integrate it in every part of your lives, on every device you have.

“We share the same space as Evernote somehow, but Evernote is the main tool for notes and we are the main tool for tasks. We will probably conflict in the future in some places, but the two products can definitely coexist. Personally I use Evernote and Wunderlist. We will see in the future how it will work out — we don’t focus on following what our competitors do.”

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On Monday the Berlin-based company’s Twitter account briefly spewed out links to a newsletter inviting the intended recipients to sign up early for a Wunderlist Pro account. Judging from the sneaky feature preview allowed by this accident, Wunderlist Pro will give teams more collaborative features – perhaps some of the functionality that was included in the axed Wunderkit project-management product.

According to the newsletter, these are the features to look out for:

• Assign to-dos to specific people on your team to know who is responsible for what
• An unlimited amount of sub-tasks allows you to split your project in smaller steps no matter how big it is
• 8 new backgrounds let you style Wunderlist the way you want it
• Work seamlessly together in teams by sharing lists and tasks with an unlimited amount of people on all devices and platforms
• Get access to latest beta versions and be amongst the first to use new features

A spokeswoman for the company told me that the newsletter was only supposed to reach “a small group of 5,000 users” and that it was sent out to help 6Wunderkinder figure out its pricing strategy for Wunderlist Pro – as it stands, the quoted price in the newsletter I saw was $4.99 per month (others apparently saw $3.99 and other prices, so the team was clearly testing out various options).

If all goes well, she added, Pro accounts will become available in April.

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The new feature is configurable to run at a specific time on any day of the week. When that time hits, the application opens and quickly walks through all of your open tasks.

For each of these, you simply tap the appropriate planning option: Today, Later, Done, Delete. Choosing Today or Later provides additional options for specific times or future dates. Any.DO will then juggle the tasks around to the days of your choice, or remove any tasks you mark as complete. The end result? You’ve done a daily task review and have a better handle on what needs to be done today:

Not only does the Any.DO Moment feature help bring focus to the day; it does so in way that’s fast, intuitive and somewhat fun. And this approach can help improve productivity, based on Any.DO’s own internal data. Says Any.DO CEO Omer Perchik:

“We’ve been testing the feature secretly in the past month and we’re seeing over 30 percent increase in engagement and over 20 percent improvement in retention. The feedback is simply remarkable. We keep receiving emails from people who say they feel far more organized and relaxed since they started using the Any.DO Moment. “

More organized and relaxed? Yup, I can see that after using Any.DO Moment on my mobile phones.

I’m no longer looking at my task list as an annoyance, but more as a tool to get things done.  Instead of being overwhelmed with an ever-growing list of activities, I feel like I’m in better control of my activities. A scheduled daily review of tasks — good practice regardless of the tool involved — combined with a fast, simple mobile interface definitely make it easier to get things done.

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I lived in simpler times then. My Mac was my primary work and home machine. The App Store was in its infancy. Cloud computing was barely on the radar, and our cars were large metal beasts with fins on the back and double-barreled carburetors (that’s a joke, folks).  As the years went on, the cloud has become more than something that just causes rain delays at baseball games. The number of devices I own has grown and Things’ lack of cloud syncing became a major hassle. So, I switched to OmniFocus. It was not, as they say, a match made in heaven. OmniFocus is a fantastic app. It wasn’t the app for me, though, and I used it sparingly. My chief complaint was that I felt like I was bending to OmniFocus’s will instead of the other way around. I don’t have complicated task management needs. I just needed a way to track things I’m afraid I will forget.

When Cultured Code announced recently that, finally, after four [censored] years that stinking syncing was finally here, I was ecstatic and couldn’t wait to try it out. Here’s my take on the new software.

Your tasks, flinging through the air

Things 2 (available via the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store) allows you to sync your tasks using Cultured Code’s free Sync Server; it does not use iCloud. When I think about syncing, I equate it to watching a routine double play with one out in baseball. Shortstop grabs the ball, flips it to the second baseman for the force out, who tosses it to first for the final out. End of the inning. In syncing with Things now, when I make a change on one device, all the other devices get the change. End of the process.

Double plays and syncing are supposed to be so routine that most of the time you never take notice of them. So far in my testing and usage, Things has made the routine double plays. It hasn’t launched the ball into the stands or let the grounder dribble through its legs. The syncing has been fast with no lag. I check off a task on my iPhone and a split second later it’s checked off my iPad and Mac. While Things Cloud is clearly designed for syncing data, the benefit to single device users is easy data recovery in the event of a hard drive failure. Just reinstall Things and turn Things Cloud back on. Boom, your tasks are back.

Yeah, it took them four years. I have no idea why it took so long and at this point I don’t care why. I’m just glad it’s here.

The Today view

Responding to customer feedback, Cultured Code has improved the Today view to give you the flexibility to easily flag a task as one you will complete today or move the end date. Previously, it would automatically place tasks due today in the view, but there was no way to tell if you had placed in your task in the Today view, or if Things placed it there. It was also a little cumbersome moving the tasks around if your priorities changed.

The new and improved Today view gives you a list of tasks due today (or overdue tasks). From there you can either tell Things you’re planning on working on that task today, or you can tap “Later” and quickly assign a new date for it. I really like this view. It’s pretty easy for me to look at my day and quickly prioritize my tasks.

Things also has a Someday view where you can put tasks you don’t want to commit to a completion date. That’s where a lot of my article ideas that I haven’t pitched yet go, for instance.

The final checkbox

I like Things 2 enough to be a replacement for my daily driver for task management. I love the clean layout and for my relatively modest needs it doesn’t feel like overkill. If you need a task management system that has more features than Apple’s Reminders app, Things is a good suite that I’m glad to add back to my toolbox.

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The only thing that held me back from using it daily was the lack of cross-platform support. That changes now with a free version for iOS as well as a Google Chrome extension; your tasks are kept in sync through all three clients.

I’ve been using an early version of Any.DO on my iPhone 4S for the past few days and it’s no different from its Android counterpart. And that’s a good thing. You can view tasks by date — today, tomorrow, this week and later — or you can view them by folders, which are of course customizable. Task entry works through keyboard input or by voice; both methods work well.

To quickly add a task, you simply drag your task list down and Any.DO is ready to accept it. Tasks are easily dragged to different days, folders or can moved around in order. A quick task tap offers several options: priority, folder, reminder, notes and share.

Unless you’re a stringent user of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, I don’t see any major features missing in Any.DO for everyday task management. And with some subtle modifications, I think even a GTD follower could use the app. Since first using Any.DO last year, I switched over to Wunderlist, but I made the move reluctantly: I find Any.DO to be visually better and refined than most other task management apps.

Let’s face it: Task management activities typically aren’t what I’d call sexy. But Any.DO’s user interface makes to-do lists a little more glamorous and now that I can use the platform on my Galaxy Nexus, iPhone and desktop browser, my next task is to migrate to-do’s to Any.DO.

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The Unwired web site correctly notes that the Windows Phone version of Wunderlist will surely look different that it does on other platforms. That’s mainly due to Microsoft’s Metro UI; a landscape and tile based interface. But that shouldn’t diminish the value brought by the software, which I find very effective.

I last looked at Wunderlist in September of 2011, recommending it for a number of reasons, even though I realize we all work differently. There’s no “one size fits all solution” for task management, of course:

“Wunderlist has many desirable features that fit my approach and at no cost, is worth the look if you’re on the hunt for a mobile task management solution. Thanks to an effective interface with solid features, cross-platform support and cloud synchronization, Wunderlist is mobile task management done right.”

The key to me is two-fold: Wunderlist’s simplicity and its cross-platform support. With clients for the web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and now Windows Phone, the service can be effectively used with nearly any mobile device or computer.

Clearly, users agree that the software works well. Just last month Wunderlist announced it had topped 2 million users just 15 months after launching. Given that relatively few are buying Windows Phone devices yet, the company may not gain much here. However, even if sales of Microsoft-powered phones grows slowly, the company is well poised to take advantage of the platform.

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New York City-based Producteev has won raves for its ability to enable task management through existing channels such as email, IM, Google Calendar, Twitter and Facebook. It is now being used by 1,000 business customers including Orbitz, Trulia, Boston College and the Financial Times. Users can send tasks and receive notifications through various communications channels, then manage tasks through Producteev’s web and iPhone apps, which offer syncing between the two platforms.

Now, Producteev is introducing a Windows desktop app along with an updated iPhone app and Producteev’s first Android app. The new apps provide a redesigned user interface and the ability to create multiple workspaces, set and receive notifications across all workspaces and search across workspaces via keywords. There’s also natural language processing for better task capturing, label auto-sorting and offline task access.

Producteev is also introducing version 3 of its web app, which includes some of the same features including notifications across all platforms, advanced search via keyword, better managing of subtasks and new settings that allow administrators to control who can and can’t join work spaces.

Producteev said it’s the first to integrate TaskRabbit’s API, so users can tap TaskRabbit’s users to complete tasks. This provides more functionality for Producteev users to get things done quickly and gives TaskRabbit a nice way to generate more work for its network of users.

Ilan Abehassera, Producteev’s co-founder and CEO, told me the company, which is close to breaking even, is moving toward becoming a Dropbox or Evernote of task management. He said while other solutions offer a closed environment, Producteev sees value in being on as many platforms as possible.

“By creating an open platform for your tasks, we put your tasks in the center of your daily life, and make sure it’s easier to create a task on Producteev than taking a pen and a piece of paper. That’s how Evernote got successful. If they only had a web app, they wouldn’t have been successful,” Abehassera said.

Producteev faces plenty of challengers such as Basecamp, Asana from Facebook’s Dustin Moscovitz and Trello, from Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky. Google also has Google Tasks, and Apple introduced a reminders function in iOS 5. Abehassera said the growing competition highlights the big momentum in the task and project management space and he hopes to stay ahead of the competition by being ubiquitous, robust and yet easy to use.

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The first thing you will likely notice about Any.DO is how much it doesn’t look like an Android app. To my eyes, the look and feel of the software is something I would expect to see on iOS: polished, refined, simple and effective. It supports speech-to-text input by using Android’s native speech-recognition engine. You can drag tasks to different days or swipe across a task to mark it as complete. And shaking your handset clears all of those completed tasks. I actually enjoy using this app to manage tasks, something I can’t say about any other that I have tried.

Usability is excellent, but if a task manager can’t effectively manage tasks, then it’s not very good. Fortunately, Any.DO has nearly all the tools and features needed to keep me productive. You can create folders to help organize tasks, set reminders and sort by date, priority or folder. Any task can have a detailed note for further explanation. Tasks can even be shared with friends or team members. The app also supports two widgets for viewing tasks or to quickly add new tasks.

If I had to pick on Any.DO, I would say the Google Task synchronization is the area I would hit. The feature works perfectly fine and the app supports multiple Google accounts, but you can’t pair a task with an account. That means all the tasks are synchronized with one account or the other in my case, as I have two Google accounts. The sync function is currently manual as well, so you have to remember to hit the sync button in the app. Maybe I should create a recurring task reminder for that?

Regardless of the minor shortcomings, Any.DO has become my current task manager on Android. There are versions in the works for iOS and the web, but for now, this is an Android-only solution. It is rare to see a third-party developer focus on Android first and iOS second, but there is no loss in app quality because of that decision. It won’t work for everyone’s task methodology, but I highly recommend that Android users give this one a try, even if you don’t use Google Tasks. Why? The company says it plans to support task synchronization with Todo, Remember the Milk, Springpad, Microsoft Exchange and many other platforms in the future.

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