Fans of Wunderlist will want to click on ‘update’ – two years after it first delivered for the web and iPhone, Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder has finally rolled out version 2 of the service for iPhone, Mac, Android, Windows and the web.
Wunderlist 2 features Retina display support, enhances cross-device cloud synchronization and introduces reminders, recurring tasks and subtasks. It also brings in a consistent notification system (somehow not previously a feature of a task management tool used by over three million people) that allows users to receive updates via push, email or through a new Activity Center.
There’s quite a significant UI refresh going on here, too. The bottom bar (‘lists’, ‘overdue’ and so on) is gone, replaced by a new Smart Lists feature that only shows stuff when it’s relevant, such as when it’s due today. There’s now a pull-in sidebar.
Basically, the tool has now been both significantly revised and made ready for more regularly-released iterations in the future.
“Wunderlist 2 lays the foundations for a much broader use case,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber told me. “We have made sure that we are now ready for the mass market… starting with a re-engineered, highly scalable and quickly extendible API, completely rewritten native clients for iPhone, Android, Web, Windows and Mac. Wunderlist is now ready for massive growth, not only in terms of users but also in terms of features. We are now capable of adding new features within just a few weeks – which now makes Wunderlist very competitive.”
Of course, the really big deal is that bit about all the various platform versions of the app now being natively written.
As Reber explained to us previously, the first iteration of Wunderlist was an Appcelerator Titanium affair – great for getting platform spread, but not so much for achieving maximum performance and stability on each platform. These are the benefits 6Wunderkinder is going for this time round, even if they mean version 2 misses some platforms on release, such as Linux, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.
This was a major investment for the company – so much so that it meant killing off the only moderately-successful Wunderkit product. And in some ways, I see the new version of Wunderlist as showing how the app is heading towards a more collaborative future that picks up where the doomed Wunderkit left off. Lists can be more easily shared, as Wunderlist now integrates the device’s address book, along with Facebook contacts. The new version also wants you to upload a name and profile picture.
It seems to be a smart evolution for 6Wunderkinder’s service, which is already seeing an average of 125,000 new registrations a month, and certainly one that shows the wisdom of concentrating on one product, rather than multiple similar-but-not-quite variants.
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