Also, don't be to hard on yourself, creating a real project from scratch takes time and passion. I understood in half a second what your app was about and why I should use it.. What many apps/site cannot even do in weeks :)

Finally, I like the idea about adding/removing stuff by replying by email.. so intuitive but I never thought of it. Maybe a kind of "delayer" might be useful:

- Do that tomorrow night

- Do this next week

So at least, if your 'digest' is empty, you don't get an email but you're sure that you will receive it when it matters.

I Want Sandy was pretty cool in it's day. (Till it was bought out by twitter at least)

That was a friend's idea though so I can't take credit for it ;)

While Twilio would be a surefire way to do it. You can also hack up a small script that will use sms gateways to send the email, but then you would have to know the person's carrier in advance. I find this way more interesting, but not nearly as robust. You can do some interesting things when you are sending text messages through gateways.

True. Before that it used to be "write your own Tetris".

- Do this next week

Fantastic idea. I just signed up. I hope August adds the feature soon. Nice app.

But like you're probably aware, GAE has a learning curve in addition to python/django/whatever. The datastore, mainly. This is a shameless plug, but I'm the co-founder of Djangy.com and we're in private beta. We're doing Heroku except for python/django. we'll support other wsgi frameworks in the future, but for now we make deploying almost any django app instant and painless.

in private beta now, but email me and we can set something up if you're interested.

The "only pay for what you use" statement only works when I have a relative idea of how much a given computational unit costs, or how much the average customer is paying.

EC2 could make the same statement, but there's a huge difference between a small and medium instance, cost-wise.

Maybe he prefers python to PHP?

I envisaged multiplayer action, even just with a wife, for example, where each person would allocate 'points' to be earned and traded for chores. She might be more likely to avoid creating a floordrobe if she could trade the resulting points for dinner out, making me watch rom-coms with her, etc. It's a little juvenile, but I would get a lot of house cleaning done were there sexual favours up for grabs.

What do people think?

Also been thinking that there seem to be few/no decent to-do apps out there with 'dependency trees'. We've just built a house and have progressed to the landscaping - every thing seems to hinge on something else. As an example, we can't put in plants until the driveway is done and can't do that until the water meter has been relocated. Or can't clear out weeds until I've bought fuel for the lawnmower, etc.

I've seen a few of these sorts of sites around, but they seemed to lack incentive or real motivation. How many people have tried a bunch of To Do apps and never stuck with any of them? I just keep going back to scraps of paper.

Of course, to-do apps and choretrackers are like black holes for developers but I can't help but wonder if there's a tack yet to be tried with both.

I'd personally stick with Sephr's advice, though ;-)

But if you want to verify email address, then going with must contain '@' is probably one of the more reasonable routes (you should probably also ban few characters like newlines and ';').

I am not sure if it is due to being in chrome-dev, but it took me a second to understand that the actual content was down the page. After widening up the browser the main content div popped into the right place.

And how do they decide how many users you have? I am sure here you are not counting each person that submits their email for chore reminders as a user or this would bankrupt you pretty quickly. So how does it work?

App Engine for Business: http://code.google.com/appengine/business/

Terms:http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html

Quotas:http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

Billing FAQ:http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/billing.html

After spending a few months with RoR though I definitely am enjoying writing in Ruby more so than Python. I might try JRuby next time I do something on app engine - http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/

I also hear app engine can tolerate a fairly large amount of traffic before you have to pay, so it seems like a solid choice to start on.

Edit: Oops.. I jumped straight to the app and only later noticed the "How I Built It" note on the post...

I put "buy my girlfriend a new ring" hopefully that will annoy that crap out of me until I do it lol

adding and optimizing the email replies would be great, its a great idea