Google Tasks on iOS

Hi Cliff. The date formatting matches the phone's locale setting. Thus if you have US locale on your phone October 8th 2011 will be spelled like 10/08/11 whereas if you have German locale it will be spelled as 10-08-11. YY-MM-DD would be Japanese, I believe. The year is only two digits to conserve space - the screen layout is optimized to fit as much data as possible.

I am generally trying to minimize number of settings because having too many will result into novice users using none at all and instead leaving in frustration. That's bad for business. Longer date description seems to be a request that's too fine-grained and only of interest to few, so the answer is no, I don't want settings like this in my app. In particular when you could always tap on a task and the very next screen will have the date spelled out, including day of the week even. I could change my mind if plenty of people asked, or if there was a way to roll this up into a larger super-setting, such as "make everything verbose". The latter, however, would need to have more than one thing in it to be a compelling feature.

So, now that this subject came up, is there anything else you (or anyone else) find too terse?

Another thing just occurred to me…

Do you have notes in your tasks? One thing I could do is that when you don't have a note, a verbose version of the date could stand in for it, reusing the space that currently goes to waste anyway.