Oh, how I loathe thee, Metro-style Wunderlist (the new version of Wunderlist made for Windows 8).

First I should praise Wunderlist to high heaven. I adopted it early on and continue to trust it with my entrepreneurial life.

But the Metro version? Not so much. Notice the absent Windows taskbar in the image above? Not only does Metro-style Wunderlist hide the taskbar by default, the settings contain no way to change that. If you want to see the taskbar, the only way to do that is to mash your cursor against the bottom of the screen, then . . . you . . . wait . . . Bounce the cursor around down there, and sometimes the taskbar emerges. Sometimes it doesn’t. Same goes for calling up “recent apps” in the upper-left corner. It often takes three or four tries to show the taskbar or recent apps.

My list of grievances goes on and on. But let’s just leave it at that. It feels funny to grouse about something I otherwise love and respect a great deal. Plus, I try to keep positive on this blog. Instead, I’ll just cut to the happy ending.

For anyone still struggling with this sorry app, it turns out you can ditch the offending Metro-style Wunderlist and retrieve the old-school, Windows 7, desktop version. The trick is to download it directly from Wunderlist, not from the Windows App Store. The Windows 7 desktop version works perfectly well in the Windows 8 environment.

https://www.wunderlist.com/download/

As a related side note, Wunderlist’s Android app performs really well. Because of its small footprint, it performs with nimble ease, even on my under-powered LG Volt. Despite its light weight, the app gives you virtually every functionality of its big, desktop brother, including sub-tasks and notes.

(Notice how I slipped in that “big brother” reference? Microsoft has acquired Wunderlist this year.)

A major bonus: the Android widget. I’ve got the widget on my phone’s lock screen. The widget displays any of my to do lists, in their entirety, without the need to unlock my phone.