My recent round-up of the best of the basic to-do apps for iPhone and iPod touch, which focused on simple apps for tracking lists of tasks, omitted Robert Kieffer's free Zenbe Lists 1.2. Also a basic to-do tracker, Zenbe Lists has two features that set it apart from those other apps: online syncing and sharing.

As a standalone to-do list app, Zenbe Lists is straightforward and easy-to-use. It lets you create multiple lists of tasks--which it calls Items--using New List and New Item buttons that appear at the top of the main and list screens, respectively. Tap on an item's box to mark it as complete. You can remove an item completely using the Edit button or the familiar swipe-delete gesture.

Zenbe Lists lets you manually reorder items in a list, as well as reorder the lists on the main screen. You can edit any list name or item after creating it, although you can't move an item from one list to another. Zenbe Lists also supports due dates for items; although there are no audible or visual alarms, an item's due date is displayed in smaller type below the item's name. Finally, although you can't add a separate note to an item, the item-name field is large enough to accommodate lengthy notes; one drawback to this approach is that the beginning of your note will appear in the list view.

Zenbe Lists offers, via its settings screen, a few options: font size, whether or not checked-off items are automatically moved to the bottom of the host list, and the ability to use landscape mode. Unfortunately, these options aren't located within the app itself; they're found in the iPhone's Settings app, so you have to quit the app and switch to Settings to make any changes, then switch back to Zenbe Lists.

What sets Zenbe Lists apart from other basic to-do apps is that once you set up a free account at the Zenbe Web site, and then enter your username and password in the iPhone app, you can sync and share your lists online. On the data-safety side, this means that a simple tap on the Sync button in the iPhone app saves all your lists on the Zenbe site. (You can even choose, via the app's settings, to automatically sync whenever you launch the app.) If your phone is ever stolen or needs to be restored, you don't have to worry whether iTunes' unreliable backup feature will work; you can easily sync your lists back to your iPhone. After experiencing several iPhone restores that didn't restore my data, I no longer personally use a to-do-list app that doesn't sync, either online or with an app on my Mac.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.