gtg-user team mailing list archive

["Lionel Dricot" <ploum@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Hi everyone,
>
> first of all, thanks for this awesome piece of software that fits best
> into my workflow.
> However, right now there are two things that would improve the
> experience even more (at least for me) and for which I haven't found
> anything on the bug tracker.

Hi,

Thanks for your time. We really appreciate feedback and any ideas that
might improve GTG.

>
> 1. Subtasks shown in the work view should also indicate the parent task.
>
> When creating subtasks, I usually prepend a short name of the parent
> task, something like "[parent task]". This helps to keep track of the
> parents in the work view, but is annoying to enter if a lot of subtasks
> exist.
> It would be great, if there was a possibility of giving a short name for
> a task (maybe in the form abbrv:shortname or so) that would than appear
> in each subtask entry in the work view list.


This is higly related to https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gtg/+bug/316922

Your idea is good but it raises some questions : what when a task is the
child of a child? How to make that easy and intuitive in the UI?

If you have some ideas, it would help a lot to have some mockups and
description of related workflows.

>
> 2. Sequential tasks
>
> Currently, I see no way of creating subtasks that are dependent on each
> other, like, for example, do A ->  do B -> do C. The problems are (in my
> point of view):
>     - in the standard view, subtasks are sorted by the order they were
> created and have to be reordered by drag&drop, which is cumbersome.
>     - in the work view, no sorting method is appropriate
>     - in the work view, all subtasks are shown, although only one task
> has to be performed before we can jump to the next one. It's not needed
> to show "do C" if "do B" has not been completed.
> One could allow for sequential tasks by providing an enumerated list in
> the task edit view. This would fix the order in the standard view even
> after editing. In the work view, one could only give the next not yet
> completed subtask, indicating how many further tasks are left to
> complete the parent task (by, for example, appending a string of the
> form "(x more)")

This is a very complicated problem and we are facing it since the earliest
mockup of GTG.

Firstly, you have to understand that you can do it : A will be a child of
B and B will be a child of C. There cannot be any "order" in the workview
because, by definition, the workview shows you all tasks that you can do
*right now*.

If you inputed A and B as children of C, it implies that you can do A
without doing B and vice-versa. You cannot break that because that's the
base of GTG itself.

The problem is in fact not there. The problem is that, when you enter a
list of subtasks, you *sometimes* enter a list of ordered tasks and
*sometimes* not.

Example :
Task "changing the light bulb" :
- Taking out the old ligtbulb to see the model
- Going to the store and buying the same model
- Putting the new lightbulb in

Task "be ready for the party" :
- Cleaning the whole appartement
- Installing the sono and choosing the music
- Borrowing lights
- Buying cakes and drinks


As you can see, one task is sequential, the other is not. But there's no
way to know if the task is sequential or not. Worst : the same task could
contain sequential and non-sequential items!


A few months ago, I did a gtg branch that had this feature when you could
indicate sequential subtask with a tabulation. So it would be :

Changing the light bulb:
- Taking out the old ligtbulb to see the model
____- Going to the store and buying the same model
________- Putting the new lightbulb in

After two weeks of crazy work, I realized that it was simply unusable.
Firstly, it would make the Task Editor a lot more complicated and with
imprevisible (at least non-intuitive) behaviour.

But, worst of all, I realized that, in the task browser, the order is
inverted!!!! It's like :
Changing the light bulb
+- Putting the new lightbulb in
+++- Going to the store and buying the same model
+++++- Taking out the old ligtbulb to see the model


So, pointing out the problem is easy. We all did. Finding and implementing
a solution is not. In this particular case, we deliberately choosed to
*NOT* provide a good solution because every solution we can think of was
worst than the actual solution. So if you have a solution, please share it
with us but take the time to really describe the solution with all the
details for yourself before. I'm sure you will quickly understand why it
is so difficult ;-)  Once you don't see any remaining problem, share that
with us :-D

I repeat : actually, you *can* do it in GTG. It's just cumbersome because
you have to open every task to type the subtask in it. But it's possible.

>
> Unfortunately, I'm not very experienced in python and haven't studied
> gtg's sources yet. If there are simple tasks, I'd be glad to learn and
> help!

Well, as you can see, a lot of time is spend thinking about the interface
and doesn't requires any code.

Thanks for your nice word and for your proposition to help!

Lionel