gtg-user team mailing list archive

[Bertrand Rousseau <bertrand.rousseau@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Lionel Dricot<ploum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 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.

This is related to this bug also: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtg/+bug/345575

If I remeber well, ploum also posted a mail in the mailing-list about
that issue. My guess is that there are two manners of expressing
dependancies: through a sequence or through a priority.

Actually GTG allows to express dependancies by priority by allowing to
insert subtasks. I think we should enable support for ordered tasks
(sequence of tasks) as well in the future. That could take the form of
a numbered list in the editor for instance.

>>
>> 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
>
>
>
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-- 
Bertrand Rousseau
Place communale 1, 1450 Chastre, Belgium
e-mail : bertrand.rousseau@xxxxxxxxx
tel : +32 485 96 69 86