gtg-user team mailing list archive

[Éamon McDonagh <eamon.mcdonagh@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

First thanks so much for this software. I've been through paper, text files,
Toodledo, tracks.tra.in, Thinking Rock, and probably some others I've
forgotten. What I love most about gtg is the flexibility and the speed.

I didn't know if this group was just for developers, so have just been
reading mails until now. Often I don't understand the technicalities of the
discussion, but I read along to inform myself, and it's heartening to see so
many people caring so much about the product.

It was only when I saw Thomas Schutzmeier's input being so gratefully
received that I thought to mail.

I think I can work around the concurrent vs. sequential subtasks just by
listing tasks on the parent (I do it with # instead of -) and then making
them active (put - at the start, move the cursor and hit enter) when
appropriate.

My problem is more that I don't know if a task is a subtask or a main task.
I currently try to work around this by naming convention, with the top task
prefixed p- meaning project, and t-meaning task. I rarely have to go to more
levels, but I guess I could do t1-, etc. However, this takes manual
maintenance, and a big part of my weekly review is fixing up tasks without
the correct prefixes, and projects left without next actions.

What would be great would be a way of (in increasing order of usefulness)
- knowing that this task has a parent
- being able to navigate to the parent
- being able to mark task as done and automatically navigate to the parent

The third option here would mean that I get back to the project, and can
make my decision on next action (often just making the next # task active).

Currently if I'm not in the work view, and the project has the same tags,
and there are no other active tasks, the project becomes active in the work
view. That's great because once I see a p- prefix I can see it's a project
without a next action. But it's only in these limited circumstances.

I'm not sure what's possible or not, but I just thought I'd share from a
user's perspective.

Quite happy to reply to questions you might have if you want to bounce ideas
off me as a committed user. I'm here for the long haul!

Thanks,

Éamon




On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Bertrand Rousseau <
bertrand.rousseau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is surely an interesting way of representing and managing task
> here. You spot some interesting features here (like task positioning,
> etc.) However this is not the direction we've taken so far, and I
> don't think our UI will adopt the mind map metaphor soon. As we plan
> to have GTG being built as an application separable from its GUI,
> maybe some guy could implement such an UI in the future, I don't know.
>
> Anyway, thanks for the ideas
>
> Bertrand
>
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Shahar Or<shahar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Ah! I wondered why I don't get responses!
> >
> > Thanks. Here it is.
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Lionel Dricot<ploum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> Hi Shahar,
> >>
> >> Could you post your mail on the list ? It's very informative but I think
> >> you sent it only to me ;-)
> >>
> >> Lionel
> >>
> >>> I immediately think of an interface kind of like mindmaps.
> >>>
> >>> I imagine that it would be ideal for the visual representation of
> >>> father-child hierarchies of tasks.
> >>>
> >>> And I imagine that the creation, listing and editing of tasks
> >>> information would be all from this interface.
> >>>
> >>> Example usage of navigation:
> >>>
> >>> One task is always the 'active' task, which is highlighted and in the
> >>> middle of the window.
> >>> To go to the parent of this task I click the up arrow button. Now the
> >>> parent task is the active task.
> >>> To go to one of the children tasks, I click down. And I use the right
> >>> and left arrows to move between the children tasks of the same parent.
> >>> A click of the mouse on a task is enough to make that task the active
> >>> one and the view travels to it. Right-clicking a task brings a context
> >>> menu in which I can select relevant actions like 'dismiss', 'complete'
> >>> and so on.
> >>>
> >>> Example usage of editing:
> >>>
> >>> To create a child task of the current active task, I click the 'c'
> >>> button. Immediately a child is created and I edit it's name and the
> >>> details in it and type in tags just like I normally would. If I enter
> >>> child-tasks in that task using the '- <task>' format, they get created
> >>> immediately in the "mindmap" interface visually.
> >>>
> >>> Of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything which will make
> >>> working with it a delight with some exercise.
> >>>
> >>> Tasks which have no children will be colored differently, so that it
> >>> will be easy to spot them out of the rest (these are the tasks that
> >>> can be done now).
> >>>
> >>> The view can be filtered using tags. The list of tags can be brought
> >>> down by clicking somewhere and then I can select by which tags to
> >>> filter the visible tasks.
> >>>
> >>> I think that many neat and usable things can be achieved with this
> >>> kind of interface, like using the positioning and size of tasks to
> >>> indicate information about them like their due date or whether they
> >>> have certain tags.
> >>>
> >>> I'm not a developer so I'll leave the rest up to you friends.
> >>>
> >>> Many blessings.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Post to     : gtg-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> Bertrand Rousseau
> Place communale 1, 1450 Chastre, Belgium
> e-mail : bertrand.rousseau@xxxxxxxxx
> tel : +32 485 96 69 86
>
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