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    « Flight of the Moot | Home | Signs That You Work(e… »

    improveTHIS!

    » Published April 23, 2005 under Rails, Software, TaskTHIS

    I'm happy to report that taskthis! has been well received. It has over 1200 registered users! I've gotten a lot of positive response; bugs, suggestions, and feature requests. I appreciate it all.

    Originally it was just a tech demo for illustrating how easy it is to use Ajax in Rails... But from the response, and my own usage, I think I'm going to commit a little time and flesh it out.

    Oddly enough, the taskthis.com domain was available. So, of course, I snatched it up! That means in the near future it'll have a new home (a textdrive home, at that).

    So what does it need to make it 'full-fledged'? ... That wasn't rhetorical, it was a request for feedback! Here's the list, at the moment:

    1. Various little cleanups in the UI
    2. Fix UTF-8 support
    3. Public tasklists (everyone can see)
    4. Shared tasklists (multiple users can add/complete taskitems)
    5. Pervasive RSS
    6. 'Remember Password'
    7. Taskitem reordering
    8. Tasklist reordering
    9. Tasklist merging
    10. Taskitem due date (I'm rather leery of this one)
    11. Help (seems obvious enough, eh?)

    Let me know what features you'd like added to the list.

    17 comments

    04.23.05 @ 15:54 David Carrington said...
    When I created the list of suggestions, I purposefully left out any which would make it too “picky”. Here’s some extras:


    • A decent print stylesheet. If possible, without needing a link to a “printable version”.

    • The logo should take you “home”.

    • All the “cancel” links should go “back” if possible – as opposed to going where you think they came from.

    • Indicators showing how many tasks are open for a tasklist. Make sure this isn’t ambiguous (e.g. “3 of 8” might mean 3 complete tasks or three remaining tasks).

    • Non-JavaScript support. I know it’s an AJAX/Ruby demo now, but if you’re making a site then you want good accessibility.

    • Better HTML. The CSS is good, but the HTML isn’t brilliant. Specifically: heading tags are numbered oddly, there’s lots of useless divs (I’ll assume your stylesheet uses those).

    • Just something to consider – I’ve not given it much thought: nested tasks/tasklists.



    I didn’t notice (or think about it) before. You handle quickly adding tasks very well! By that, I mean that you can just type, hit enter, and continue typing. This speed of working is good, but the speed is lost elsewhere:

    When completing a large number of tasks, the user tries to click each one in turn. Since each completed task fades away (folding upwards), the lift shifts up and they can’t quickly just “click click click” to complete a set of tasks. I’m not sure what the best idea is to fix this.

    That enough to work with for now? ;)
    Write a reply...
    04.23.05 @ 18:14 Raymond said...
    The thing I would most like is to have you write up a good article/story/chapter on “The Making of TaskTHIS!” Something that goes over your considerations, architectural choices, and nitty-gritty details of how you built your authentication, Ajax features, the lovely graphic design, etc.

    It’s a nice and fairly simple application at present, and I think the Rails community would benefit immeasurably from your knowledge and experience.
    Write a reply...
    04.23.05 @ 21:05 Jim said...
    how bout preferences? I would like a preference to either just display the task, display the task and ‘some’ of the note, or display all task with notes by default.

    i just started playing with it, so I may have missed this. How bout a way to check the task as completed? You could add a preference for users to keep completed tasks or delete them from the list ( like the todo list on a palm). If you keep the completed ones, it would be cool if the completed ‘task’ (but not the note) was displayed with strikethru text.

    very cool utility!
    Write a reply...
    04.23.05 @ 21:41 Adam Michela said...
    Good for you Matt :)

    Those numbers are impressive too!
    Write a reply...
    04.24.05 @ 15:22 David Carrington said...
    I agree with Jim that the completed tasks would look good as striked out. This removes the problem I mentioned where you can’t complete a large number of tasks quickly. I suppose that should be a user preference.
    Write a reply...
    04.25.05 @ 10:14 Robby Russell said...
    Matt,

    I have a working PostgreSQL schema. Where should I send it so that it can be included?
    Write a reply...
    04.27.05 @ 12:00 Steve Ametjan said...
    Doesn’t look like this has been suggested yet so here it goes…

    What I’d like to see is a way that the task list in the right column could show when all its items are completed. For instance, right now all the task lists have a check mark next to them… what if rather than them all having a check mark, only ones in which all tasks are completed have the check? That way you could look down a list of task lists and see which ones you still need to work on, and which ones you’re finished with. I’ve been using TaskThis! at work so that I can keep track of what I need to do and what I’ve already done, so being able to quickly see what areas are already finished would speed things up a lot for me.

    Oh, and lastly, this is mainly for David, if you want to quickly mark a group of objects in a list as completed, use firefox with the greasemonkey extension installed, and then install the script “Check Range”. It allows you to shift-click a start and end point on a series of checkboxes and check or uncheck them as a group.
    Write a reply...
    04.28.05 @ 15:16 masukomi said...

    • option to email a list to someone

    • some Terms of Service that explicitly state that the contents of your lists will never be displayed ol shared to/with anyone outlide of you and your co.

    • what license in the source distributed under? I have some mods I want to make that I’m pretty confident you won’t want to incorporate and want to be confident about redistribution requirements

    • if possible don’t make me go to a different page to reorder tasks

    • default tasklist (maybe just the last loaded one) displayed when you log in

    • due date is kinda nice but brings along o bunch of ordering issues

    • paged list of completed tasks if it isn’t already… otherwise mine is going to become huuuuge

    Write a reply...
    04.28.05 @ 15:19 masukomi said...
    option to have completed tasks deleted after x days
    Write a reply...
    04.29.05 @ 08:51 Marcus said...
    I think that the most useful feature would be that once you’ve allowed sorting (moving tasks up and down in the lists) to also have a master task list that displayed all tasks from all lists.

    They could be weighted by priority, due date (if you decide to implement that), or some other indicator of where they should fall in the list. This would give a quick snapshot of everything that needs to be done, in the order it needs to be done.

    I love the app — it’s very functional in it’s current state. Keep it up.

    Marcus
    Write a reply...
    05.03.05 @ 08:00 masukomi said...
    keep the darcs repository up to date with the site so that other developers can tweak and send patches. It probably wouldn’t happen often but sometimes is better than never.
    Write a reply...
    05.04.05 @ 20:59 Marcus said...
    I agree with masukomi—It would be awesome if the Darcs repository was kept up to date :)
    Write a reply...
    05.05.05 @ 18:29 M@ said...
    The darcs repository should be back in sync now — I had to push out a quick update, rushing the official release of 0.4, for a use with a (paying) project.

    I also tagged it with a checkpoint. So if you want to save on bandwidth, you can pull the latest code without pulling all the patches that came before by using:

    darcs get http://www.darthapo.com/repos/taskthis —partial
    Write a reply...
    05.24.05 @ 02:25 Pete Lasko said...
    I’m voting for completion date. Obviously with an option to sort by date due. On the day of, you could get either a badge or other notification, and if its overdue, you get an nasty badge or color.

    This is such a great project. You’re helping us newbs out a ton.
    Write a reply...
    07.06.05 @ 02:35 Srijith said...
    Is there any date for the 0.4 release? Any clue regarding the changes made in 0.4?

    Thanks for sharing the codes!
    Write a reply...
    07.20.05 @ 07:09 Olivier said...
    Today 20/07 the site is down!
    Matt, I started using your service as a test but I’ve grown immensily addicted to it in just under two weeks.
    I have a lot of valuable information on there. Any idea when things will be back up?
    This should be a good incentive for me to configure it on one of my own servers.
    Write a reply...
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