TeamTasks version 0.3 released
October 29th, 2007
Today I humbly release version 0.3 of TeamTasks to the world. TeamTasks is a simple tool for managing tasks and to-do list and is built on Tiddlywiki. Because of its TiddlyWiki foundation, it allows you to intertwine wiki content and task items, in order to build a meaningful set of notes and reminders, in a single, portable file.
We at Osmosoft are now using TeamTasks to manage our own tasks as part of a central knowledge sharing site. For us, it made sense to host this on ccTiddly, but it would be equally at home hosted on somewhere like TiddlySpot, on your own webserver, or indeed just sitting on you desktop as your personal task management solution.
This release sees the introduction of a wizard to help you setup new users and build a set of default task views for them. I hope it will smooth the way to productive task management.
I should mention that this is not the first TiddlyWiki based tool designed to help you manage your tasks. If you are looking for something along these lines, you may also want to check out GTDTiddlyWiki and MonkeyGTD.
TeamTasks is a developing product and I will be adding more functionality in the coming weeks. If you discover that it is proving useful to you, but has shortcomings that you would like to see put right, please leave me feedback here in the comments section and I will do my best to address your feedback in a future release.
Team tasks is available on this site in the playground, from subversion web front end, or through the subversion repository.
Finally a GTD tool I can feel comfortable with (ironically, such tools often come with too much overhead - TeamTasks, on the other hand, looks simple enough to jump right in without any previous knowledge).
A few (very) preliminary observations:
A sample task on the “front page” would be nice to illustrate the concept.
There should be an empty file with just the barebones functionality (i.e. just the plugins and basic structure - but no introduction or help)
More to come after an extensive review…
By the way: Even though I’ll use this as my personal task manager, I might also create users for other people (e.g. you or Saq). That way I could assign and keep track of tasks I expect others to do (e.g. plugins, bugfixes etc.)… (Of course I’d still have to inform those people myself - at least until TiddlyChatter has been implemented for TeamTasks… ;) )
@FND, Thanks for the feedback.
Those are both good points, and I will action them in the next release for sure.
Also, your comment about keeping the tool lightweight strikes a chord. I’m determined to avoid this getting too bloated with features. I really want to allow users to quickly get started and not need to spend much time figuring out what’s useful and what’s not.
It’s a tricky line to walk!
Well, you had to challenge me - so here we go:
Visuals
As you already know, I absolutely love the design (especially the control bar). However, I’m not sure about the red bar at the top. Also, the buttons’ color in the Listings menu doesn’t quite fit in, I guess.
The task tiddlers’ layout breaks (sort of) when there’s lenghty tiddler contents: The
taskControls“column” is just a box in the lower right then, so you either need a top border there, or use equal-height columns (those can be very tricky though - drop me a note on IRC or via IM if you’re interested).Functionality
The control bar is missing a save button (it’s only accessible via the backstage area).
In addition to the New Task button, maybe there should also be a New TaskView button (NewTiddler macro preloaded with a boilerplate TaskViewBuilder macro call)
Listings (e.g. the Timeline) are not refreshed automatically (the respective parent cotainer probably needs the
refresh="content"attribute).UserDefinitions does not seem to support wiki markup (
[[PrettyLinks]]in particular might be useful for non-CamelCase names - but the brackets are visible in the selection lists then).A wizard/UI for building TaskViews would be nice (e.g. offering a selection list of available fields/definitions and their respective values).
Misc.
Changing a value (in one of the
taskControlsselect boxes) feels a tiny bit sluggish; there’s a very brief pause before the TiddlyWiki becomes responsive again (likely caused by the internal updating of the store - not sure whether or how this could be optimized though).Can we somehow re-order the task fields (scope, priority, assigned to, status), or even add new ones? (I’ve tried modifying TaskDefinitions, adding a line “DummyField” and then creating a “DummyField” tiddler tagged with “TaskDefinitions” - that didn’t work.)
In the future, maybe(!) we could have multiple projects (scopes) and/or assignees for a singe task.
Aside: For some scenario’s, Saq’s TiddlerNotesPlugin might be a good addition.
Addendum: I guess I know why modifying the task fields isn’t possible; you’re using extended fields instead of tags for the field values. We might have discussed this before, but I think using tags here is the better, more flexible and future-proof solution. The tags could use the slices format (
field:value), making the whole concept pretty much universal and easily extensible. The issue of potentially “spamming” the list of tags is not a huge concern here, I guess, since TeamTasks TiddlyWikis will probably not be used for storing regular content.PS: Apologies for the embarrassing typo on “scenarios”…
Another addendum:
For additional (though optional) fields, you might consider adding dates (e.g. start, due) and duration. Eventually (in v3.0+), that might result in some sort of automatically-constructed Gantt chart…
I feel bad about flooding your blog with repeated comments, so I’ve summarized my thought on the respective TiddlyWiki.org page.
In your list of TWs used for task management, please don’t forget TiddlyDu2 at http://www.giffmex.org/tiddlydu2.html. I am happily using this system for my own tasks and really like it.
BTW I must say I really like your redesign of the right sidebar by making it a topmenu. Awesone! I will definitely be thinking about this as a way to redesign a few of my TWs. May I TeamTasks in the TW in Action showcase?
Sorry, for some reason the link above absorbed the period. Here is a link that functions: http://www.giffmex.org/tiddlydu2.html
Very nice, and to think of all things to find across the pond.
[…] v0.1. Track&Choose in its current infancy is largely based on Phil Hawksworth’s TeamTasks, which itself relies on a number of plugins from the TiddlyWiki community. The current basic […]
[…] to Phil’s progression towards the next version of TeamTasks, much of the interface improvements are straight out of the box, with only some minor hacking to […]
Any new developments on this project? Was just rediscovering the joys of ValueSwitcherPlugin and noticed that there was a TODO of ‘Build in deadline support’.
You mention hosting TeamTasks with ccTiddly. How does one do this? Nothing I’ve tried as left me with a working TeamTasks implementation with ccTiddly.
Hi Jack,
You should be able to import teamtasks (getteamtasks.com) into your ccTiddly workspace using the TiddlyWiki import functionality.
If you are having any issues running ccTiddly we have a small user community at http://groups.google.com/group/ccTiddly who will happily help with you out.
Please feel free to ask any questions and make suggestions in there.
Thanks
Simon
Thanks
Simon