Tasktop Blog

Mylyn 2.3 is now now available along with the Europa Winter Update. Check the New & Noteworthy for the listing of features and performance improvements. The next major release is Mylyn 3.0, which will go out with Ganymede at the end of June.

This release includes a very nice contribution from Willian Mitsuda, whose screenshot annotation feature makes it easier for users to communicate bugs and enhancement requests. For details on other great community contributions, such as Frank Becker’s ongoing stream of patches, see the New & Noteworthy.

This release also addresses a key Task List usability problem. Mylyn makes it very easy to create and collaborate with tasks. As a result, you can quickly end up with a large number of tasks in your Task List. To address this, we previously added the Focus on Workweek facility and made task scheduling an optional but core part of the Task List UI. For the most part this worked, but there were days when it felt like we were spending way too many clicks on scheduling. Those days tended to be Mondays, when tasks over-optimistically scheduled for the previous week would all turn red and needed to be re-scheduled. At first we though that this was a sensible best practice to encourage, but there are two problems with this assumption.

The first problem comes up when the start of the week is so busy that there isn’t time to get organized. We added the Scheduled presentation to the Task List which can help, but doesn’t solve the whole problem. The second problem is a deeper one. As Kent Beck pointed out in Extreme Programming Explained, optimism is an occupational hazard of programming. This means that many of us schedule too much for the future. We termed the resulting symptom “red mondays” (see bug 206566). When your UI ends up with a large portion of the visible elements colored red for a large number of users, there is something wrong.

The crux of the problem is the fact that there simply aren’t enough days in the week. When a task comes in that you know you want to get done, you may want to get it done this week, but with ever-changing priorities you may not know what day you can get to it. So we added one more day to the week that comes after Sunday and called it “Someday”. Since then, the running joke at Tasktop has been “sure, I’ll get that done on Someday”.

In the Mylyn UI the “Someday” date shows up as “This Week”. In other words, you can schedule things for “Someday This Week”. This is a floating date that moves from week to week and promises to never go red on you. This floating date has no notion of the past or going overdue, which in the end means a lot less manual maintenance of your Task List. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Voting is now open and it’s time for Eclipse committers to cast their votes. The list of nominees is an impressive collection of people whose passion has been making a big difference in Eclipse, so we should be in good hands for the coming year. Last year the committer representative list was dominated by IBMers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and IBM’s contribution to Eclipse continues to be key in bringing us the amazing platform that we work with today. One thing that’s interesting about this year’s election is that Equinox guru Jeff McCaffer and I represent small Eclipse-based startups. I see this as a very good thing because innovation is critical to the continued evolution of Eclipse, and startups are a great mechanism for driving innovation. My vision statement is focused on tool support to make committers’ lives easier:

I have been an Eclipse committer since early 2002 when I co-created the AspectJ project. Like many others at the time, I was hedging my bets and developing extensions for multiple IDEs. But after a few weeks of experience building on it, it became clear to me that Eclipse was going to be the platform for innovation in the tools space. At that time I based this judgment almost entirely on the modularity and openness of the Platform. Since then, I have learned a lot about the critical part that collaboration tools and community involvement play in fostering a successful ecosystem. If elected, in addition to fulfilling the usual obligations of Committer Representative, my first priority will be evolving the tool support that facilitates collaboration in our community, and my second priority will be helping committers improve the cross-project usability of the tools that we produce.

Being an Eclipse committer is a challenging task, due to the amount of input that comes in through project planning and community channels. In addition, the Eclipse frameworks that we work with daily add up to millions of lines of code. As an Eclipse committer, one of my motivations for creating and contributing Mylyn was to facilitate development and collaboration within the Eclipse ecosystem. To date Mylyn has been successful at enabling many committers to work more productively on their projects and to process much more community feedback than was previously possible. This has been a key factor in the success of the Mylyn project to date, since it has enabled a small number of committers to resolve thousands of bug reports.

The Eclipse Foundation has been doing an amazing job in providing the infrastructure and web services that are the backbone of our community. As Committer Representative I plan on coordinating improvements to the tool support that we use to make us more productive when using these services. Key areas I see for improvement include:

	Better integrating Eclipse.org facilities for committers, including bugs.eclipse.org and IPZilla integration with the IDE. We spend a large portion of our time using these repositories, and the easier it is for us to use them within Eclipse the more productive we become.
	Ensuring that there is an EPP distribution that supports committers and contributors. This used to be the Eclipse Classic download, but thanks to innovation within Eclipse there is an increasing number of other projects and tools that are now relevant to committers.
	Coordinating additional tool support for facilitating Eclipse project development. This can include things such as include IRC integration from ECF, easier applying of patches and sharing of Mylyn contexts, as well as default configurations for PDE’s API Tools.
	Improving the user community feedback channels. This includes better integrated support for bug reporting (e.g. EPP distribution specific reporting) and usage monitoring.

While I have put some effort into each of these areas already, as Committer Representative I will drive additional progress via contributions, getting help from the Eclipse Foundation and coordination of community resources (e.g. a summer of code project on improving tool support for committers).

Read more…

The one-point-oh release of any product is such an exciting time. While we decided to stick with the grass-roots publicity that we know best, the Tasktop release still brought a huge spike in downloads and hits. In the past two weeks the Tasktop video alone has been viewed over 8,000 times, contributing to over 120 Gigs of data we served. (I am so glad that we decided to chose an unlimited data plan from our ISP). But the most exciting part is all the feedback that we’ve been getting. Creating new technology wouldn’t be nearly as fun without some controversy, so it’s been interesting to see the comments and debates in the three places that we posted notes on the release. It’s also great to see new users like Dr. Internet getting excited about the Task-Focused Interface for organizing their day-to-day work, as well as the action on dzone.

	TSS: Tasktop 1.0 released: Mylyn for the masses (15 comments)
	InfoQ: Bringing Mylyn’s Task-Focused Interface to Everyone (11 comments)
	This blog: Reclaim your workday (13 comments)

Our favorite and most lively forum for feedback is the integrated bug reporting facility that’s in Tasktop. Yesterday’s Tasktop Update already addresses some of the minor usability corners reported and we’re now nearing 200 reports, the vast majority of which are enhancement requests. Processing and responding to your feedback is very important to us because Tasktop is a new technology whose interface we’re evolving for a rapidly growing user base. We rely on early adopters telling us how to make the tool better support their work and prioritize improvements around that feedback on a daily basis.

Feedback is also important because our goal is to make Tasktop the glue between the many sources of information that surround us. We learned with Mylyn that the Task-Focused Interface is a very good glue technology because it focuses on the user and not on the information. Whether you like to keep your data with a service provider in the cloud or local and private, it will be automatically organized for you when you activate and switch tasks. The more kinds of task repositories and applications that we integrate with, the more users we can make more productive. This is why the Eclipse story is so important to us—there are way too many interesting tools and technologies out there for one company to do it all. Open source APIs in Eclipse and Mylyn enable the innovation networks that make it possible for Tasktop to support the large variety of technologies we use today. I’ll post more soon on how open source projects and our partners support that innovation.

As soon as we saw the onslaught of integration requests coming we put up a survey. While the degree-of-difficulty in these integrations varies with the extensibility of the tool—easy for any open source Eclipse based tool, hard with something that has no web service API like GMail—the survey numbers are extremely valuable in helping us determine where to take Tasktop next. For example, consider how the following chart helps us prioritize our evolving email integration story:

We just hit 81 survey responses and look forward to more, since there is still room to influence the upcoming releases (Tasktop Spring 2008 on March 18th and then Summer 2008 three months later). If you’re interested in seeing the survey result charts, they’re accessible if you log in to your Tasktop.com account or if you fill out the survey.

Over the past few decades the amount of information available at our fingertips has steadily grown. We have become so overloaded with hundreds of emails, thousands of files and millions of lines of code that we often spend more time repeatedly looking for information than getting work done. Its time to reclaim our workday. Starting today, you will be able to use the Task-Focused Interface for managing all of your work. For Eclipse users, this means the productivity benefits of Mylyn now extend to your file and web browsing activities. For all those who have asked for Mylyn but don’t have the luxury of spending their day in Eclipse, Mylyn’s benefits will now be available to you through a standalone RCP application.

Planet Eclipse readers: after this announcement, posts that are not specifically about Eclipse or Mylyn won’t be tagged "Eclipse" and as such won’t show up in the aggregator. Subscribe to this blog if you’re interested in staying up-to-date on Tasktop.

Video for Eclipse and Mylyn users

Video for Windows users

Just over one year ago, two key events marked the evolution of the Task-Focused Interface:

• Monday, Dec 11th, 2006: We released Mylyn 1.0 which provided task-focused tools for programmers along with extensible APIs.
• Friday, Dec 15th, 2006: I defended my PhD Thesis, which validated the productivity benefits of this new approach, via field studies of programmers using Mylyn and knowledge workers using the first prototype of the Task-Focused Desktop (Tasktop).

The chronic multitasking leading up to that week was grueling and would not have been possible without the tool support that we are releasing today. Mylyn was our first major step away from the information-centric desktop metaphor, towards the the user-centric task metaphor. Tasktop 1.0 marks the next step in the evolution of the Task-Focused Interface and the beginning of making this new way of working available to everyone.

The people that made Tasktop 1.0 happen, from left to right are: Steffen Pingel, Gail Murphy, Shawn Minto, Mik Kersten (me), Wesley Coelho, Leo Dos Santos (blinking) and Robert Elves. Between Tasktop 1.0, the Mylyn 2.x releases and upcoming 3.0, creating connectors for our partners and now the very ambitious SpringSource Tool Suite, I often get asked how we manage to do it all. Here’s a hint–all of our work is done with Tasktop and Mylyn, and we don’t use email for collaboration. With the tremendous productivity increase that is possible when everyone is focused, your small team can feel more like an army. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll list some of our tips on how to get the most out of task-focused work and collaboration.

Read the full release story on InfoQ

Download Tasktop…