Tasktop Blog

Today’s Tasktop 1.4 and Eclipse Mylyn 3.1 releases are a milestone in the evolution of the task-focused interface. Mylyn continues to improve as a framework and core tools for open source developers, while Tasktop evolves its commercial integrations and enterprise-ready feature set. Together, these tools are bringing the benefits of the task-focused interface to a rapidly growing audience.

Mylyn 3.1 includes 432 bug fixes and enhancements, and 134 community contributions. This represents our highest rate of patches applied to date. One highlight is that the Mylyn Bugzilla Connector can finally edit all bug attributes, such as custom flags, so there’s no more need for users of customized Bugzilla installs to fall back to the browser.

This release also includes WikiText, a new addition to the Mylyn framework. Mylyn provides a broad set of Eclipse-based tools for working offline with web-based artifacts such as tasks and bugs. Wiki markup is a simple and powerful way of editing the text that’s presented by these applications. For example, many projects use wiki syntax when interacting on tasks and authoring documentation. As of Mylyn 3.1, wiki markup becomes a first class citizen of Eclipse. If you’re editing a JIRA issue with Confluence markup, you can do so directly from Mylyn’s task editor. If you’re authoring online help in a “.textile” file, you will immediately see the effects of your formatting without needing to preview changes in a web browser. In other words, the power of Eclipse’s code editing facilities are now available for your wiki editing.

All of these features, and many more, are also available in Tasktop Pro 1.4, the enterprise ready and fully supported product based on Mylyn. The biggest new feature in Tasktop 1.4 is the time synchronization. This has been one of the most requested features from our user community. It has taken us this long to deliver it because time tracking automation is a very tricky thing to get right. For example, if the automation is done without the user’s consent, it can have a big brother effect, which defeats our goal of empowering developers. So as usual, we have put all the control in the developer’s hands. Next to some nice BIRT-based reports you now have the ability to adjust all your timings before synchronizing them with the task repository, ensuring that all your activity is always accounted for. Tasktop will automatically track time that you spend working both inside and outside of Eclipse, present you with a chart of your activity, and allow you to edit that activity as needed. This is a huge time saver for those of us who need to fill out time sheets. For example, I recently learned that I needed to re-create six months of time sheets for R&D tax credit purposes. It took me only one hour to create and submit those reports.

There are many other new features in Tasktop 1.4, including support for Microsoft Exchange and the ability to create tasks from email threads. But my favorite is the streamlining that we have done for focused web browsing. For those who browse with Tasktop, bookmarks become a legacy technology. With this release, we have simplified the way that browsing activity populates your task context. Just activate a task, start browsing, and you will see a more concise context that represents your interaction with both web pages and web applications. This makes Tasktop’s one-click browsing session restore even more useful.

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements of task-focused tools coming from our partners, including the impending release of the premier IDE for users of the Spring Framework, the SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0, and some very neat developer tools that we have been working on with Atlassian. In the meantime, check out the New & Noteworthy for Tasktop and be more productive today.

		Mylyn 3.1 New & Noteworthy
		Tasktop 1.4 New & Noteworthy

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Eclipse, Mylyn, Tasktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.