TaskPaper's topics

“Clicks are Searches” limitations

ClintMacD — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:56:39 -0500

Jesse:

I was playing with TaskPaper 2.0 dev 56. I am still struggling with “Everything Is a Search,” at least in its extreme implementation. These are not fatal flaws, and many of my criticisms might be fixed by changes to the UI.

if I click on a tag (such as “@priority(1)” in your Welcome document), the window clears except for the relevant items. This is very good behavior, and seems clear to a naïve user like me. The problem occurs when I want to escape out of that “search” and return to the full contents. As a naïve user, the first three things I looked for were (1) a back arrow, (2) a “home” icon, or (3) some way to “unclick” the tag (say, click it again or double click it). None of those were available, and it took several moments to see the faint (nearly invisible!) “✕” to the right of the search term, very far from where I had originally clicked. My preference would be a back arrow, but “unclicking” would work as well, especially in the context of my next criticism.
if I click on the arrow to the left of a Project title, everything disappears except that Project. Again, this might be a useful behavior under some circumstances, but it is not the behavior I would ordinarily associate with a “handle” like the Project arrow (in fact, I had meant to do a drag, but 90% of my document disappeared, instead). However, like clicking on a tag (above), this left me with a blank document, and no obvious way to return to “home.” My immediate response (after saying, “Whoops, I didn’t mean to do that,”) was to click on the arrow again. Nothing happened. If clicking on an arrow makes things disappear, why does clicking on it again not make them reappear? Are arrows destructive, and something I should avoid clicking at all cost?
since clicking on an arrow made everything but that Project disappear, I tried clicking on a dash. Well, as we all know, in TaskPaper clicking on dashes adds the “@done” tag and crosses out the text. Why is this behavior so incredibly different than the behavior of clicking on an arrow? In your previous incarnation of TaskPaper (which I liked quite a lot, I want you to know), the arrows and dashes were very useful as selection and drag handles. In TaskPaper 2.0dev56 they are less useful because unobvious things can happen if I accidently click them.

Unlike many folks, I am extremely mouse-centric, and I like to click on obvious buttons to make things happen. You current “clicks are searches” metaphor, while potentially powerful, can be taken to an extreme. As a clicker, I rarely, if ever, enter my own searches to create “views.” That’s just not how I use TaskPaper — my preferred use is to open up the document and scroll until I see what I want, or click on a scrolling list to go to a particular Project. Therefore, I find some of the click-searches unsettling. Instead of helping me find things, they hide most of my document from me. Help!

Best wishes,
Clint

No project underlines in 2.0 dev 56?

Eiren — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:25:45 -0500

No project underlines in 2.0 dev 56?

I really like thoselines. The ones that fade off to the right (depending on window width, of course.

Maybe we can have them back as an option?

TaskPaper 2.0 Development 55

jesse — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:35:05 -0500

Edit Just released 55. It's a minor update, but fixes some problems with the search field that might have confused some people. (The contents were not always getting cleared even when no search was running). The below download should be pointing to the new version. Lets just keep the comments in this thread since this new version is so similar to 54.

Edit 2 I appreciate all comments no matter if they are liking the changes or not. So please keep them coming. I'm going to try to resist responding for a while so I don't influence first impressions to much. Also I don't have much time this weekend :)

Watch out for sharks!

This release is more incomplete then the previous release. Things are missing, bugs exist. But it has been a long time since the last release, and this version has some major new features that need feedback, so I’m ignoring the problems and releasing now.

What to look for:

New UI. Goals include be cleaner, be more paperlike, and give more prominence to search field.
Scrollbar only show when you “need” them.
Tab functionality is renamed to views. Views UI is a popup menu, or keyboard shortcuts.
New query language. Read my follow up comment below for details.
Theme options to show or hide header line dividers, project handles, and comment handles. Also theme options for toolbar colors.

What to watch out for:

Generally haven’t done much backwards compatible testing with preference files. Probably best to just delete your existing TaskPaper preferences before launching this new version.
Search field popup button is not yet functional.
Theme rules section no longer configurable. It will be, but I’m in the middle of replacing the rule editor view UI with a a UI that uses TaskPaper’s new query language.

This version has been replaced by development 56.

TaskPaper 2.0 Development 56

jesse — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:33:30 -0500

Not yet trying to address any UI design issues with this release. Just trying to make it a bit more useable. Once again it should be possible to change font's in this release :)

Changes include:

you can once again define syntax rules, but now using the query language instead of predicate builder.
query language should be a bit more robust. Should accept non asci character in the queries. Also allows for escaping "'s so you can search for them.
Changed auto-indentation to better show hierarchy... not sure that I like it, make things look more complex to me, but trying it out.

Here's the download link

Request: Support for regular expressions in "Rules".

Eiren — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:45:05 -0500

I'd like to be able to conditionally format lines in the following example format:

20080827 Wednesday

One way to describe the pattern is:

The first eight characters are numeric
followed by a space
followed by any number of any characters
and ending in "day".

Regular expression support in the rules defined in "Preferences|Rules|Edit Rule" would give me what I need. Any plans to do this?

Note: I currently use "line" "begins with" "2008" and it's alright, just not 100% accurate as sometimes I have lines that begin with 2008 that I don't want caught by this rule. I'd have to make a new rule to catch those other lines by something that makes them unique. Regex support would simply be terrific here and if you already have some interest in adding it, here's a +1 from me.

Printing without archived tasks

Joshua Choi — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:54:55 -0500

In Taskpaper, you can archive done tasks into a project called Archive. In the future, would it be possible to add a preference of excluding these archived tasks from being sent to the printer?

Tag Searching

Bill Vangen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:24:36 -0500

Two things related to tag searching:

1) It would be nice if tag searching were not case sensitive. So when I enter @Today in the search I can still find the @today tags in my document.

2) If would be nice if Taskpaper would show matches as you type tags. So when you enter @to you will see tags in your document @tomorrow and @today.

Note: this mimics how plain text searching already works.

Project with "quotes" in name does not filter correctly

Bill Vangen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:15:41 -0500

This is not a huge issue, but I happened upon it so I thought I should report it.

If you create a project with quotes in it (i.e. My project "with quotes" in it:) and then click on the project handle, you will see in the Search box: project "My project "with quotes" in it" and consequently the filtering does not work correctly.

TaskPaper freezes when using @

Henrik Christiansen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:04:01 -0500

Hi!

I have a problem with TaskPaper. When I'm writing something, and adding a @SOMETHING behind, TaskPaper freeze and the little ball comes up. It takes about 5 seconds, and it's back to normal. Happens every time.

I'm using TaskPaper 1.0.3 (26) on OS X Leopard 10.5.4.

How can I solve it? Pretty annoying in length, and I've tried to reinstall (using AppZapper).

Pasting notes

RobAllen — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:36:01 -0500

Hi,

When I past multi-line text (usually from an email or text editor) as a not under a task, TP doesn't automatically indent all the paragraphs (and blank lines). I end up having to go through and press tab multiple times to sort out the indentation.

Any chance of getting TP to auto-indent all pasted text to the current indentation level?

Thanks,

Rob...