Feedback and some ideas

[mkpaz]

Hey! First of all much thanks for you app. It's just the best app concept I've seen and I've tried lots of services. Time tracking and GTD in one user-friendly, offline and open-source tool is just what I wanted. Hope I can make some PRs or give some ideas, so SP could become even better. I'm not a Typescipt guy, but I've developed webapps, so I' familiar with Vue, Webpack and NodeJS projects. I think Angular should be pretty similar.

I've tried SP this weekend first time and want to share some ideas you may (or may not) like.

Small improvements:

• Adding subtasks is somewhat tedious. You have to return to task context menu and select "Add sub task" each time you want to add a new one. In opposite adding tasks is way more simpler. I'd suggest adding subtasks in similar fashion to unify UX.
• Project notes and tasks notes can misguide some users. I'd suggest to rename tasks notes to description or comment to differentiate the concepts.
• Project note should have a limited height. Just try to add source code to a note. It looks pretty clunky :-) I'd suggest to only show note header in sidebar, where note header is everything before the first blank like. This is the common approach that used by many note-taking apps. Also only edit note in fullscreen.
  
• There's no way to add multiple tasks. When I tried to migrate my tasks from markdown I was really upset that I have to copy-paste them one by one. I really like how neat and clean Trello devs solved that issue. Their engine just checks if the new task contains line-breaks and if it does then you will get a choice to add it as one or multiple tasks. It only required when you paste text with line breaks from clipboard. Check gif here.

Enhancements:

• Full screen backlog. Let's be honest, backlog is always far longer than active tasks, no matter how hard you're trying to change that :-) So splitting screen 50/50 for backlog and active tasks just isn't fair. I'd suggest to implement backlog as horizontal slider. This way it could take the whole screen and it will be natural to switch between backlog and active tasks using arrow keys.
  

• Sections for My Day and projects. We are all using different approaches to plan our tasks. I think this feature isn't too complex, but can help many people. The idea is simple. Section is kind of "separator task" with title. This way one could split project tasks into groups and Today tasks in to sections like: morning, afternoon, evening. One could also use sections to have Goals area on top of any project. Sections is universal yet very helpful. SP basically have everything to supports basic sections. It should look like a normal task but:

  • without control buttons and context menu;
  • task title is centered and uses bigger font size;
  • has small top and bottom margins to visually separate it from ordinary tasks

  Adding is also simple, just like "--- Section name".

There is also one complex suggestion. It's about project arch. I've read issue tracker to find something I could help and find a lot of feature requests like "Provide integration with X". Each of these integrations has a maintenance cost and it can be pretty big cost, because third-party APIs tend to be changed from time to time. It could flood issue tracker with lots of bugs and disperse yours and community efforts. I'd suggest to implement plugin system for integrations, so you could only support the basic ones you need for yourself, but people still have an option to integrate their favorite app with everything they need.

Tnx for reading this.

[johannesjo]

Thank you very much for your feedback!

• Adding subtasks is somewhat tedious. You have to return to task context menu and select "Add sub task" each time you want to add a new one. In opposite adding tasks is way more simpler. I'd suggest adding subtasks in similar fashion to unify UX.

You can use the "a" key to add more sub tasks if a task is focused via the keyboard (indicated by a colored border). This should be pretty quick.

• Project notes and tasks notes can misguide some users. I'd suggest to rename tasks notes to description or comment to differentiate the concepts.

This is a good idea! Thanks

• Project note should have a limited height. Just try to add source code to a note. It looks pretty clunky :-) I'd suggest to only show note header in sidebar, where note header is everything before the first blank like. This is the common approach that used by many note-taking apps. Also only edit note in fullscreen.

Oh. Thanks for bringing this up. This was already implemented at some point. Not sure why it aint any more. I plan to redo the whole notes feature at some point. But there is a lot to do in general, so I don't know when I will get to that :)

• There's no way to add multiple tasks. When I tried to migrate my tasks from markdown I was really upset that I have to copy-paste them one by one. I really like how neat and clean Trello devs solved that issue. Their engine just checks if the new task contains line-breaks and if it does then you will get a choice to add it as one or multiple tasks. It only required when you paste text with line breaks from clipboard.

I agree that this would be nice. There already might be feature request open for that. Can you maybe post your additonal input there?

• Full screen backlog. Let's be honest, backlog is always far longer than active tasks, no matter how hard you're trying to change that :-) So splitting screen 50/50 for backlog and active tasks just isn't fair. I'd suggest to implement backlog as horizontal slider. This way it could take the whole screen and it will be natural to switch between backlog and active tasks using arrow keys.

Yes I agree that that might be better. It's pretty tricky to implement layout wise, as there already is going on a lot with the menu, the notes and the task sidebar for the additional stuff. Putting another layer there might be a challenge.

• Sections for My Day and projects. We are all using different approaches to plan our tasks. I think this feature isn't too complex, but can help many people. The idea is simple. Section is kind of "separator task" with title. This way one could split project tasks into groups and Today tasks in to sections like: morning, afternoon, evening. One could also use sections to have Goals area on top of any project. Sections is universal yet very helpful. SP basically have everything to supports basic sections. It should look like a normal task but:

  • without control buttons and context menu;
  • task title is centered and uses bigger font size;
  • has small top and bottom margins to visually separate it from ordinary tasks

  Adding is also simple, just like "--- Section name".

This is likely very tricky to get right and I personally don't need such a feature, so unless demand is huge, I am unlikely to work on this myself, but maybe you can open up a new issue about this anyway? This way people can upvote it, if they like to see the feature as well.

There is also one complex suggestion. It's about project arch. I've read issue tracker to find something I could help and find a lot of feature requests like "Provide integration with X". Each of these integrations has a maintenance cost and it can be pretty big cost, because third-party APIs tend to be changed from time to time. It could flood issue tracker with lots of bugs and disperse yours and community efforts. I'd suggest to implement plugin system for integrations, so you could only support the basic ones you need for yourself, but people still have an option to integrate their favorite app with everything they need.

This would very nice indeed. I experimented a lot with that before v2, but given the technological choices it's not all that trivial to do neither unfortunately. Usually demand for third party issue providers isn't too high and not too many people use the existing ones (which are supposedly the most popular ones), unless someone offers help with this, I am ok with the situation.

[mkpaz]

This is likely very tricky to get right and I personally don't need such a feature, so unless demand is huge, I am unlikely to work on this myself, but maybe you can open up a new issue about this anyway? This way people can upvote it, if they like to see the feature as well.

Ok, it's on me. I will try make some prototypes as soon as have time for this.

Thank you very much for the answers.

[johannesjo]

You're very welcome! Thanks again for the very welcome input! While the other suggestions might take time to bear fruits, I at least already changed the task notes tile to "description" :)

[sergeevabc]

Err… I added a lot of tasks to Today. Now I want to sort them out to folders/projects.
Doing that one by one is too inconvenient. How do I select multiple tasks to drag further?

[johannesjo]

Could you open up a separate question please?