Traskpro blog

Traskpro has received the greatest gift (aside from world peace or a multi-billion dollar corporate buyout) in the form of a giant pile of feedback. Our gracious benefactor is uber user interface expert Jake and his contribution was delivered in the form of a 24 page user experience review of Traskpro crammed to the brim fantastically useful comments and ideas.

While Traskpro in its current incarnation is an extremely powerful and flexable solution it’s plainly obvious that beauty is not one of its key strengths. In the next two weeks that should be changing - not many changes will be published out to production in the near term as most of the UI changes being planned are major enough to take more than an evenings idle coding.

Stay tuned for more updates and a friendlier, prettier Traskpro!

The Traskpro UI and functionality developments of the last few days have finally been pulled together into a more compact and functional area dubbed the context bar. So called for it’s ability to adjust the view of the current tag context the area is intended to be simple to use while not consuming large amounts of network or CPU resources.

Other minor change log entries today include updating the color scheme for high/low/completed tasks slightly to emphasize a tasks status and adding “modified” as a sort option.

After making baby steps on task sorting and iPhone UI tweaks today brought major revolutions to both features.

The new Sortbar provides advanced sorting and filtering capabilities. Now users can not only sort their tasks by priority and due date, but also view completed tasks and sort by the date that tasks were completed. This functionality helps meet the requests of two user groups - those looking for more advanced view options and those wishing to review notes from completed tasks.

The custom CSS stylesheet for the iPhone has improved drastically. By adjusting the initial zoom values, increasing the size of certain key page elements, and removing small bits of the user interface the entire Traskpro application sings on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone check it out and drop us a note about what you think about the new iPhone interface.

Several user interface tweaks were published to the web today for Traskpro. Most obvious to most users will be the colored backgrounds which help differentiate high, medium, and low priority tasks. These backgrounds were added based on feedback from several users that the task priorities lacked enough definition to be easily identifiable.

iPhone users will also be pleased - some iPhone specific style sheets have been added to make the text appear much bigger on the iPhone enabling easier navigation. The new stylesheets won’t affect desktop users but make a very big impact on the mobile experience. More iPhone tweaks are in store with the upcoming UI redesign, but this was a great stepping stone to enable effortless task management on the iPhone without waiting for the complete rewrite.

When the users speak Traskpro listens! Nearly every user that has provided feedback has asked for customizable task sorting. The latest build was just pushed out to production enabling a state aware task sorting mechanism.

The sorting feature is deceptively simple - just click on an entry in the sorting bar to sort all tasks by that value. Click an already sorted column to reverse the sort order. Your sort order preferences will maintain state through different sessions so if there is a particular view you like it will always come up by default.

Users sort order is the first use of a new user preferences state management system that has just been implemented on the backend. This new system does not do much now, but it enables features like sort order and personalization to be developed very rapidly. The Traskpro roadmap is looking to a lot of user personalization and more advanced custom view options (grouping and smart tagging).

As always stay tuned for more updates and feel free to leave feedback on this or other features in a comment on this post, or using the feedback link within Traskpro itself.