Traskpro blog

A small but powerful new feature just hit Traskpro: .tagging (or ‘dot tagging’ in conversation). This new feature lets you add words from the task text as tags without having to retype them by simply putting a period before them in the task entry/edit boxes. For example if you entered:

Follow up with .John on .scheduling lunch

A task will be added with the text of “Follow up with John on scheduling lunch” with the tags “john” and “scheduling” added automatically for you. Of course you could always enter these tags in the provided tag entry field, but this is a quick way to save a little duplicated typing. Enjoy!

Totally awesome Traskpro user Nate suggested the (now stunningly-obvious) feature of exposing an iCal feed of tasks with due dates set. Lucky for Nate and other Traskpro users the feature has gone live. All users will have to explicitly activate their personal iCal feed in order to use this feature. Activating iCal is easy - just click the activate link in the lower portion of the sidebar then click the subscribe link to open the iCal compliant application of your choice. The link has been tested with Apple’s iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and the Mozilla Sunbird application - let us know if you have problems on other platforms.

The iCal functionality is currently read only from a client perspective, but will automatically update within your favorite iCal application as you add or change due dates for tasks allowing for a “what’s due today view within the calendaring application of your choice. Currently only tasks with a due date set will show up, but in the future access to other tasks may be enabled via RSS or other non-date specific functionality.

iPhone owners rejoice: Traskpro now has an iPhone specific capture mechanism. The new Quickadd link shows up in large and easily selected thumb-sized text when viewing any Traskpro page on an iPhone. The Quickadd page itself is styled specifically for the iPhone, and is designed to be as lightweight to load as possible.

By reducing the resources and actions required to quickly enter tasks into Traskpro the application as a whole can be more effective. As per the infamous Getting Things Done methodology the more things you can enter into Traskpro the fewer things will be cluttering your brain allowing for more focus to be given to planning and executing on tasks.

Targeted at quick entry on the go Quickadd will automatically offer to tag all tasks created through it with ‘quickadd’ for easy reference and triage later. You can prevent the quickadd tag from being added to your new tasks by deleting the task from the tags field before submitting your task.

A few power user tips:

• Add the Quickadd page to your iPhone’s home screen for quick on-the-go capture
• The next and previous buttons on the iPhone keyboard allow for quicker entry
• To quickly submit a task hit the big blue “Go” button while either the tags or due date fields have focus
• Assign high or low priority to a task on entry by tagging it ‘high’ or ‘low’

Have an idea for how to make the Quickadd feature better? Let me know - leave a comment on this post or send email using the feedback link within the Traskpro application. I’m also mulling about creating iPhone specific task view options, although am planning to wait until after the SDK comes out - depending on the tools availabe it may make the most sense to make a thick client Traskpro application for the iPhone instead.

Traskpro is pleased to present an early beta for search functionality. The new search box in the sidebar offers an easy way to search all your tasks, tags, and notes. This functionality makes quick work of finding tasks related to a person or tag with one or more simple search terms. Search terms are additive so you can use the search box to view multiple tags at once - just enter both tags you are interested in into the box.

Future improvements will be boolean operators, and the ability to restrict a search to either the current view, or to only specific tags. Have an idea for a great way that search could improve Traskpro - leave a comment and let us know!

One of the many jewels of feedback from Jake was the need for Traskpro to have an undo function. Having an obvious way to undo actions encourages user exploration and helps correct accidental clicks. At the same time Traskpro has been needing a unified user messaging system to communicate with the user about automatic actions. Enter the user notification system:

This new Gmail-inspired system pops up contextually and provides the user with information as well as offering a path to do the most recently performed action.

With the release to web of this new system a few other tweaks have been included as well. The task editing area is cleaned up slightly, and the editing pane has been re-arranged based on some analysis of how users were interacting with the notes feature.