Re: [Evolution] Task list ideas

[Damon Chaplin <damon ximian com>]

bfrantzdale THUBAN AC HMC EDU wrote:
> I know this is a CVS snapshot so this is unfinished. I'm sure many of
> these ideas have been thought of already and are being implimented. Take
> these as brainstorming ideas.
>
> Dates:
>
> It would be nice if the Due Date entry had a drop-down menu with today,
> tommarow, and one week later. At least allowing the date box to parse
> things like:
>
> ``today'' => 1/24/01
> ``in an hour'' => 1/24/01 9:27 PM
> ``11PM'' => 1/24/01 11:00 PM
> ``Friday'' => 1/26/01
>
> along with the normal form.(*)
>
> Overall the Due Date entry (as well as some others below) feels to me like
> it's a text entry box even though it should be a date entry box.
>
> Having it default to a time of 00:00:00 isn't quite
> user-friendly. Perhaps having it default to have no time at all if none is
> given? A more human-readable format like the mail component now has
> would be good. When a deadline approaches it could become ``11PM tonight''
> or ``in 2:15'' or whatever...
>
> Other entry boxes:
>
> As I mentioned, lots of the boxes seem (and I guess are) just hacked text
> entry boxes. As such their use isn't obvious. For example it would be
> sensable to say ``low'' in the priority box but it wants 0--9. Isn't that
> what a GtkOptionMenu be better?
>
> The same goes for % complete. I'd think a slider or an option menu would
> do best.

I am working on this now. We'll have popup boxes for entering dates, as
well as for selecting the priority, status and percent complete.
Though I'm not sure if we'll support things like "in an hour" in the dates.

 
> Geographical Position (in coordinates) is a bit useless. If it were
> attached to mapping software then it might help... What would be best,
> though is if it knew the user a bit better and could know about home,
> work, etc. (That connected to a GPS could remind someone to get milk on
> the way home :-)

The Geographical position is in the iCalendar spec, so we added it.
I'm not sure it is useful either.

 
> The URL entry could do with being clickable.

That's true, though clicking on it should probably be for editing it, since
that is what we do for all other fields. But there could be an 'Open URL'
command in a popup menu.

 
> Also, what does Transparency do?

It is mainly for calendar events. It tells whether the event time is shown
as busy or not when you (or someone else) tries to schedule a meetings.

 
> --Ben
>
> (*)
> In the future it would be very cool (though natural language parsing is a
> pain) to have things like:
>
> ``after lab on friday'' => check calander for friday, grep for "lab" =>
> 1/26/01 5:30 PM
>
> or
>
> ``once Ryan has finished secret project x'' => addressbook for who I call
> Ryan => ask his publicly available task list for notification when
> "project x" is done.

Hmm. Maybe for version 2.0 ;)

Damon