Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

Published by admin on June 1, 2008 11:24 am under technology

*** Update ****

This post still seems to get quite a bit of traffic via google so I wanted to note that the information in this post is not out of date. Since the time I’d written this, Tasktop folks have added Firefox integration which was my primary complaint.

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I’m not a developer but play one on TV youtube. Well OK, I don’t even play one on youtube, but I work with developers day in and day out, hence I’m an eclipse user by association.  This is how I first run into Mylyn.  The simple brilliance of the idea was striking to me. I liked it immediately, thought it was a great developer productivity tool and suggested to the team.

I do think that I loose significant amount of time context switching as I often work on different things in parallel. A tool that would keep the information organized around the different tasks I work on simply makes sense.  Then I heard of Tasktop and realized that now the idea that I liked so much in mylyn was available outside development environment and got excited.

Tasktop uses the tasks you work on as the context. When you browse the web or open the documents while you work on a task, web pages and docs are automatically associated with the task you work on. If you close the task, they get closed and if you reopen the tasks, they get reopened. Simple idea and effective.

So having loved the idea, I downloaded an evaluation copy of the software and started using it to see whether I would stick with it.  I started using it exclusively and after some getting used to what is what, I was comfortable using it. We use Jira for issue management in the company and I use gmail as my email client; tasktop is integrated with both which made is easy to get going. Working with Jira this way is really nice and a lot of my tasks originate from email so gmail integration is very useful.  I got my tasks in and started using the tool happily.

Tasktop uses an embedded safari based browser. You can launch external browsers but it is meant to be used with the internal browser. Determined to like the tool :) I gave it a go. I didn’t last very long with it. I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea.  It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me. The browser is the most important application I use, and no way I’ll switch to something else that easily.  I think Tasktop folks may be underestimating the resistance people may have to switching browsers a bit.

There were couple of other minor issues, but they were not show stoppers that would likely to get fixed as the product matures. At the end, the experiment was a failure in my case due to the browser issue. I find myself forgetting to switch back to tasktop etc. which defeated the purpose of tasktop. I still think this is a great idea that has a very good chance of succeeding in the corporate world. It may have harder time with the usual early adaptor crowd however. I’ll keep an eye on tasktop to see where it goes.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    Users access our forums via Tasktop, which requires an account to connect to Bugzilla. We find the integrated task editor a very effective mechanism for community communication and don't use the Web UI at all. Also, we make all bugs visible to registered users, and would need to make it very clear that what users submit would be visible to the world (common in open source, not common in product land). However, it does get annoying when we're trying to communicate something to someone who is no signed up for the user community, as is the case when linking to bugs on blogs. We'll discuss this and re-consider the policy for the Tasktop Summer release.
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    I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea. It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me.

    Great points. This is precisely the reason why we don't provide a standalone release of Tasktop for the Mac yet. The problem is that the Safari/WebKit integration with Eclipse is not sufficient to provide a seamlessly integrated browsing experience. In contrast, Internet Explorer does a great job supporting embedding, which allows us to have a full-featured browsing experience within Tasktop on Windows.

    We're doing two things about this. First, we are working on improving the Eclipse and Mac browser embedding, and you'll see some those improvements surface in the Tasktop Summer release, scheduled for mid-July. In addition, we have had a lot of user feedback about browser integration and realize that some will want to use Tasktop alongside their regular browser as you allude to. While this does compromise the user experience some (more switching between windows) we think we can streamline it enough to still give you the majority of the benefits of the task-focused interface. The first browser we plan to do this for is Firefox, due to its extensibility. We should be starting on that work later this summer, and it would be great to hear your and other interested users' feedback.

    128: support monitoring of browsing activity within Firefox
    https://tasktop.com/bugs/show_...

    General Mac discussion is on:

    2: provide a Tasktop distribution for Mac OS X
    https://tasktop.com/bugs/show_...

    (If you're using Tasktop those links will open up with its rich editor without requiring sign-in, just one of the ways we leverage being the default browser :)

    --
    Mik Kersten
    President & CTO, http://tasktop.com
    Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylyn
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    Mik,

    Thanks for the information, much appreciated! Firefox plans are music to my ears, looking forward to it.!

    Curious: why do you keep your forums under lock and key? Wouldn't it be better if people can see (not post) what's going on without a user account, search traffic etc. seems odd.
    waiting for my password reminder ..


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    Hi Tim,
    Definitely sounds interesting. I've added your feed. looking forward to it.
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    I am running a similar team using Mylyn. The business side of the house has had some success w/ it + JIRA to do task tracking (similar to TaskTop it sounds) coupled with the beauty of context ala Mylyn but on non-code artifacts (docs, pdfs, etc). I am going to write up our experiences on my blog @ some point. If you are curious here is the link:

    http://timbauer.bauerfive.com

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