Welcome again. This is going to be a small overview, since the "To-Do" is in fact part of KOrganizer, which was mostly seen on the last article. It's just going be fast view at the main interface, the changes to the interface remain the same as on Calendar.

Kontact: To-Do

By default it looks like this:


Of course, after some little changes (removing douplicate functionality, like the. unreadble, mini to-do viewer, and the mostly unused resources), however, I need to remark that the calendar is absolutely useless on the To-Do (as it is the "today" toolbar icon) , but revoming it, will remove it too from the Calendar sections, this is a big bug in my humble opinion, it ends like this:


The interface works well, if you want to edit the fields, you can easily do it by right clicking them :-)


Little update (Thanks Thomas): I forgot about this, by clicking it once you can get an in-line editor, so you don't need to right click:

You can use flat view or tree view (I prefer the later, and it's the default), so you can easily see sub-to-dos:

Creating new To-Dos is extremely easy, just write a tittle and hit enter:

Little update (Thanks Thomas): You can easily add new sub-to-dos by selecting the desired parent to-do, then you just write the name in the in-line creator, but instead of hitting enter, you press Ctrl + Enter:
Being able to see the information without opening the editor is very confortable (at least after removing the mentioned parts at the beginning) :

Search works as expected:

You can filter categories (and it will affect search too):


Well, this is one was very short, but most was covered on the Calendar article, if you didn't read it, in that one you'll find the Add, configuration, attendees, categories dialogues among others. Thanks in advance for you attention, and I hope you like it, I will publish the "Feeds" article later today :-) (this is one was way too short).

Coming up later today: Kontact: Feeds


13 comments:

Stefan T. said...

Well, even if you don't use recourses so often there is solution. You can drag it down to hide it. This way if you use it from time to time you can drag it up.

On the other side calendar is not completely useless (bold dates), but since it doesn't do much it would be nice if we could hide without hiding complete sidebar.

Anonymous said...

IMHO the todo list is too fine grained. With 10(!) levels of priority and 6 levels of progress, you end up thinking too much every time you mark something.
Most userfriendly systems that aim at having constant categorizing input from the user (two examples are Anki flashcard app or rememberthemilk todo webapp), end up limiting it to three choices, and I agree with this. Three levels is at the upper limit of what we can comfotrtably keep track of in our heads.

Luis Augusto said...

"Well, even if you don't use recourses so often there is solution. You can drag it down to hide it. This way if you use it from time to time you can drag it up."

No, you can just turn it on from the menubar. I highly doubt you use it more than 2 or 3 times a week. In fact, those option should be available in the menubar itself.

"On the other side calendar is not completely useless (bold dates), but since it doesn't do much it would be nice if we could hide without hiding complete sidebar."

You can get rid of it, the problem, is that it affects how the Calendar section behaves :-(

"IMHO the todo list is too fine grained. With 10(!) levels of priority and 6 levels of progress, you end up thinking too much every time you mark something.
Most userfriendly systems that aim at having constant categorizing input from the user (two examples are Anki flashcard app or rememberthemilk todo webapp), end up limiting it to three choices, and I agree with this. Three levels is at the upper limit of what we can comfotrtably keep track of in our heads."

You're absolutely right Sr.

Anonymous said...

Great work!

A feature that would be really great would be some kind of "activation" of todo items:
1) Allow that a task becomes active on a certain date. Before that date it is inactive.
2) Allow that a task becomes active when its parent is finished.
Then it would be easy to add a filter "show only active tasks" and you have a very nice reminder feature that only shows items that are really important at the moment.

Thomas said...

Hi there!

Just two things you didn't mention, but IMHO they are quite nice:

1) Try the inline editing. Just click twice (no double click) on a title, or hit F2. Then you are able to edit your todo's only with the keyboard (use Tab/Shift Tab to navigate)

2) If you want to add sub-todo's quickly, mark the parent todo, type the title of the new sub-todo, and press Ctrl-Return instead of simply Return.

Agreed, those features are not overly discoverable, but come in handy sometimes.

Cheers,
Thomas

Anonymous said...

"IMHO the todo list is too fine grained. With 10(!) levels of priority and 6 levels of progress, you end up thinking too much every time you mark something.
Most userfriendly systems that aim at having constant categorizing input from the user (two examples are Anki flashcard app or rememberthemilk todo webapp), end up limiting it to three choices, and I agree with this. Three levels is at the upper limit of what we can comfotrtably keep track of in our heads."

There is something that I don't understand here. O_o
Just because there is 10 levels of priority and 6 levels of progress, is doesn't mean you have to use them all. If you can't deal with more than 3 just use the first three levels of priority and 25, 50, 75%.

Great review as usual.

Luis Augusto said...

@Thomas: I will update the article with those two things, to be completely honest with you I didn't know those shortcuts XD.

@Anonymous: It doesn't work like that, the user will try to prioritize them according to the application level, at first, when he right click there he will start thinking which level to use according yo what is offer, using just "high" "normal" "low" is fairly easier at first sight.

Luis Augusto said...

Thanks for the compliment too :-)

Luis Augusto said...

"1) Try the inline editing. Just click twice (no double click) on a title, or hit F2. Then you are able to edit your todo's only with the keyboard (use Tab/Shift Tab to navigate)"

Oh, I did know about this one, but I thought you meant on the sidebar, haha.

genesiss said...

very nice quick review... ;)

It's quite interesting what u said about "duplicate functionality"....

Maybe ToDo List and Calendar views should have totally independent configuration also in the panel...

It would be possible to set up a Date Navigator in Agenda View and make it disappear in ToDo List

Anonymous said...

The tree view is broken, it is not possible to reparent items, and if i create more items with the same parents they dissapear from the view. So I find the TODO feature to be in a mostly useless state.

Luis Augusto said...

"Maybe ToDo List and Calendar views should have totally independent configuration also in the panel..."

Yes, they should, since they're presented as different parts of Kontact.

"It would be possible to set up a Date Navigator in Agenda View and make it disappear in ToDo List"

Indeed.

"The tree view is broken, it is not possible to reparent items, and if i create more items with the same parents they dissapear from the view. So I find the TODO feature to be in a mostly useless state."

I do have problems with the tree view (sometimes the sub-todos go outside the parent), however, since I'm using KDE 4.3 trunk I usually don't blame those kind of things. I dunno if it works like that in 4.2.2.

Anonymous said...

What I find a little frustrating with the KOrganiser (3.5.9) part of Kontact is recurring to dos.

When I create a recurring event it does not disappear (in summary view) after the first time you mark it complete. It remains on the to do list as in progress even though you may have set it up not to recur again until next year.

So if you have a lot of recurring to dos you can end up with a lot of to dos on the summary screen even though many are not due for a while.

It is possible that there is a way to avoid this that I don't know about but as of yet I haven't found a way despite experimentation and searching. If this is the case then apologies for this comment.

Thanks for the page by the way.