Show HN: An infinitely nested task manager where progress bubbles up to the top
discotask.com
discotask.com
If requiring JS to render the homepage is a conscious decision made considering the various tradeoffs, please at least add a message saying so in a noscript tag.
Would love to know the tradeoffs. The main page at least is a static marketing page. Surely a canonical case where the page should render under almost any circumstances.
Separately, it makes more sense to me for websites to set the default they think is best, and then let users override it. This can be done today in any browser with a bookmarklet.
(None of this is to excuse websites which abuse their power. I just don't think removing that power is the right solution, at least not here.)
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">
I imagine the only problem here is the maximum-scale parameter. Is that so, or are there other ones?
I haven't touched a frontend for a few years. It was the case that this tag was needed to display anything on mobile (and Google would all but delist you if you omitted it or used it incorrectly). I imagine things have improved. The optimist in me would like to think that the tag isn't even necessary anymore, but I can't trust that guy.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
Let see how this pan out.
* “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”, Steve Jobs
Edit: Wait! Click on the tiny barely-readable links in the bottom corner of the page (at least on desktop) that say "List Maker" or "Online Notepad" (they both are different URLs, but link to the same page). Then you get an interactive demo.
After looking at that demo, I think Disco is ahead feature- and presentation-wise. I don't see any way to do the status tracking/people pictures/coloring showcased on Disco's landing page in Workflowy.
Yeah, this looks like the author is too happy doing SEO shenanigans and multiple landing pages, while forgetting to make the root page useful...
I saw those links and clicked on one. I thought that it was for a different product!
At least that's for a webapp, not for a landing page, but still...
https://i.imgur.com/kyT6xlF.png
https://i.imgur.com/5LJzJsa.png
If you're developing on OSX, I recommend turning on scrollbars to make this more obvious.
It looks like there's the beginnings of keyboard shortcuts? (like tab and shift tab) I think for this to really appeal to power users, there should be very good keyboard shortcuts. And for an app like this, I'd think most users would be more on the power side.
When clicking on a task to drill into it, I wish it had a focused input ready for my to type right away.
So far this looks pretty cool. I think it's a good idea, and it looks pretty promising.
Also visually, its white with lots of almost white / grey stuff.. Its really hard to see anything!
Thanks for the feedback!
There is no keyboard navigation at all, not even closing modals or selecting items in the dropdowns. Being able to navigate through the tasks and expand with the arrow keys would be awesome.
1. Adding an item - when pressing Enter to create it, the resulting (static) text moves 1px down and left relative to where the edit field was. It's a smaller thing but annoying.
2. It's possible to add empty items, so holding Enter down will create a long list of nothing.
3. There's no easy way to delete items, e.g. erroneously created ones.
4. There's no easy way to edit items either. This appears to require 3 left-clicks at least - 2 too many.
5. Text size and spacing is too large and non-adjustable. The thing with ToDo lists is that you'll definitely want to cram as much items on the screen as possible.
6. Adding a brand new label is somewhat confusing, because, apparently, the label first needs to be created and then, separately, assigned. This is not obvious, nor expected.
All in all though (and ghost scrollbars notwithstanding) it looks nice and simple, but the UX needs a bit of polish.
PS. The name is not very memorable. Perhaps consider changing it while you are not too far in with the current choice?
It's easy to see what's blocked, but being able to identify blocking tasks that aren't yet in progress is important.
But enough with the criticism. I like how this looks like a nice, self-contained product. And I love that the author understands that tasks are subdivisible to more than one level. I'm really, really fed up with the usual issue trackers and project management tools we use in this industry - all of them limit your tasks to one, at best two levels.
(I wish someone one day would recognize that tasks don't form trees, but directed graphs; Org Mode, being an outliner, doesn't handle this, but I'm surprised no other tool seems to handle it either.)
Does org-edna help any? Although it doesn't help with viewing them as graphs, it may help with making TODOs act like graphs.
Absolutely! This is the first thing I check for trying out a new app. It's amazing that people think one level can be enough for anyone ("oh, but you can add a level by putting these tasks into a list and another one by putting that into a project ..." dude, why?).
> I wish someone one day would recognize that tasks don't form trees, but directed graphs
It's not that nobody realized, project management is not a new field, there are already MS Project and Project Libre.
What seems to be missing is a personal version that's really easy enough to be used for personal projects.
A note about the graph representation:
You're right, it's really not always a tree, which is why I think there should be cross connections. For about 95% of cases however I'd consider a tree sufficient.
A general note about tree based thought management:
I currently use Dynalist (similar to Workflowy) to manage my ideas. I generally love it (though it could also profit from a feature to branch out into a graph).
A part of that is task management as well, with the best motivation to use it being the nesting, but it's lacking a bunch of festures on that front, so I imagine it being petty cool being able to replace it. Eventually though I'd like to be able to keep my tree of thought in a single application. Do you think your app could be extended a bit to support that (it's probably not much, since the general management is almost the same)? If I'm going to pay 5€/month (or what price are you thinking of?) I'd probably want that, as well as very easy complete export in an open format.
Is it possible to indent nodes on mobile?
- keyboard shortcuts - subtle animation when navigating nest levels - ability to add deep nested items while in top level view
Looking forward to see the next version!
It's great to see a nice project using it!
Drag and drop functionality to move bullets and lists up and down so that points aren’t locked into the order you input them in (exactly how Trello works)
Support for link recognition (any link will auto underline and become a working web link)
This third option is nice, is honest, it's not a lie, and makes clear to the end user who is responsible.
A really nice to have would be to have inline Latex mathematical formula, but it may be too specific for your app.
Not planning on adding Latex anytime soon though.
It seems like an epidemic lately. So much JS in the wild just stops cold when some cookie or LocalStorage permission isn't available, and that failure prevents some other JS from running that unhides the page or runs a CSS transition. It doesn't seem like long ago when most sites at least showed some content when cookies were disabled, but that's beginning to feel like the exception.
Session cookies is a perfectly fine option that eliminates the need to pass the session id in each every URL. Sticky cookies are also something that most people will actually want because it helps improving the UX on the site on return visits. If you don't want either, in principle, clear them. This can be trivially automated in a wide variety of ways.
* That said, I agree that the site rendering shouldn't depend on the cookie access. But it's almost certainly an oversight of not testing for a marginal case that vanishingly few people have. So loudly moaning about it looks very odd - you are complaining about something that nobody needs. Just like a website not rendering well in Lynx.
I'm sure that, to many such webmasters (may I use that term?), I am indeed a nobody. Still, the Web is worse for it--a significant regression in usability and compatibility. Feel free to ignore my "loud moaning"--maybe the OP will appreciate the bug report.
The way you phrased it was different, both in spirit and in intent. Hence the "moaning" qualifier.
Better would be a relational structure.