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It would be nice to see Mylar enforce developers (novice Mylar users) who keep forgeting using a task. Ideally, developers always work with an active task, or they may not care about the work when a task is not active, but the idea here is to ease the adoption of Mylar who are not used to work with tasks. To do that I may suggest the following. Mylar can collect interaction information in a circular context buffer (say for last 100 events) when there's no active task. When a user creates and activates a task, Mylar can ask (and no, not like clippy!) "well, it seems that you've done some work before, do you want to use it as your initial context?" and a short list of direct interaction events can be shown to choose the start point. If this feature is too annoying or affects the performance, it can be turned off from the preferences.
This is an interesting idea Izzet, and we could also do something similar for taking the last n events and creating a new task from them if the developer's task has diverged.
(In reply to comment #1) > This is an interesting idea Izzet, and we could also do something similar for > taking the last n events and creating a new task from them if the developer's > task has diverged. > Sounds interesting but I think this makes only sense if it is possible to also remove those events from the active context when moving them to the new task. This is ofcourse after asking the user if it is allright to remove the events.
implementing this feature as part of my Masters thesis
*** Bug 166489 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Video uploaded to show the progress of our tools. You can watch a 4 minute demo at: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~isafer/taskboundaries/taskboundaries.html The demo needs Flash to be installed, and a relatively fast internet connection. Please watch it full screen in your Web browser if you have 1024x768 screen resolution
*** Bug 196602 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Izzet: are you still interested in contributing this to the Sandbox?
My "real" use case, from bug#196602: > Mylyn workflow forces you to: > > 1 - Create a task. > 2 - Work on it. > > But many times I caught myself doing some work, so only then I figure out that > it could be interesting turning it into a task. > > For example: > > - Navigate through news on live.eclipse.org and found some demo/tutorial. > - I think: "cool, I think I'll try on my machine". > - Start working, and after some time I think: "It is time to > <do-another-thing>. I'll continue later". > - Then: "Ops! It would be good if I had created a task for this before". > > My idea is: > > - If there is no active task, collect interaction into some kind of "anonymous > context". > - When you create a new task, offer the option to initially populate it with > this "anonymous context". > > So the workflow could be: > > [ 1 - Do some work. ] > 2 - Create a task [ populating the context with previous work ]. > 3 - Work on it.
Yes Mik, definitely. I was actually working on this feature but had to pause it for a while. The working prototype will be a straight-forward wizard (and not views, if you watched that old demo above) to associate previous work with a task. Right now the basic functionality is there and working but it doesn't have the maturity to be committed to the sandbox yet. I'll try to be quick in releasing a prototype - but doubt it will be less then a month's time. Willian, what I am working on covers what you want as well :)
I just saw the video. Congratulations, very good idea. (In reply to comment #10) > Willian, what I am working on covers what you want as well :) > Good!
Cool :) When you get back to this please post so that we can discuss some UI simplifications that would make this a more straightforward contribution.
Created attachment 74876 [details] screenshots for the wizard I've attached some screenshots of my current implementation, please share your comments
imho it still need to be improved. Here is few thoughts. I have doubts that radio buttons is the best UI for variable number of elements and event details won't scale well for large number of events. Perhaps simple tree view (groups at the first level, and details as the child nodes would be more scalable) and would also allow to select multiple groups for creating context. The task selection page I think it should embed the task selection dialog Also, 4 wizard pages is probably too much to be simple operation. Perhaps first and last page could be moved into help instead. To increase discoverability link to the help perhaps could be added to the wizard title area.
One way to evolve the UI could be to start simpler. Consider just the case of resetting the start boundary of a task. The wizard could be invoked by right-clicking on a particular task in the task list and selecting "Add previous work to task context". This wizard could have just two pages: 1) the selection of the new start event and then a summary/doit page. Two radio buttons might be enough for the selection of the new start event: 1) since deactivation of last task and 2) from this set of 128 events (i.e., its not clear if since the beginning of the Eclipse session is useful but comments from the community would be helpful here). I agree with comment #14 that the radio buttons might not be best for the groups. I also am not sure of the semantics on the group creation. Perhaps just group on which source is being operated upon? If this use case is satisfied than the more difficult use case of setting both ends of the boundary could be tackled?
Izzet's Master's thesis has the relevant screenshots for those interest in exploring this topic further: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/grads/resources/thesis/May07/Safer_Izzet.pdf
Mylyn has been restructured, and our issue tracking has moved to GitHub [1]. We are closing ~14K Bugzilla issues to give the new team a fresh start. If you feel that this issue is still relevant, please create a new one on GitHub. [1] https://github.com/orgs/eclipse-mylyn
