[mylar-dev] Re: What is the "!" column in the Task List for?

[Eugene Kuleshov <eu@xxxxxxxx>]

David,

 Blank means Normal priority. You can see actual symbols and their 
meanings in the "Filter Priority" drop down on a Task List view toolbar. 
Those priories automatically mapped for Bugzilla, Jira and Track into 
the unified scale. Web connector is always using normal priority. The 
point is to provide a common UI and the priority scale across different 
repositories, so you can prioritize tasks from several repositories locally.

 Synchronization state shown not while synchronizing, but after the 
fact. So, it give you an indication what you haven't seen yet and it is 
probably quite longer then 0.1% when you see these markers. Arguably 
that indication could be done right on the task icon decoration, but 
with separate column you can sort on that status more intuitively 
(though I don't think it is working like that now).

 As of tooltips, I think it used to be shown in a task tooltip, but 
probably got removed because it was cluttering the UI. I do agree with 
you that those icons maybe counter intuitive at first look, but their 
meaning will quickly became obvious while working with Task List...

 One more important note to Mylar developer. Lately I see some UI 
suggestions from the newcomers and those (when implemented) can severely 
break UI experience of the old Mylar users (some of them like me are 
using it over a year). For example, recent "improvement" for "Make less 
interesting" menu, now cost me about a second every time I need to call 
it. So, please take this kind of stuff into the account when making 
those changes.

 regards,
 Eugene


David Karr wrote:
> So you're saying the value in the unlabeled "priority" column is 
> supposed to be a symbolic value that maps to the priority values of 
> the underlying task repository?  I'm guessing the intent is to have a 
> single set of symbols in Mylar that have a mapping to the 
> repository-specific priorities in each task repository.  Frankly, that 
> doesn't seem like it's worth it.  I would think that just using the 
> raw priority value from the underlying task repository makes more 
> sense.  Obviously, that would mean you'd have different kinds of 
> values in that column for each task repository, but that's because 
> they're different task repositories.  I don't see any reason to mask 
> those differences.  The tradeoff might be that that column might take 
> more space.
>
> If the "priority" column is supposed to map to the priority of the 
> underlying task repository, why do I only have one task that has a 
> value in that column at all?
>
> Also, in the "synchronization" column (or whatever you called it), 
> you're devoting an entire single column of this view to data that 
> 99.9% of the time will be blank.  Since the "synchronizing" state will 
> only be present very rarely, why didn't you just try to change the 
> visual appearance of the line while synchronizing?
>
> Is it possible to have a tooltip just on the column header that can 
> explain what the column is for?  Almost any obscure meaning ceases to 
> become obscure if you provide some sort of explanation somewhere.  If 
> you're going to use obscure symbols in the column, provide the key in 
> that tooltip.