Oh, I was using it _many_ years ago, glad it's still alive.
What I liked is that the projects are text-based and can be stored in Git. I.e., easily shared between apps, accessible for collaborative works, with changes history, etc. Essentially like a code.
Many open source projects started as passion projects. Someone had a problem they wanted to solve, so they solved it for themselves or for their team. The products weren’t designed based on a need to sell to a wide audience, or to attract a particular kind of buyer, they just need to work and work well.
Function is often more important than form when these projects are born.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that a pretty UI should not be confused for good UX. We can make snap judgments by looking at screenshots that look a little old school, but if the UX is good, the rest is just eye candy.
I agree that UI and UX are different things. A beautiful to look at UI can have horrendous UX.
But I’m less sure about the reverse. I’d argue that a bad looking UI can scare or otherwise put off the user, which means bad UX.
I’m fully on board with the rest of your analysis.
Motivation to keep improving the project usually significantly drops off once it does what the initiator wants well enough - pair that with lots of programmers not having a great feeling for UX/it not being a primary concern.
Like so often in FOSS, if you want it, you’ll probably have to do it yourself. It’s rewarding (I’m currently polishing up a software project for friendlier UX), but also a ton of work (guess why nobody did it before).
is there a kanban-esque board or some task management where the tasks can be recurring? like on a monthly schedule or say quarterly?
a simple example would be your annual tax filing. you have to do it every year and its due every year. you dont want to create a new task every year, that gets boring and difficult qucikly.
having recurring tasks.
Question in good faith here. We are heavily hooked on redmine, having closed over 70k issues there over the last 14 years. I see that this thing has redmine integration.
Will it do us any good? What kind of good?
I'm struggling to understand this, and gantt charts never found much use with us, we always fall back to simple milestone based versions to manage when we do what.
I have used TaskJuggler alot in the past, however that was more in a waterfall developement where we needed to plan the whole project over 6 months to 3 years, For agile I have not really used it, a SCRUM/Other board tends to fit better. But I still really like TaskJuggler
Same here, it's very useful for waterfall scenarios but I've never used it for agile planning and I'm not sure it would have a place in that kind of workflow.
Also, for medium-sized projects and up I've found its planning heuristics some times produce pretty bad plans (in terms of deadlines and resource utilization), and you have to guide it towards a better solution, by adding artificial constraints.
But having a project plan that I can express in the form of tasks and constraints, and that I can fully track using git, makes up for any of TaskJuggler's shortcomings.
rly want a group task tool that supports uncertainty, multiple branches, estimation, and updates -- essentially a file format for strategy, rather than for tracking day-to-day work
for big uncertain R&D projects where you have to shuffle priorities of parallel tracks based on progress + new information
There was an attempt to do something like this for R&D planning back in the 60s called GERT [1] (Graphical Evaluation and Review Technique) that I suspect was just a little ahead of its time. I consider the R&D project planning with uncertainty space absolutely ripe for disruption. Schedules and plans stale quickly and are redone basically from scratch again and again in the face of big uncertainties. But strategies linking objectives and abstract actions through concrete activities and facilities could live on as uncertainties resolve and overall be extremely useful.
> strategies linking objectives and abstract actions through concrete activities and facilities could live on as uncertainties resolve and overall be extremely useful
hard yes, also what you wrote about 'plans going stale'
Looking at the sidebar, it seems like this tool will be celebrating its 20th birthday shortly (2021-11-30). Hats off to the author for their dedication!
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 71.5 ms ] threadThis is the most thorough walkthrough I've found though it uses the QT-based Taskjuggler 2:
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-taskjuggler.html
This guide goes through the ruby-based TJ3, though it ends kinda abruptly:
https://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/taskjuggler/ox-taskjuggle...
What I liked is that the projects are text-based and can be stored in Git. I.e., easily shared between apps, accessible for collaborative works, with changes history, etc. Essentially like a code.
That's a crime my friend. You must mention covid or masks or Fauci in the title and in the story and in the comments.
Covid covid covid!
Is there a licensing problem? Is it an artifact of the preferences of those who typically contribute to open source projects like this?
Bleh. It's hard to sell management on a product that doesn't look sexy, whether it works or not.
Function is often more important than form when these projects are born.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that a pretty UI should not be confused for good UX. We can make snap judgments by looking at screenshots that look a little old school, but if the UX is good, the rest is just eye candy.
But I’m less sure about the reverse. I’d argue that a bad looking UI can scare or otherwise put off the user, which means bad UX.
I’m fully on board with the rest of your analysis.
Motivation to keep improving the project usually significantly drops off once it does what the initiator wants well enough - pair that with lots of programmers not having a great feeling for UX/it not being a primary concern.
Like so often in FOSS, if you want it, you’ll probably have to do it yourself. It’s rewarding (I’m currently polishing up a software project for friendlier UX), but also a ton of work (guess why nobody did it before).
Empathy thing, experience thing.
foss would be nice
This would create a recurring entry on the first of October every year.
Will it do us any good? What kind of good?
I'm struggling to understand this, and gantt charts never found much use with us, we always fall back to simple milestone based versions to manage when we do what.
Also, for medium-sized projects and up I've found its planning heuristics some times produce pretty bad plans (in terms of deadlines and resource utilization), and you have to guide it towards a better solution, by adding artificial constraints.
But having a project plan that I can express in the form of tasks and constraints, and that I can fully track using git, makes up for any of TaskJuggler's shortcomings.
for big uncertain R&D projects where you have to shuffle priorities of parallel tracks based on progress + new information
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...
I did a big literature review on this a while back.
hard yes, also what you wrote about 'plans going stale'