Hi Davor,

Thanks for the feedback.

> I don't remember exactly why I first tried it, but my Dashboard feels
> cramped so I guess I wanted to remove some items that I didn't feel
> like they were that important t be tracked in the dashboard. Maybe
> they were FYI's from the calendar or tasks that aren't super urgent.
> Or recurring items that are past their last occurrence but are still
> stuck in the Now state (I have a bug filed for this already).

The recurrence-stuck-in-now bug (well, it's not exactly a bug, it's more
like a not-yet-implemented feature, but whatever, it's a pain)
definitely makes using triage hard, I should have that fixed in alpha5
(it's fixed in our recurrence branch, but that's not yet ready for prime
time).

Presumably your FYI's and not-super-urgent tasks aren't done, or you'd
mark them as such, right?  If you could remove those items from the
dashboard, where would you want to see them?

I don't know that this is the best approach (perhaps excluding
individual items from the Dashboard is better), but for items you want
to see only very rarely, you could create a new "Random" collection,
mark the collecton as "keep out of the Dashboard", then move such
infrequently used items to Random.

If doing something like that becomes common, we might want to consider
adding an option to "remove this item from other collections".

> The control Now-Later-Done also makes the triage somewhat clunky.
> Lists quickly get long, especially if I don't triage them often
> enough. I also don't like that it's hard to get an item from Now into
> Later because as soon as it's clicked on once it becomes Done and
> moves into another section. (Although now that the item is moved to
> the top of the Done section, it's easy to keep the Later section
> collapsed so that the item is visible just down the screen. Still, I
> think it causes a loss in context. The item either should not be
> refiled until the cursor is moved, or a double-click should take it
> straight to Later.)

The Now-Later-Done dance is, happily, fixed on the trunk.  Now nothing
changes its position until you click the "Triage" button.

Definitely having the Now section filled with irrelevant recurring
events makes the dashboard less useful.  Once that's fixed, do you have
ideas of ways you could make long lists of Now items more approachable?

I just moved into a new apartment, so my "stuff to buy" collection and
"stuff to do" collections each have several dozen items.  To keep the
dashboard from getting out of control I label most of those items as
Later, and only make a few at a time Now.

[...]
> On the other hand, defining a tickler for a Chandler task is done by
> attaching a custom "alarm" and requires setting up a time (why?).
> More importantly, it doesn't let me distinguish between different
> types of ticklers.

Can you explain your "(why?)" a bit?  Do you mean you just want to be
able to set a day for the alarm, but no time?

> Furthermore, it's easy in Ecco to define additional filters to
> further expand or restrict the range of tickled items shown in this
> view. (For example, "due in the next week".) I admit I don't use
> those at all, although apparently people who have to juggle many
> tasks (e.g., lawyers), find this feature incredibly useful. I realize
> it's not something that's in the immediate feature plan, but I
> thought I'd bring it up since I'm already talking about Ecco.

I can see how that would be useful.

> One more thing: the layout of the summary table in the Tasks area is 
> wasting a lot of space for things that are irrelevant to it, like the
>  Who column, while there is hardly any room for the task description.
> Are there any plans to redesign this? Right now it really looks like
> a poor cousin wearing hand-me-down UI from another app area. I know a
> task can be created from an email message, but I really don't care
> who sent it if I'm looking at the tasks summary in the Tasks area.

The Who column will be used for emailed items, it's true.  It'll also be
used for keeping track of who last changed a shared task.  When that's
working I think it should help the who column seem like a good use of
screen real estate.

With that said, you're certainly right that the task view doesn't
currently have any special features, it just filters to show only tasks.
 Are there particular things you'd like to see when you're looking at a
task view?

Perhaps a useful addition for collections where there's no Who to show
except "me" would be to collapse the Who column?

Sincerely,
Jeffrey
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