Checkvist story

Improving notifications

Those of you who tried using Checkvist in teams (it was designed primarily for collaborative use), might have noticed that email notifications contain very little information about the actual changes made by your peers. To see the changes one had to follow the link. 

Not anymore. Now notification emails tell you everything: who changed what (was - such, became - such). The link is still there - if you want to respond to the changes or view them in a broader context.

Upgrade to Rails 2.1.1

Until recently, Checkvist was running on Rails 2.0.2. But when I started adding notification enhancements (to list actual changes in tasks), I realized that I need to track changed fields in ActiveRecord model. Well, may be not really “need”, but this feature would ease some pain and make code more elegant.

This feature (change tracking) is available only in the 2.1.x update of Rails. By the way, a really good summary of the changes in Rails 2.1 is available as a free book. 

The first step was to install Rails 2.1.1, and this was as simple as run 

gem install rails

I’ve done this both on the production and development machines.

The next steps were:

• In environment.rb, change RAILS_GEM_VERSION to 2.1.1
• In the same place, rename ActionView::Base.register_template_handler to ActionView::Template.register_template_handler
• rake db:migrate
rake db:test:clone
rake test

Test run revealed that the new change tracking in Rails 2.1 has broken my forced timestamp update in the Checkvist. I use updated_at field of a checklist object to track timestamp of the latest checklist update (including update in tasks, notes and so on). And sometimes I call checklist.save only to update this updated_at field.

In Rails 2.1 calling the save method does nothing unless ActiveRecord model has actual changes (or this model is notified explicitly that it has changes). So to fix the tests I added updated_at_will_change! before every save call to enforce timestamp update. 

The next problem I encountered was the following: in the initializer of a controller I saved the name of the action in @action_name variable to reference it in a shared view. In Rails 2.1 this code doesn’t work anymore:

• Variable with name @action_name cannot be passed to view
• Method action_name doesn’t work in controller initializer at all
• There is really no need to use @action_name variable, because action_name method works as a helper in view (starting from Rails 2.1)!

After these fixes all tests pass and everything works as it should.

To update the production server, I had to run cap deploy:migrations, because of the change in database schema format.

So now Checkvist uses Rails 2.1.1. 

Import & Export

The recent update to the Checkvist includes a couple of related features: export and import.

Import tasks

A possibility to import tasks from a simple structured text was one of the oldest requests we received from our friends. This is a typical situation - many people keep their to-dos in simple text files placed on the desktop or in some working folder. So it was quite natural to support one-step importing for such tasks.

Click the import link in toolbar and copy/paste your tasks into the input field. If you use indentation for subtasks, the list will be organized hierarchically. Moreover, you can paste a list of items from a Confluence-like wiki - Checkvist will try to do its best to strip confluence markup and to import tasks with appropriate indentation.

Export tasks

For exporting tasks, we provide a number of formats and some options.

Plain text and confluence wiki formats are pretty clear. OPML format is a standard for outliners (and Checkvist is an outliner). OPML format can be used to exchange data with OmniOutliner and some other tools.

HTML format allows to get a simplified view of the page, which can be saved and opened with any HTML-supporting editor, including MS Word, TextEdit and so on.

Exported data might include or exclude user notes and a status of the exported tasks. 

Add new tasks: easier and faster

Checkvist was designed to facilitate the process of adding tasks: when you finish typing and press Enter, a new empty field appears - go on! To remove it, one had to press ESC (or click somewhere outside the field).

Now you can simply navigate up or down the task tree (using arrow keys or mouse). The empty field will disappear automatically.

Saves a keypress, improves user experience! Thanks, Oleg!

We want to call it a “beta release”

When you use a piece of software, every day brings new feature ideas. And when you’re the owner and happy developer of this software, the list of features and ideas (and occasionally, bugs) never ends.

Same with us. The “very minimum” we wanted is already here. With our Checkvist you already can:

• Create a hierarchical task list - be it a to do list, a release plan, or a bibliography.
  
• Brainstorm any ideas together - the tool allows concurrent editing and provides full keyboard support for those who prefer to work faster and do not mouse around the UI.
  
• Share your checklists with others and notify your peers about changes. 
  
• Copy and move any part of your checklist.

But what about the “due date” functionality, marking checklist items with colors or icons, integration with other tools, bookmarklets and dashboard widgets? All’s planned and will follow. 

But for those who’s striving for a collaborative and highly interactive outliner, or a sharable checklist, or both, like we did - it’s already here. We’ll be happy if you try it and tell us what you think. 

More people, collaboration transparency and UI modes

Basically, all falls in two parts: features valuable for individual users (like mobile device support, time and calendar integration, etc), and features aimed to facilitate collaboration: commenting on tasks, seeing who changes what and when and receiving notifications not only by email.

As usual, we started with things absolutely necessary even “yesterday”. 

Who when what.  As soon as we have shared checklists between 3 or more people, we must understand who did what (and, occasionally, when - because tasks hierarchy doesn’t always reflect the real consequence of work).

Obviously, the information about the author, time and type of change is auxiliary. We do not want it to interfere with the real content (which is tasks) all the time. 

But doesn’t it mean that we are facing the necessity to introduce modes (details on | details off)? But modes are evil. Moreover scrolling to the top of the page to switch on the details mode - and then switch it off - is not a good idea either. 

Decision is rather simple: combine all variations without polluting the UI:

• the “details on” mode is controlled by holding the CTRL key down. Release it - and the mode is off. Usually this is all you need to understand the work flow of your team.
• “details on” link in the toolbar which enables you to switch the mode permanently. Might be useful when you add and edit many tasks and want to keep the context without holding CTRL.
• Unfortunately, we were unable to make CTRL-trick working in Safari 3.0. So please upgrade to 3.1 if you want to try this.

Implicit AJAX page update. So we always see the latest version of the task list. Very important, especially for the brainstorming seances! Tasks updated by your peers will be temporary highlighted after the page update. 

What’s next?

• Comments (or notes) - otherwise we mix real tasks with all kinds of additional info coming from all people collaborating on this checklist.
• Shortlist - a combo of tasks from all available checklists which I select for immediate work. Should the shortlist be tied to some date or not is still an open question.

We hope to release a new version every week or so, and want each one to have new features - the ones we and our users need most. 

Oh, yes: if by any means you think we chose the wrong features, not the ones you need, the answer is SCREAM LOUDER. And we might alter the plans for the next version!

Ripe to invite more people

So far we used our interactive checklist tool almost only in-house. We develop it for ourselves, and it helps us in our nomadic life. But now we came to the point when we need some feedback from other users.

Many new features are waiting in queue to be implemented, and we’d like to hear what would you like to see in this tool.

So. If you like to use to-do lists (or checklists or any other GTD techniques), please leave a comment, and we’ll send you an invitation.

Hosting

We’ve finally decided on the hosting provider. After some troubles with VPSLink (including slow access, unexpected reboots, lazy support) we turned to SliceHost. 

Now it will remember

Yes, now you won’t have to log in each time you access checklists.