Notices

I've used Task Coach as well. It has a slightly smaller feature set than Bonsai, which I have used in Palm for about ten years, so it's hard for me to say that its feature set cannot be brought to a handheld. To me, a powerful feature set and simple do not go together; however, simple interfaces can be made for powerful apps. It's a matter of design effort. I tire of using app.s that are several generations simpler than what I am accustomed to using.

When I purchased my N810, Nokia hailed it as an "Internet Tablet," something not a smart phone. My N900 very much looks and acts like a smart phone, and to be honest, many of the apps. look like offerings I could get on other smart phones. Where's the full advantage of a powerful OS when the apps. being offered are similar to those on the iPhone?

Jurop, perhaps we are talking about a similar feature set. For me, the ability to create hierarchical drag-and-drop lists is critical. Similarly, I cannot envision a powerful task manager without the ability to set dates, reminders, notes (or descriptions), categories, sorting and progress. If we include effort, it seems that we'd also be including progress, and budget. The ability to set prerequisites moves Task Coach toward being a simple project manager. The default screen doesn't need to show more than 3 columns; however, the ability to select those columns would be incredibly useful.

If some of us simply want a task manager that is somewhat more powerful than what is available, why not join one of the many task manager projects and push it in that direction? And as for porting Task Coach to QT, I don't really see the point, given that Task Coach is already available for many platforms. wxPython has been already been run on Maemo in a test environment. To me, that would be the logical way to go.

In fact I never said to completely drop the data model behind TaskCoach as this is independent from the view aspects. Therefore there still can be task and category trees as well as effort, dependencies etc. It is the view which is not very suitable. Example: The task properties dialog needs a specific width to operate properly and even on my wide screen laptop it has too many tabs to be visibile without clicking on the extension arrow on the right. This is not very usable.
The concept of various MDI view is nice for a desktop but this is something Maemo does not provide. In former releases there were tabs iirc which would be more appropriate but those have been removed some time ago.
For lots of use cases you have to open a context menu or apply keyboard shortcuts which is cumbersone on such a small screen.

My proposal is an app which uses the taskcoach model and applies this model in various views. QT is extremely helpful in model/view areas so this would be my weapon of choice. This approach also enables an iterative scenario in which the model is visualised step by step.
Using Qt has another advantage- think about Symbian, Windows Mobile, MeeGo, etc. some day.

wxpython is a nice framework but it is highly designed for desktop applications. There is a reason why wxpython for Maemo has stalled at some stage and I suspect it is the hildonisation which causes this.

Of course I would not mind having TaskCoach and wxpython but my usage would depend on how well it performs under mobile scenarios. Meaning no stylus in 80% of the use cases.

@offels: Ahhhhhh, I see. I think we've been saying much the same thing in different ways. Thanks much for 'splaining the advantages of porting to QT. I would be eager to help out in this direction as well. My Python skills are rusty, but I can still test and read/edit code, etc,, and I have written much documentation on a professional and open source basis.

I agree with 100% of what you said. Thanks for being patient.

I'd like to help in porting TC to qt with pysid & qml. Some examples are already there:
http://qt.gitorious.org/pyside/pysid...es/declarative

We'd have to start with a subset of TC features but include sync from the beginning in order to use the TC desktop version for advanced project planning.

For Notes and Tasks, I can't see a better way. Wx on N900 is no fun. QML the future.

Ah, great. I already had some ideas but currently another project is standing in my way (besides that Python is not my friend and I love C++ more ).
I suggest to start by using a QXMLListModel to read the TC file in and use an XPath/XQuery to extract the task items from it.
Nokia has some examples in their QML doc how to do this (except the exact query but I might be able to help out here).

Then we can attach views to it (eg. a QTreeView) to show the task structures with attributes.
Later appropriate delegates will make the appearance a bit more convenient.
A Filter proxy model between the XMLListModel and the view will allow to filter by dates, priorities, etc. but this is more of the advanced stuff.

Your work is appreciated.

Oliver

Threema, I want to help in any way I can. It's been years since I did any Python, and that wasn't much then. I can do testing, documentation, and possibly help out with use cases.

I'm glad you're thinking about taking this up.

hey there guys,
i know it's long time ago but i wanted to see if there's any progress with the task coach app. I know a little bit of python but no c++, but if it helps and if i can help, just show me and i see what i can do. everything for a better n900 ;-)

Just in case anyone is still looking for Task Coach for our devices, check out my attempt at it called Task Poach.

Written for the 2012 Coding Competition so not much time to get lots of features. Mainly just the basic functions of tasks and categories implemented, but an example of what could be done on our devices.

Currently only for n900, but I may try to add support for others if I can lay my hands on some of them for testing.