Are you an irresistible creature with an insatiable love for the dead… bugs? Well, grab your bug hunter crossbow, because we need you to test some big technological changes in GTG so that we can confidently release version 0.5 sometime soon (way before the year end, ideally).
Synchronizing your tasks across devices using CalDAV
A new synch backend/plugin was developed by Mildred during the summer. I think that’s super cool and it will probably be useful to many of you! I will now let this thematic tweet speak for itself (so that you can retweet it too today):
It would be great to have many adventuring early-adopters try out this feature. See the details (and report issues) in this ticket. This has not yet been merged into the main branch of the Git version of GTG, as I would like to have more people testing it before it is included by default in what will become a stable GTG release. Please indicate your success or failures by voting on this comment.
Changes related to the local file format data storage
In an attempt to rule out the possibility of our XML file format being the cause of GTG’s performance problems that occur when you have multiple hundreds of tasks (I have a thousand), Diego ported GTG’s XML storage backend to LXML, which is reportedly 40 times faster.
- Unfortunately, that was not the silver bullet; the performance issues remained, but at least now we can rule out XML (and the task editor, see below) as suspects, and we can move on to a different part of the problem.
- We suspect our performance woes have something to do with sorting in liblarch, or perhaps deeper: maybe it’s all GtkTreeView/GtkTreeModel’s fault? Who knows.
- Do you take pride in optimizing the sh!t out of GTK applications? Do you have experience in duck-taping a jetpack onto a turtle? Join the party! Your help is more than welcome in investigating our performance problems and devising potential fixes. We will owe you beer and candy.
In addition to the LXML port, another area where Diego brought down the might of his code refactoring skills is the new “task editor” backend and view renderer, which includes a bunch of new features and refinements such as support for subheadings (with the “#” markdown syntax), the use of GTK checkboxes to represent subtasks, tag highlight colors that match the tag’s color, and a bunch of bugfixes. It was also envisioned as a way to address one of the performance issues I theorized about. This is what it looks like:
And as if that wasn’t enough, Diego set out to redesign the XML file format from a new specification devised with the help of Brent Saner (proposal episodes 1, 2 and 3). The new file format is not yet merged into master, and we consider it quite experimental. If you’re feeling courageous and are looking for a bug hunting challenge, back up your data (really) before trying it out with the “file_format_2” branch (which you can see in the current list of branches).
As you can imagine, Diego’s changes are all major, invasive technological changes (particularly the proposed file format change), and they would benefit from extensive testing by everybody before 0.5 happens. I’ve done some pretty exhaustive testing before he merged his first two branches of course, but I’m only human, and it is possible that issues might remain. To make testing easier, a snapshot of the current git version has been packaged as a Flatpak package, available here. As for the third (file format) branch, we’d like to have more people testing it with copies of “real data” before we feel confident about merging it, so you’ll have to build the git version yourself instead of using the flatpak. So please grab GTG’s git version ASAP, with a copy of your data (see the instructions in the README, including the “Where is my user data and config stored?” section), and torture-test it to make sure everything is working properly, and report issues you may find (if any).
Other ongoing improvements
There have been countless bug fixes and improvements going on in recent months, here are a few that I can remember from the top of my head:
- The main window’s previously active tab/mode is now restored when you launch the application.
- Task windows no longer all reopen on launch when you shutdown the PC without closing GTG first.
- There is a setting in GTG’s preference now to specify whether you are using a dark theme or not, so that GTG can adapt its colors accordingly. From what I am told, it seems GNOME still doesn’t have a mechanism for applications to know for certain if the user’s system is using a dark theme, or to connect to a signal when this changes…
- Izidor Matusov made a surprise appearance to nuke the pyxdg dependency from orbit
- Diego landed the new icon, along with a nighty version of it. I mourn the pixel-perfectness of the oldschool bitmap icon, but there are worse things going on in 2020 😉
- The about dialog now properly shows the application icon
- Parent tasks automatically close their window when you click to open a subtask, which makes that consistent with closing the subtask’s window when you click “Open parent”
- Neui started by working on the German translation, then quickly got addicted and started fixing a bunch of papercuts in the code! Among other things, Neui removed dbus-python in favor of gdbus, made the plugins’ “about” text translatable, documented the contribution process for translators, and various other things.
- New Swedish and Hungarian translation updates have been contributed!
- Francisco Lavin fixed the Hamster plugin! Productivity metric rodents rejoice! Please test this thing.
- Recurring tasks. Holy shit.
More great things to come.
P.s.: I realized today that I totally forgot to mention this in the context of GTG: I have a personal news announcement mailing list where I send out notifications about my new blog posts (with a short hand-crafted summary), as courtesy to my readers. Over the past 12 months, I have sent 5 such emails (so, not exactly a deluge), and they have so far all had something to do with GTG. If you’re afraid of missing some news about GTG, or don’t have time to be following every ticket and every tweet, feel free to subscribe to my mailing list. Details and subscription form can be found here (that page sucks, I know, I need to write something simpler).
You can check out my main website, find me on Twitter or Mastodon or subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Comments
One response to “Spooky GTG features to try out for Halloween 2020”
Awesome stuff!
Thank you and everyone else for the great work.