What’s going on with GNOME To Do

Aye folks! Since a few weeks ago, GNOME To Do saw quite a big number of changes. As some of you may not be strict git followers, a good review of the latest changes may come in handy. Let’s go!

A new list view

Yeah, that’s it – GNOME To Do now has a grid and list views of tasklists. A list view is very useful when you have many tasklists. Check this out:

Captura de tela de 2016-01-31 18-49-34
The traditional grid view
Captura de tela de 2016-01-31 18-49-55
The new list view

 

I’m expecting some input on it, as I strongly believe this is not the ideal UI for the list view. For example, it’d be nice to display the number of tasks each list have. Anyway, a small new feature was added as well – task headers.

Task headers on Scheduled panel

Since I started using Todoist, I absolutely fell in love with it’s organization of tasks. Seriously, Todoist designers, you’re really skillfull. Congratulations! So I decided that To Do also needed something similar to that, and here’s the result:

Captura de tela de 2016-01-31 18-58-21
Not perfect yet, but at least working.

Hope this will be useful! Now, the single most important thing that this release has to offer. Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to the new plugin system.

The plugin system

There are many things we can do with a personal task manager. We can have integration with different sources of tasks like Google Tasks, Remember the Milk, Todoist, among others. We can also have new features like user statistics, Bugzilla integration, different handling of recurrency, et cetera. Imagination is the limit.

Since I’m pretty sure I’m not enough to implement all the crazy ideas, I decided to make To Do handle plugins, so third-party developers can make their own extensions. This work is obviously inspired in the awsome work made by Christian Hergert with GNOME Builder.

A sneak peek:

Captura de tela de 2016-01-31 18-59-50
Ops! Look, you’re not seeing that I’m working on Todoist integration, ok?

I want to take this paragraph just to say a big thank you for Patrick Griffis – he gave an unvaluable help on post-fixups on the plugin system. Please, dudes, applause for him!

The plugin system itself is built on top of Libpeas, which happen to have a really mature API. I took a special care to reimplement the plugin manager window to better fit GNOME HIG, with the hope it’ll serve as an inpiration for the libpeas-gtk widgets to be updated.

And yeah, you’re not being tricked by your eyes. I am working on Todoist integration – you can check it here.

Next posts will explain the new To Do API with an example, fictional plugin. Stay tuned!


7 responses to “What’s going on with GNOME To Do”

  1. Hi,
    I’m using gnome-todo for syncing my tasks via webdav to ownCloud. The ownCloud Web-UI allows nested tasks. Do you also Plan to support this?

    1. I do plan to add subtask support. I just didn’t have enought time to do it.

  2. I would love to be able to work on multiple task lists at the same time, and to move my tasks from a list to another.

    Maybe some kanban inspired view could do the trick.

  3. Checklists similar to what can be found on Opentasks on Android would also be lovely, it uses the task’s notes with this syntax:
    [ ] Milk
    [x] Bread
    but show the list as a a set of very convenient checkboxes.

  4. Wow! Todoist integration is just wow! Thank you!

  5. icewater Avatar

    An extension for shell integration would be great.

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