Monday, May 12, 2008

Mind Traffic Control now has #tags.

If you use any word beginning with a # when describing a task, the task gets tagged with this word. And once you start tagging, a filter appears to let you filter your queue to present only those tasks which contain the tag.

Not entirely sure I've got the UI right on this one. It is simple, I think. But maybe not obvious, and maybe not in the right place at the moment.

Comments, bug reports, suggestions welcome as always.

BTW : a good thing about the GAE, it is so simple to add new functionality. This was about three hours of development and another 3 of debugging.

The reason for the longish debugging is what looks like a quirk in GAE.

At one point I was using a user object instead of a user email in a query. (I'm using user email's as user id in the database.) You might assume that this would simply fail with some kind of type error. But interestingly it worked on my local machine (somehow in the SDK it looks as though the user object gets correctly coerced into its email) but not on the appspot server where the query always returned nothing.

Read into that what you will.

3 comments:

BillSeitz said...

I can't believe you've gone to the dark side, abandoning WikiWords! :)

Composing said...

He! :-)

But they're not quite the same thing, are they? WikiWords link to instances (eg. pages), whereas tags are for assigning types or classes to things.

Although I guess CategoryCategory implements types *using* WikiWords + search. So maybe my distinction is a bit artificial.

Actually, I *am* thinking of adding InterWiki to MTC.

Composing said...

Another thought, Twitter is like Wiki in that it encourages experimentation with new SmartAscii conventions. It definitely has some wiki-nature.