[zargron]

Excellent comments xja.

Starting with your concerns as to whether UR is able to cope with project/task manager functionality. I'll take a punt here by suggesting that you know in your heart that UR is able to cope with it - otherwise you wouldn't have persevered with UR for so long. What you are asking for is a specific interface enhancement that you feel would make your experience with UR take a huge leap forward.

You can already do some pretty comprehensive filtering of completed, priority, flagged and next due tasks in UR. What frustrates you is being forced to see the results of your filtering in a flat list. You would love to see the results in an outline format.

For a long time you have been using UR to build up your own unique way of handling project management. You have become very familiar and comfortable with the outlined view of your information. Seeing it as a flat list robs you of familiarity, comfort and obviously the organisational power that comes with an outlined data view. No matter how hard you try to force yourself to work with the search results pane, you end up going back to the data explorer pane. You waste valuable mental energy manually separating the wheat from the chaff.

(Oops – there I go rabbiting on again… )

I spent a lot of time with similar (albeit a little different) suggestions a long time ago but to no avail. Unfortunately due to personal time constraints right now, I don't have the time to fully engage in a detailed iterative discussion of how tree filtering could work (I'll defer to my previous posts from long ago).

You don’t get off that easily. If you want this facility bad enough, allocate 15 minutes as follows:
--- 5 mins = read my proposal;
--- 5 mins = read it again making note of exactly 5 criticisms;
--- 5 mins = post those 5 remarks in this thread.

…maybe Kinook can find the ideal way to implement (since we are not familiar with how the code is designed, it is difficult and pointless for us to suggest approaches that are easier to implement…

All I can suggest to you and others is that you assume UR is based on high quality software design principles. Basically this means you assume it is very modularised with minimal dependency between each module. For example, assume that each pane is a separate object that has a carefully crafted low dependency on any other pane. Assume each toolbar has little or no dependency on any other toolbar. Assume importing and exporting has “no” dependency on printing and visa versa. If would be nice, (but very rarely happens), if the software vendor conveys dependency problems when responding to suggestions.

If anyone else uses UR as a project/task manager, I would be interested to know if they would find such capabilities to be useful. If no one else uses UR as a project/task manager, I wonder if that is because these capabilities are not possible.

Amongst other things, I use UR as a “project manager”. I’ve started to package up my “project management” implementation in preparation for submitting to the forum at the end of August 2008.