Why did we wait for so long? What did happen?

As you may know, Luca Invernizzi worked as a GSoC student to integrate GTG with online services in 2010. At that time, we realized that implementing true, solid backends would mean rewriting most of GTG structure.

Over the years, we had in GTG a lot of duplicate code doing nearly the same thing and basically, working around all the complicated stuffs of GTK. This code was completely rewritten and taken out of GTG as a standalone library called liblarch. Most of the work was done by Izidor Matušov during GSoC 2011. Working as a student was not enough for him and Izidor became co-maintainer of both GTG and liblarch in September 2011.

With liblarch out of GTG, we are finally able to concentrate on interesting stuffs like better UI, performance, and tasks related features. Liblarch takes with itself all the boring, crappy bugs like thread management, displaying in GTK, etc.

So, what brings GTG 0.2.9?

Many solved bugs (288) and some new, major features:

True asynchronous experience

No need anymore to wait for tasks to load. Tasks are loaded asynchronously while you can edit already loaded tasks. This should make your GTG experience a lot more enjoyable.

Backends

Backends allow you to store your tasks on online services. Currently, only stable backends are enabled:

  • Tomboy, Gnote - consider your notes tasks
  • Launchpad, Mantis BugTracker - import your assigned bugs
  • Twitter, Identica - import your tasks from your Twitter/Identica feeds

twitter.png

Google Tasks backend started by Madhumitha Viswanathan as her GSoC 2011 and Remember the Milk backend are not stable enough for everyday usage. They will be stabilized and shipped with GTG 0.3.

Search

You can make search through the quickadd bar. Searches are automatically bookmarked what makes a new way to organize and work with your tasks. This was done by João Ascenso as part of his GSoc 2011.

search.png

GTCli and improved DBus interface

Bryce Harrington contributed a command line tool GTCli. Do you need find a task? GTCli may be handy. It communicates with GTG through DBus. There were several changes to DBus interface including CamelCasing methods, so you can call GTG from Vala. Don't forget to update your scripts!

Now that we consolidated our infrastructure, we really want to release more often. For 0.3, we will fix bugs, improve backends and if possible, work a bit on the performance.

How can I help?

First, GTG is hiring. We are looking for a Django/CSS/JS developer to continue the work on the GTG web interface started by Karlo Jež as part of GSoC 2010 but never finished.

We are also looking for a communication manager who will update our blog regularly, take screenshots and hang out with developers to advertise new features we are working on.

Alternatively, you can package GTG and Liblarch for your distribution.

You can contact us through our mailing list or Google+ page.

Your feedback is welcomed!

Did you found a bug? Doesn't something behave as you would expect? Report a bug!

Do you want to share your opinion or just say hello? Use our mailing list or Google+ page.