• It does have a (lame) name now: Bubug (supposedly stands for “Barely Unconventional Bug Untracking Gizmo”. Whatever).
• It has improved a lot here and there, and it now has authentication and multi-user support, not to mention a lot of UI bling bling and goodies.
• The development has moved to BitBucket, an excellent free service built by ex-Opera’s Jesper Noehr, where you can follow it more easily, comment on, check the Wiki, fork, or whatever you want. You even have a screenshot there ;-)

As you can guess from the last point, for this project I’ve been using Mercurial instead of Git. Although I certainly don’t have sophisticated needs, so YMMV (heavily), I find Git more pleasant to use. Which is kind of surprising, because I always thought that Git’s UI was a pain in the ass. Oh, well. That doesn’t mean that Mercurial is hard to use, though. I think it’s more that I’m used to Git now, and there are a couple of things that I find more convenient: the coloured diff (possible in Hg, but you have to install some extension for it, and only thinking about installing some Python extension that is not even packaged for Debian makes me want to switch to Git) and the staging area are the most important ones I can think of.

So, if you thought I had abandoned the TODO application thing, you were wrong ;-) If you’re interested, have a look at the Bubug BitBucket project page, download it, play with it, and tell me what you think.

1. Possibility to “postpone” a task, so it doesn’t appear in the main view for a defined time.
2. Possibility to associate a task to a “person to nag”.

When you have a lot of small tasks to do, and they are not the kind of things you put in a BTS (say, stuff that you have to do that is not really connected to some project’s code) I think these two features are really useful, and I was surprised that no applications I saw seemed to have those. I mean, don’t people have the same problems as me?

That’s why, as I had mentioned, I started writing my own TODO application: I’d have what I wanted, and I’d learn a thing or two about Merb, DataMapper and jQuery. The application has several design limitations that I used to simplify things, like not having any notion of users (single user app without authentication) or supporting only a “title” for the tasks, without any longer description. It isn’t something I really plan to publish for other people to use (I mean, the code is in my Darcs repo, I’m just not going to make a project page for it or anything like that), so I don’t really care how much it fits other people’s needs :-)

As it is a pet project and I didn’t really mind how long it would take to finish it, I started by making some mockup of the application in HTML (+ a bit of Javascript with jQuery), and once I was happy, I started with the actual design and code. I think some parts of the code are nice, and it has some Ajax sweetness, but I admit I haven’t used it yet for myself: only as a kind of underpowered BTS for the application. Maybe I’ll upload some screenshot some day. In the meantime, feel free to download and try it out ;-)

• Make a TODO application that I actually like (I’ll post about it some other day).
• Learn Merb and DataMapper… and jQuery.

The experience have been roughly half frustrating, half rewarding. It’s fun learning new things, but the documentation for both Merb and DataMapper sucks big time so sometimes I spend much more time than I would like figuring out how to make things work. Don’t get me wrong, the reference documentation looks very complete… but there’s no single source of consistent documentation to learn how things are done. And that’s painful. Moreover, apparenly the API has changed several times (at least before 1.0.0, but it hasn’t been that long since), so a lot of recipes or solutions you find on the internet are simply not valid anymore, which just adds up to the confusion and frustration.

Anyway. The client-side piece of the puzzle, jQuery, has proven to be a very handy, clean, easy-to-use-even-for-non-Javascript-wizards, natural way of writing Javascript. I admit I’m a kind of Javascript-phobe, as I don’t really know more than the basics and never has had the need or inclination to actually learn the language (yeah, my bad, but whatever). And yet, I really like jQuery, so there has to be something there. My favourite feature is the selectors: they’re a very clean way to access elements in a page, and add event handlers or otherwise manipulate them. Also the jQuery Ajax features feel really natural and comfortable to use.

The only problem I have had was using the autocomplete jQuery UI feature. I read the documentation, downloaded the appropriate bits from the jQuery website, included everything in my application, but it just wouldn’t work. After a lot of trial and error (and more frustration), I finally could make it work… using the Javascript files from the demo page (js, css) instead of the latest version from the jQuery download page. I think the problem is that the API has changed (the API apparently documents the older version that they use in the demo page), but I couldn’t figure it out reading the source code, so I just used the older, known-to-work version.