floating point

While my main work recently has been doing research towards my MEng in the Program Analysis Group at MIT’s CSAIL, I’ve been paying attention to the “secret project” from my internship at Best Practical last summer. Most of what I did there was way out in the open, in the public repositories of the request tracker RT, the object-relational database mapper Jifty::DBI, the web framework Jifty, and the distributed version control system SVK (which wasn’t actually part of Best Practical at the time). But we’ve been keeping this project under wraps and in “private beta” until this weekend, when we released…

Hiveminder! Hiveminder is a collaborative task organizer. Sure, there are many other to-do trackers out there. Hiveminder’s biggest strengths are in its intuitive and simple way of letting you set up “… but first” and “… and then” style relationship between tasks and its support for sharing tasks between people, one-on-one and in groups.

Today, when I look at my main “to-do” page, I see the next steps I need to to for my research, the SVK bugs and features I’d like to work on, a reminder to renew the hosting for this website (with a due date of… today… ooh, should deal with that right now… done), all in one spot.

Technology-wise, the Jifty framework we wrote has some very nice advantages. (Disclaimer, or bragging, or something: Jifty was designed mostly by Jesse Vincent (”the boss”), but I did most of the implementation of its first draft. Of course, since then I think every line I wrote has been replaced.) For example, all code that actually changes anything in the database goes through specific “action” objects; while we haven’t finalized a public API for Hiveminder, this means that eventually everything you can do through the site will be achievable via an API, without any special custom coding.

Another nice technical feature in Jifty is the concept of individually-addressable “page regions” inside web pages, which can be updated via AJAX in a single click. This feature is nothing new for AJAXy webpages… until you try Hiveminder again without Javascript and find out that everything still works. Sure, there are a few extra page reloads, and some fancy UI features like drop-down menus can’t be used, but other than that the site works exactly like it does with Javascript… and without Hiveminder’s code having to have any special cases at all. Hell, I just added a comment to a task about an SVK bug using lynx… just because I can.

Of course, I’m being distracted from work now, so I’ll click on the “pag” tag to show only my research-related tasks and get back to editing this paper…