My folks gave me the first season DVD’s of The West Wing for Christmas. I sat and watched the first three episodes tonight. I hadn’t seen the first 2 episodes but I think I caught the third one on first run.

It was the first time in a little while that I just sat and relaxed. With the move and the holidays back to back, time has been a bit scarce. I’ve also been squeezing on some development whenever I’ve had time… anyway, it was nice to sit and do nothing for a few hours.

It was a little sweeter tonight because my mind was able to fully relax. I finally wrapped up development of Tasks Pro 1.0 beta 4. The main feature I added is the ability to select multiple tasks in a list, then modify them (or mark them complete or delete them). This is really handy in the multi-user environment where you may need to re-assign several tasks at once. I expect it will be appreciated by Tasks 2.0 (the upcoming single user release) users as well as they need to escalate or move a group of tasks (or change a bunch of due dates, etc.).

I also went through and re-wrote some of the oldest code in tasks, the code that calculates and sets the parent task completion percentage based on the completion percentage of its sub-tasks. I haven’t benchmarked it yet, but it should be noticably faster. I also re-wrote most of the permissions queries and some of the RSS and iCalendar code.

So far, I have resisted the temptation to re-write the code that displays messages to the user based on their actions (‘This task was saved’, etc.), but I may squeeze that into beta 5. I want to categorize each message as ‘Info’, ‘Warning’ or ‘Error’ and present them accordingly. Unfortunately, there are 90 some odd messages that will then need to be converted… yuck.

More about Tasks Pro beta 5 tomorrow – I had it all written out, but this was all I had saved before my browser crashed. 🙁

Oh, and tasks 1.8.3 beta 1 will be posted when I get back to a high-speed connection. It’s been done since the 23rd, but it doesn’t want to upload through my cell connection.