I’ve made the first beta releases of Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7 available. I’m going to take the advice of my customers and release the .7 versions with the current features rather than continuing to add features and further delay the releases.

New features in the .7 versions include:

• Tagging!
• Adding closing notes when marking a task complete is now an option.
• When marking a task complete and adding closing notes, you can also add time spent on the task.
• Font size is now a preference.
• The e-mail to task now works properly with quoted-printable e-mails.
• Additional changes to improve MS SQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.
• Lots of little enhancements and bug fixes.

There is a nice enhancement to the tagging features in this release: the integration of the Yahoo! Auto-Complete library. I’m pretty pleased with the way this works right now and look forward to your feedback on it.

While pre-releases are partly a way to catch bugs and issues that my testing can gloss over (internationalization issues, cross-database issues, etc.), they are also a chance for you to provide feedback on how things work while they can still be changed with minimal impact.

Most importantly, this is the time when the tagging experience can be changed if it needs to be. There is still time for feedback about how the tagging works (for example, does there need to be an option to turn it off?), how the tags are shown, etc. to be incorporated before the release. I’ve been through over a half-dozen implementations thus far already. 🙂

I’m also curious to get feedback from you GTD fans out there. I believe that the combination of the hierarchy and the tagging make Tasks Pro™ and Tasks ideal for the GTD approach. I’m interested to hear if there are changes, tweaks, etc. that could improve it.

While enough Tasks Pro™ customers have provided feedback that I’m fairly confident that the Tasks Pro™ beta doesn’t have any real zinger bugs, this is the first pre-release of Tasks 2.7 and (though the changes have been ported from Tasks Pro™ and should be pretty save) there could be some annoying bugs in there. My standard pre-release disclaimer applies:

Let me stress that this is a pre-release software. It almost certainly has some bugs, and could behave in unexpected ways. Make a backup before you upgrade. There is also no documentation yet for the new features that have been added. You have been warned. 🙂

The beta mailing lists are still down from the server meltdown, so please use the Beta Discussion forums to discuss these pre-releases with other customers.

UPDATE: If you are using recurring tasks, you’ll want to apply this patch to Tasks 2.7b1.

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.