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Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

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Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#61

Post by andrey_utkin »

dksidana wrote: post #24
DaveWM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, when I doing the initial research for Intention I found that a lot of people had had the same idea, but nobody had implemented it.

To me, task management can be represented as tree and thats what most popular tools have it as well

Most of the time, but not always.

It is somewhat typical for certain activities to "feed into" multiple high-level goals or needs. Trees can't express that, so you get into activity categorization problem. Trivial example: are you cycling your way to work because it contributes to your health, is fun or because it enables you to do your job duties? Obviously it's all of that. None of that matters until you try to introduce some "time budget" for different spheres of your life, and with the tree concept you realize that the results don't make much sense.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#62

Post by toyg »

DaveWM wrote: post #2

Hey HN! I've just launched my latest side-project, Intention. Intention's an app to help you achieve your goals. The idea is that you create a graph of goals/tasks (intentions), with your high-level goals at the top and actionable tasks at the bottom. That allows you to create a collection of actionable tasks you can work on, and to visualise how they relate to your high-level goals. Any feedback would be much apprec…

Interesting. Some feedback (i only tried the webapp, from ios):

- i’d find more intuitive to have “the big prize” at the bottom, so i can work my way down by priority. Maybe an option?

- i should be able to delete the root node, which would scrap the entire hierarchy. Give us a big warning but have the feature.

- i should be able to edit nodes from the graph - even just by clicking an icon that sends me to the list-item view

- this approach is good for one-off tasks but doesn’t seem to fit recurring tasks. For example, if i want to lose weight, i have to meal-plan once every week. Either i keep adding the task manually (bleh) or i cannot deal with it here.

- maybe have a bit of song & dance when you tick off the root node.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#63

Post by andrey_utkin »

The concept of viewing activities as DAG is going to be huge and ubiquitous, I think.

This applies to any activities of humans, organizations and computer systems, and hybrids of those three. One of the most fascinating epiphanies I've had recently is exactly that the purposeful behavior of these three kinds of actors can be decomposed as DAG with a relationship meaning "contributes to fulfillment of a need".

So congrats on the launch to the author, and expect a lot of competition, including me :)

I am working on a FOSS tool storing TODO actions and activities in an SQL table, and enabling DAG relations between entries. https://github.com/andrey-utkin/taskdb/wiki

I have actually built my DAG (or, as I like to call it, a semilattice) going all the way up to fundamental categories of needs as described by Maslow.

Sorry that I have no live demo container or juicy screenshots yet, that will be in place in a week or two, please email me at (my HN username) at fastmail.com if you want an update when I publish the containerized demo system.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#64

Post by DaveWM »

lhdj wrote: post #60
DaveWM wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I got TaskGraph running locally, but couldn't figure out how to create a node. Seems like it's built on the same basic idea as Intention though - tasks structured into a graph. I'd be very interested to hear how you get on with TaskGraph.

Shift-Click to create a node. Then click on the node to modify it's attributes. Shift click and drag to other nodes to create dependencies. The dependencies should auto-snap into place. The algorithm used for this works most of the time. Our current taskgraph at openquery has ~50 nodes and it works quite well. I don't have cycle-checking so be careful or your browser tab will blow up.

Got it, the app works well. I did consider using `react-digraph` for Intention, but the UX seems very focused on desktop (lots of clicking and dragging) and I wanted something more mobile focused.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#65

Post by DaveWM »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #63

The concept of viewing activities as DAG is going to be huge and ubiquitous, I think. This applies to any activities of humans, organizations and computer systems, and hybrids of those three. One of the most fascinating epiphanies I've had recently is exactly that the purposeful behavior of these three kinds of actors can be decomposed as DAG with a relationship meaning "contributes to fulfillment of a need". So cong…

Haha looking forward to the competition ;). TaskDB sounds good, I'll keep an eye on it. Your approach to keeping the entire history of the graph is a good one, I'm using Datomic in Intention mainly for this reason.

I do hope DAGs become more commonplace, I think a lot of areas (e.g. project management) could benefit from using them.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#66

Post by andrey_utkin »

DaveWM wrote: post #65
andrey_utkin wrote: post #63

The concept of viewing activities as DAG is going to be huge and ubiquitous, I think. This applies to any activities of humans, organizations and computer systems, and hybrids of those three. One of the most fascinating epiphanies I've had recently is exactly that the purposeful behavior of these three kinds of actors can be decomposed as DAG with a relationship meaning "contributes to fulfillment of a need". So cong…

Haha looking forward to the competition ;). TaskDB sounds good, I'll keep an eye on it. Your approach to keeping the entire history of the graph is a good one, I'm using Datomic in Intention mainly for this reason. I do hope DAGs become more commonplace, I think a lot of areas (e.g. project management) could benefit from using them.

True, I don't see why Intention and taskdb couldn't grow into enterprise, or groupware project management systems. Sometimes I'm even thinking about peer to peer exchange protocols for this kind of data (e.g. if your spouse or collaborator uses it too).

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#67

Post by foolinaround »

this is really nice...

Can a few pre-made templates be shared?

Folks can then then 'fork' it out github-style.

Eg, financial independence - it has a couple of sub-topics - like understand current state, identify goals, etc... and then finally an actionable set of tasks.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#68

Post by DaveWM »

foolinaround wrote: post #67

this is really nice... Can a few pre-made templates be shared? Folks can then then 'fork' it out github-style. Eg, financial independence - it has a couple of sub-topics - like understand current state, identify goals, etc... and then finally an actionable set of tasks.

That's a really good idea, I'll add it to the roadmap. If you have any suggestions for specific templates, please send them over to me (my email's on my profile).

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#69

Post by stewbrew »

DaveWM wrote: post #29
seanhunter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which this can also have. One concrete action could contribute to two intermediate goals which in turn could both contribute to one parent high-level goal (giving a diamond).

That's exactly right. Each intention can have multiple parents, which I believe makes the topology a DAG. The only constraints are that you must have exactly 1 root node, each node must have at least 1 parent (apart from the root node), and that you can't have cycles.

Ok, I missed that.

Re: Show HN: Intention – DAG Todo App

#70

Post by DaveWM »

toyg wrote: post #62
DaveWM wrote: post #2

Hey HN! I've just launched my latest side-project, Intention. Intention's an app to help you achieve your goals. The idea is that you create a graph of goals/tasks (intentions), with your high-level goals at the top and actionable tasks at the bottom. That allows you to create a collection of actionable tasks you can work on, and to visualise how they relate to your high-level goals. Any feedback would be much apprec…

Interesting. Some feedback (i only tried the webapp, from ios): - i’d find more intuitive to have “the big prize” at the bottom, so i can work my way down by priority. Maybe an option? - i should be able to delete the root node, which would scrap the entire hierarchy. Give us a big warning but have the feature. - i should be able to edit nodes from the graph - even just by clicking an icon that sends me to the list-i…

Thanks very much for the feedback. To respond:

- Is this in the list view or the graph view? I did originally have the list order reversed (i.e. root node at the bottom), but I found it very confusing. I could potentially add a setting to control the order.

- I've tried to avoid deleting nodes where possible. If you delete a parent node, its children will be automatically re-arranged rather than deleted. Could you re-name the root node instead of deleting it?

- Agreed, the graph view is very basic at the moment. I'm looking to make it much more powerful in future.

- I've intentionally ignored recurring tasks for now, because I want to get them right when I do implement them. I'm aware it'd be a nice feature, so I am looking to add it asap.

- Good idea

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