[1]Vancouver – Tasktop Technologies [1], creators of Eclipse Mylyn [2] and the task-focused interface, have announced the release of Mylyn 3.1 and the enterprise ready Tasktop Pro 1.4 [3]. New features in Tasktop include the highly anticipated capability to automate time tracking [4] by synchronizing actual time spent working with JIRA [5], Bugzilla [6] and other popular issue trackers, saving developers from needing to manually create time sheets. Tasktop 1.4 also includes new integrations such as Microsoft Exchange server support, and the ability to work with threaded Outlook and Gmail conversations alongside their issue tracker within the IDE, even while offline. A major new feature in Mylyn, the open source foundation of Tasktop, is integrated wiki markup editing for authoring both tasks and user guides.
“With Mylyn, we have laid the foundation for ALM integrations with the Eclipse IDE.” Said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and Mylyn project lead. “This release of Tasktop demonstrates the breadth of ALM solutions that now support the task-focused interface’s benefits such as offline editing and the focusing features that make it so much easier for developers to work on large systems. It also shows how making tasks central to the IDE enables new developer productivity features such as automatic time tracking. The ecosystem of Mylyn integrations is starting to create a network effect where productivity gains are multiplying as more tools and languages are integrated with the task-focused interface.”
Tasktop and Mylyn provide seamless integration between Eclipse and ALM tools
Tasktop and Mylyn provide access to tasks from a team’s ALM solution from a task list integrated with Eclipse. When a task is activated, work activity is tracked, enabling the Eclipse interface to be focused on only the source code that is relevant for the task at hand. Countless developers have attested that this has provided them with the biggest productivity boost since code completion by minimizing the need to repeatedly search and scroll to find relevant code. This task-focused programming paradigm is now supported by dozens of Mylyn-integrated ALM solutions including JIRA, Rally, CollabNet, Bugzilla, SVN and CVS.
This release of Tasktop Pro includes many ALM integration enhancements, including:
* Outlook & Exchange message threading to keep conversations in one place and the ability to convert Outlook email threads into bugs and issues, enabling developers to bridge between email, calendars and issue trackers.
* Complete support for Mozilla’s recent Bugzilla 3.2 release, including offline access. Custom fields used by many enterprises to track additional information are now supported in the integrated rich editor.
* Wiki-style task and documentation formatting with support for Atlassian Confluence syntax.
* Improved instant session restore of relevant web pages in Tasktop and Firefox, with improved task-focused browsing to facilitate development of web applications.
This release builds on existing integrations of Mylyn with development tools including Eclipse, through which Mylyn has averaged over 900,000 downloads per month.
Mylyn 3.1 supports rich task formatting with wiki markup
Mylyn’s new WikiText sub-project supports rich formatting of task descriptions and comments using lightweight wiki markup. Now it’s easy to add formatting to highlight important information, use headings to break up long content, and create more readable bulleted lists. The markup itself is formatted as you type and you can switch to preview mode to see the final result. Several popular wiki markup languages are supported including MediaWiki, Atlassian Confluence, Textile, and TracWiki.
Tasktop 1.4 makes time tracking painless
Developers can use Tasktop to automatically generate a custom report of how much time was spent on each task. Tasktop is the first technology with which developers voluntarily activate tasks, since they get the benefit of focus when indicating which bug or feature they work on. In addition to providing time tracking automation, Tasktop gives developers facilities to explicitly adjust tasks and times as needed to account for meetings, etc. After adjusting times, developers can synchronize their time logs with supported project tracking tools such as JIRA and Bugzilla.
Tasktop now guarantees developer productivity gains
Tasktop’s task-focused interface makes developers more productive by organizing their work around tasks and showing only the relevant information for each task. This reduces the need to repeatedly search and scroll for information while minimizing the impact of interruptions because information relevant to each task can be instantly recalled. These benefits have been validated, with statistical significance, by peer-reviewed university research, enabling Tasktop Technologies to provide this unique productivity guarantee [7].