Suggestion: Change color gradually while the task becomes due today

[Alexandre Philippe]

I think it would be great to have an option to set not only the color of due today tasks, be also tasks that will be due in the next 2 or 3 days, and using a color that gradually becomes "more red" while the due date is closer to today.

This would enable to see more clearly the most urgent tasks.

Kind regards

Alexandre

[Tony G]

This could be accomplished with UDTs. Click an icon and some external code checks the due date of tasks against today to set the color? Hmm, maybe even with a plugin.

Actually, it seems what you're trying to do is to establish Priority based on due date. There's already a preference for changing color in the Priority column on a gradient scale. Again, a UDT could be used to set priority based on dates and other factors.

You could get the UDT to export tasks, and then run through the exported data to work out your criteria. Or, multiple tasks can be selected and passed to a UDT where the IDs are pipe-delimited "|". I don't believe due dates can get passed to a UDT directly, so an external read of task data is still required.

If you have coding skills this becomes trivial. If you don't then perhaps you can ask a friend - the code isn't tough.

HTH
T

[Alexandre Philippe]

Hello Tony,

Thanks for the ideas.

But this functionality is supposed to check automatically the due date of the current list of tasks each time the list loads.

Can you imagine someone pushing the UDT button each time he wants the special colors to appear ? That would be too much bother for the expected gain of productivity.

I noticed there are two different colors for "due today" and "due dates" in the settings.
So this would be a coherent enhancement of this already existing functionality.

Kind regards,

Alexandre

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[Alexandre Philippe]

PS : I use a more subtle priority system that what you described.

It is a combination of the fields priority, start dates & due dates

Kind regards,

Alexandre

[Tony G]

I agree that ease-of-use is important. This is just another man's opinion but I'm thinking auto changes to dates or other fields could also cause startling=confusing color updates. Because we're talking about colors changing based on days, it's less likely that the user will need to invoke a toolbar button frequently, and more likely that they'll just need to do it once per day.

There is also a matter of the Time as well as the Date: A simple comparison of the internal values can't be used. The date value must be extracted from the due date and compared to the date value for today. Otherwise if it's 2pm now and a task is due tomorrow at 3pm, it's technically more than 1 day away, so is that colored as a 1-day priority or a 2 day priority?

And I understand that in your case priority can't be used here. But what I'm seeing is that with priority becoming invalid for your purposes, due date could easily not be an alternative coloring criterion for someone else. For this reason I'm suggesting that some thought be put into implementing this in a way that's more future-proof. For example, with a plugin that gets updated on every task change, a custom calculation can be inserted to apply a 0-10 weight of desired factors, with a task color being returned based on that weight. Unfortunately plugins don't currently work like that, by default anyway but it's possible to make it work. Doing it like this takes a lot of load off of Dan And gets us a more versatile feature.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts, no "rebuttal" intended.

T