Working with Tasks

A project's window has two main elements. On the left is a textual outline, listing the tasks that make up the project in a hierarchy—each task can have any number of subtasks, and each subtask any number of sub-subtasks, and so on. On the right a graphical view shows a timebar for each task, giving you a graphical picture of when tasks begin and end and their relationship to each other.

Up to this point, Juggle offers a combination of an outliner and a calendar. However, its real power comes when you need to change the timing of a task. In most real-world situations, changing the timing of one task means you need to change the timing of others. For example, suppose you plan to visit Amsterdam for three days and then Luxembourg for two days. If travel timetables force you to delay your arrival in Amsterdam, you'll need to change Luxembourg's timing too. The more tasks are connected together, the more tedious it becomes to change each individually. Juggle lets you link tasks so that moving one will, if necessary, move others automatically. Juggle in fact provides three different ways of linking tasks:

1. •A task and its subtasks move as a group . This is logical. If you planned to visit a certain museum on the second day of your Amsterdam visit, you expect this to be delayed by a day if the whole Amsterdam visit is delayed by a day.
   

2. •A ‘one way coupling’ models a situation where task B cannot start until after task A has finished, but does not necessarily have to start immediately after A. For instance, on a photographic assignment, you cannot logically download the pictures until after you have taken them, but you do not have to do so immediately after the shoot finishes. Juggle would only push back the 'download' task if the 'shoot' task was pushed back so far that its new end was later than the time originally set for the start of the download.
   

3. •A ‘two way coupling’, by contrast, models a case where tasks are chained together so that B must immediately follow A. You would typically use this in a project where the overall project must be completed in the shortest possible time so you do not want to leave unnecessary slack between sequential tasks.
   

On the other hand, there may be tasks which must begin or end at a specific time. For example, if you must hand in your project thesis by 21 December, you do not want this date to be inadvertently moved when you move one of the tasks that makes up the project. Juggle therefore allows you to lock either the start or the end or the duration of a project (or all three).

The combination of all these things—the grouping of task and subtasks, one-way and two-way couplings and locks—gives great power in being able to make changes to a project quickly with consequential changes being reflected automatically. back

Exporting to iCal

Juggle allows you to export a project to iCal. In iCal, tasks show up as events in a calendar that has the same name as the top level task in your project. You can select which tasks you wish to export—you do not have to export all of them.

Note that, in this version, it is a simple one-way export, not a synchronisation. If you subsequently make changes to the events in iCal, those changes will not be reflected in your Juggle project. back

Customisable interface settings

A number of interface features help make viewing and working with projects clearer and easier. Individual tasks or groups of tasks can be given their own colour, so that their relationship is more obvious. The colour of the background can also be changed project by project. A time grid lets you see the exact time or date of a task. When dragging tasks to change their timing, the drag proceeds in steps, whose size you can select (eg, hours or days), but if required you can drag steplessly. A popup menu lets you set the status of each task individually, and you can add your own status types. Dates, times and durations can be displayed in a wide range of formats. The timebar view can be zoomed horizontally, so you can zoom in to make fine adjustments and zoom out to see more of the project's timespan; you can also fit the entire project in the window. Row heights can also be changed. back