First, I love nearly all of the enhancements Seth … you absolutely ROCK!

When I first saw the widget to select projects and tasks I thought it was pretty slick, but soon realized that it’s actually less usable than the dual drop-downs.

I commonly used keyboard selection to jump right to the project and task, and it’s now taking quite a bit of extra effort. What used to take a few key presses now takes a click, followed by the inevitable scrolling, followed by another click and more scrolling and then another click. Since the projects and tasks show multiple lines they take up far more vertical screen real estate and I can’t type ahead to jump to items that I know by name.

You claim it takes 50% less mouse clicks than the old method, so maybe I’m missing a shortcut. A click-select-release in a pop-up menu takes only one click for a total of two clicks for both pop-up menus. Even if you count each menu as two clicks the new control requires three clicks and often manual scrolling as well.

Am I alone in hoping for a return to the admittedly less visually appealing but more usable dual drop-downs?

- Dave

p.s. sorry to nitpick; I truly appreciate the hard work you’ve put into the recent upgrades!

David, thanks for the kind words – but the dual-dropdowns will not be returning.

It might take you 2 clicks, but for the majority of users it takes 2 clicks per selection, not to mention scrolling (possible 3, for a total of 6). The behavior is different depending on what OS and browser you use. Our new method is consistent across all browsers and all operating systems.

Additionally, the old way of working absolutely sucked for large numbers of tasks. There was no concept of sorting tasks by rank or alpha, it was always alpha. This was confusing a lot of people who would meticulously sort their tasks, only to be confronted with an alpha list when logging time.

Unfortunately I can’t please everyone all of the time with design decisions – but I do try to accommodate the majority. You do bring up a good point about key usage and I think some keyboard enhancement JS is in this widget’s future.

I’ll add it to my enhancements list and circle back around to it.

I suppose it makes more sense, and becomes a bit less annoying after using it a lot. You might also think about just making the dialog a little larger to prevent so much needless scrolling.

Food for thought: I just stumbled on this project selection technique from 37Signals, which looks better than anything else I could’ve dreamed up. Large clickable targets for the five most recent projects, in a fashion that includes the best of your project/task selector and pop-up menus.

Yeah making it larger might be on the agenda. Funny timing on the release of that technique too…I saw that earlier this morning :)

“Might be on the agenda” eh? LOL. Thanks for making the change so quick!

I like to keep you guys off balance sometimes :)