We’ve made a few usability improvements to Pivotal Tracker related to viewing and editing of stories, as well as file attachment handling.
All of the story text fields now automatically expand based on the amount of text entered, and they’ll grow as you type. When you expand a story, you’ll now see the entire story title in one glance, even when it’s long. Text fields for story description, comments, and tasks expand as well.
Working with file attachments got a bit easier, too. It now takes fewer clicks to attach a file, and you can upload multiple files at once. In browsers that support it, you can drag files on to the story directly from your desktop. Finally, there’s now a ‘download’ link next to each file attachment, for easier access to the original file.
These are just the first few of a number of usability improvements. Much more is on the way!
As always, we appreciate your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments here, or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.
Thanks for these.
Being able to embed links in descriptions using some markup language (like Textile, or a partial implementation of it) that doesn’t show the full URL, seems like it should be top of your list– always seems like such a strange oversight. Especially automatically turning story id references like [#12345] into links.
Next on the list for me would be the tricky interface for re-ordering tasks.
Thirdly, and more ambitiously, how would you feel about a preference or keyboard shortcut to add new story(ies) to the top of the backlog instead of the top of the icebox?
April 19, 2011 at 6:57 am
I’m really liking the expanding description — thanks for that! No longer expanding by hand as the 1st action when adding a story!!!
But…Since the expanding description field, I’ve noticed that when I am entering the description and alt-tab away (to copy some text, let’s say) and then return via alt-tab, my focus is no longer where it was (inside the text field at a particular position). Then when I click the description, my cursor is at position 1 instead of where I was when I switched away.
April 22, 2011 at 3:04 pm
David – the issue with the description field reverting to read-only on loss of focus will be fixed in the next release, early next week. We’re also putting back the manual resize anchor, and making it work with the auto-resize.
Dan – drag/drop re-ordering tasks is in progress. Thanks for the other suggestions, we’ll keep those in mind as we work through a UX overhaul.
April 22, 2011 at 7:19 pm