Tasktop Upgrades Mylyn, Tasktop Offerings

Tasktop Technologies, creator of Eclipse Mylyn and its task-focused interface, announced on March 16 the release of Mylyn 3.1 and the "enterprise-ready" Tasktop Pro 1.4.

"New features in Tasktop include the … ability to automate time tracking by synchronizing actual time spent working with JIRA, Bugzilla and other popular issue trackers, saving developers from needing to manually create time sheets," Tasktop said in a news release. 

Mylyn is described on its Eclipse page as "a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multitasking easy." Tasktop, built on Eclipse Mylyn, enables developers to access bugs and issues from their desktops.

Tasktop 1.4 "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 [integrated development environment], even while offline," the company said in the release. "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 [application lifecycle management] integrations with the Eclipse IDE," said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and creator of Mylyn. "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 continued in the release, "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."

According to the release:

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 e-mail threads into bugs and issues, enabling developers to bridge between e-mail, 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.

Moreover, "Mylyn 3.1 supports rich task formatting with wiki markup. Mylyn's new WikiText subproject supports rich formatting of task descriptions and comments using lightweight wiki markup. … Several popular wiki markup languages are supported, including MediaWiki, Atlassian Confluence, Textile and TracWiki."

Furthermore, "Developers can use Tasktop to automatically generate a custom report of how much time was spent on each task. … For more information about Tasktop, or to download a free trial, visit http://tasktop.com."