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I just wonder if anyone can identify with me, thinking it's absolutely crazy to invest energy in any feature or app that has a "nested" (hierarchical, tree) dat

I just wonder if anyone can identify with me, thinking it's absolutely crazy to invest energy in any feature or app that has a "nested" (hierarchical, tree) data structure as your primitive, when for any project with dependencies, what you need is a graph structure - meaning, items that can be blocked by multiple parents. Basically, if your item can only have one parent, you're already doing it wrong. I know it's a hard problem, but we haven't even scratched the surface of what kind of UI/UX features there are to make it easier to deal with. This is the problem people should be iterating on, but it's like no one wants to deal with graph data structures. Outside of the apps with way too many features like MS Project and Omniplan (it doesn't need to be as complicated as Gantt charts or even PERT charts), I know of only two pieces of software that try to tackle this in a graphical sense: Flying Logic and Taskheat. Taskwarrior has some support for it but it's clunky. Orgmode barely has support for it via org-brain but still clunky.

AlanYx 5y ago
FYI, Org-mode supports multiple dependencies via org-depend (blocking entries do not have to be nearby and can even be located in a different file). Thanks for the recommendation for Taskheat BTW; that looks pretty amazing. I'm curious, have you actually tried using Flying Logic for task planning?
- tunesmith 5y ago
  Flying Logic is like my secret weapon, I use it daily for both work and home. There are some features I wish it had which it will never have due to it being Java, but I can pretty much work around all of them. I tend to use a vertical orientation for explanation/justification, and a LR orientation for task planning. It's also better than things like draw.io and figma for quick architectural meetings with team members, since it re-orients as you draw. For home, I also use it for recipes, especially those that require multiple cooks at once.
  - AlanYx 5y ago
    Thanks -- that's fascinating. I can imagine it works well for planning multi-course meals. You've piqued my interest enough to give it another look one of these days. I had looked into it briefly a few years ago when it was pitched more as a constraint management tool than a general purpose tool.

AlanYx 5y ago

FYI, Org-mode supports multiple dependencies via org-depend (blocking entries do not have to be nearby and can even be located in a different file). Thanks for the recommendation for Taskheat BTW; that looks pretty amazing. I'm curious, have you actually tried using Flying Logic for task planning?

tunesmith 5y ago
Flying Logic is like my secret weapon, I use it daily for both work and home. There are some features I wish it had which it will never have due to it being Java, but I can pretty much work around all of them. I tend to use a vertical orientation for explanation/justification, and a LR orientation for task planning. It's also better than things like draw.io and figma for quick architectural meetings with team members, since it re-orients as you draw. For home, I also use it for recipes, especially those that require multiple cooks at once.
- AlanYx 5y ago
  Thanks -- that's fascinating. I can imagine it works well for planning multi-course meals. You've piqued my interest enough to give it another look one of these days. I had looked into it briefly a few years ago when it was pitched more as a constraint management tool than a general purpose tool.