So I understand how action groups are designed to work a bit better now. I'm still undecided about where they fall on the continuum from elegant design to clever hack to unspeakable kludge, but I'll let that go for now.
BTW, on the question of whether the "parent" action of a group should ever appear in context mode, put me squarely in the "No" camp. I agree with Ken that action groups are purely a planning-mode scaffolding that allows for various dependencies for the actions themselves, so I don't ever want to see the "parent" action in context mode.
Some questions/requests:
(1) Is there a keyboard shortcut for turning an action into an action group? My current method for making a group is to make two actions, then drag the second one on top of the first one. For a variety of reasons, I find that awkward.
If there's not, I have a suggestion. One possibility would be to allow cmd-Return (when editing the action name) to turn an action into the head of a group. Then Return would create a second action (either parallel or sequential to the first action depending on the settings of the current project/group) and cmd-Return would change the current action into the parent of the group and create a new child action. Please, please, please!
(2) I would like a preference to auto-complete action groups when all the actions they contain are completed. That would eliminate some of the overhead of action groups and give me some of the behavior I was looking for in my parent/child model, without breaking the current model.
(3) If the head of an existing action group is given a start or due date, any existing actions in that group without a start or due date are given that date. (That may be how things actually work when in context mode, but I don't think the interface in planning mode fully reflects it.)
BTW, on the question of whether the "parent" action of a group should ever appear in context mode, put me squarely in the "No" camp. I agree with Ken that action groups are purely a planning-mode scaffolding that allows for various dependencies for the actions themselves, so I don't ever want to see the "parent" action in context mode.
Some questions/requests:
(1) Is there a keyboard shortcut for turning an action into an action group? My current method for making a group is to make two actions, then drag the second one on top of the first one. For a variety of reasons, I find that awkward.
If there's not, I have a suggestion. One possibility would be to allow cmd-Return (when editing the action name) to turn an action into the head of a group. Then Return would create a second action (either parallel or sequential to the first action depending on the settings of the current project/group) and cmd-Return would change the current action into the parent of the group and create a new child action. Please, please, please!
(2) I would like a preference to auto-complete action groups when all the actions they contain are completed. That would eliminate some of the overhead of action groups and give me some of the behavior I was looking for in my parent/child model, without breaking the current model.
(3) If the head of an existing action group is given a start or due date, any existing actions in that group without a start or due date are given that date. (That may be how things actually work when in context mode, but I don't think the interface in planning mode fully reflects it.)