Its been a while since I wrote about my Chrome extension Trello Tasks but thats not for lack of interest in the project. At the moment it has 3,546 users and I have had innumerable requests for new features so seeing as I had to update it to comply with GDPR anyways, I thought it was time to give it some love.



# What does it do?

Well its pretty much exactly the same as Trello Tasks in functionality, so ill copy the description [from that post](/posts/trello-tasks-a-new-chrome-extension/):

[![](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/screenshot-01-640x400.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/screenshot-01-640x400.png)

The TLDR; of Trello Tasks is: it augments Trello by turning Cards into “completable” tasks.

One of the most common ways to use Trello is in the "ToDo" style. In this style you have three lists, ToDo, Doing and Done:

[![2015-11-25_08-28-57](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-28-57.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-28-57.png)

In this style, when you start work on something, you move it from the "ToDo" List to "Doing" List then when its complete you move it to "Done" List.

This is all well and good but what if you use a different system of organisation such as arranging the items by category:

[![2015-11-25_08-31-45](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-31-45.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-31-45.png)

Now if you want to indicate that you have read a book or watched a movie you would have to either drag it into the "Done" list (and loose the categorisation) or create a "Done" list for each category. One other option is to "Archive" the card but doing this removes it from the list altogether.

[![2015-11-25_08-36-50](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-36-50.gif)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-36-50.gif)

So I decided to try and solve this very particular but annoying problem. My solution is to add a checkbox to each card. Now cards can be marked "complete" and "uncomplete" by simply checking the checkbox.

[![2015-11-25_08-41-18](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-41-18.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-41-18.png)

The extension works by piggybacking on Trello's comments system. So each time you complete or uncomplete a task the extension adds a comment to the card.

[![2015-11-25_08-43-25](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-43-25.png)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-43-25.png)

This means that in a multi-user board you can tell who completed or uncompleted a task and syncing "just works":

[![2015-11-25_08-47-32](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-47-32.gif)](https://www.mikecann.blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-11-25_08-47-32.gif)

# Whats different?

Well apart from 99% of the source code being different I changed the browser action to be clearer:

[![](./browser-action.png)](./browser-action.png)

I also upgraded the options significantly in anticipation of adding a bunch more settings in here:

[![](./general-options.png)](./general-options.png)

I also gave the logging section an overhaul so you can see whats being logged and crucially download the log to send to me for analysis:

[![](./logging-options.png)](./logging-options.png)

Under the covers everything is syncing to the chrome cloud store so it should work across browsers without any private servers or privacy issues to me.

# Why change the Name?

The reason why I changed the name and created a whole new extension rather than upgrading of Trello Tasks was because when I reached out to Trello to see if I could get official approval from for the extension they told me that I would have to rename the extension to "X for Trello" to comply with their branding guidelines. Well I didnt want to do that at the time as I had just spent ages getting everything setup with the name "Trello Tasks" so I decided to keep it as it was.

So this time around I decided if I was going to do a rewrite, I might as well rename the extension at the same time and hopefully finally get Trello's approval.

# Rewrite?

So the decision to do a rewrite rather than an upgrade was partly because of the name and partly because I was going to have to make changes to Trello Tasks for GDPR compliance. I also realised that Trello Tasks was built using (what seems like) ancient coding practices so I decided in my typical naïve way that I should just start again, it shouldnt take too long, right?

Well it took about twice as long as I was expecting, but I am happy with the way it turned out.

# Open Source

I decided to do this rewrite on a public Github repo. This is because a great many extensions these days are doing very shady things such as crypto mining, ad injection, ad replacement, privacy violation and other things. I wanted to be able to avoid all of that by pointing to the source and saying; "here, look at the source, you can see im not doing anything shady".

I do intend to add "donation" features in the future to help with the costs of continued work on the extension but im trusting that most people wont then download the source and create their own extension from the source.. would they?

Anyway you can check it out here: [https://github.com/mikecann/tasks-for-trello](https://github.com/mikecann/tasks-for-trello)

# Using Trello for Support

So I decided this time around to use Trello itself as the hub for the project.

[![](./support-ss.png)](./support-ss.png)

People can leave comments, suggestions and error reports on that board which I will receive notifications for then update the board. Its a quick and simple way of managing the project.

# Trello Tasks Depreciation

So I also made a very small update to Trello Tasks at the same time to ad a message informing my users that Trello Tasks will be no more in a few weeks and to go download Tasks for Trello instead. I hope they all get the message!

# Download

If you are interested then you can go grab Tasks for Trello now from the chrome store: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tasks-for-trello/cdbbpbodmdnhmbpnnmlpboepefbhiefp](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tasks-for-trello/cdbbpbodmdnhmbpnnmlpboepefbhiefp)

This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.

What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!



First the history, if you arent interested in this then just skip on down to "What exactly is it?"

**History**

It started off as an idea I had while playing around with some RobotLegs code. For those not in the know, [RobotLegs ](https://www.robotlegs.org/) (RL) is an awsome Inversion of Control (IoC) or Dependency Injection (DI) MVCS framework for making Rich Internet Applications (I wrote a post on it [here](/posts/on-the-bleeding-edge/)). IoC and DI were new concepts to me and I was fascinated and excited by the power that they had especially when couppled with something like [AS3 Signals](https://github.com/robertpenner/as3-signals).

At the time of this discovery I was working on a game that used [Push Button Engine](https://pushbuttonengine.com/) (PBE) and [Mate ](https://mate.asfusion.com/)as the basis for development. Feeling dissatisfied with PBE and Mate I wondered if there was a way I could take all the cool things I was playing around with RobotLegs and apply them to some of the cool aspects of PBE.

The first thing I did was to check to see if anyone else has had the idea of using DI in a component based game engine. It looked like it hasnt been done in AS3 but it looks like it has already been thought about and documented in Java. There has been a paper written about it here: [https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1658866.1658872](https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1658866.1658872), I managed to get my greasy mitts on it and enjoyed the read however I think there was definitely room for improvement in AS3.

The next thing was to seek advice on whether it could even be done in RL. I decided that I should go straight to the source and I emailed one of the contributors to the RL project, Stray. It turns out stray is a very nice lady who is also from the north of the UK. She had some good words of advice but she recommendation that I repost my question to the RL mailing list where the other contributors to the project tend to lurk.

So I wrote up my query[ and posted it](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/f7e325c5caf14d93). I added in some diagrams of how I thought it may look:

[![](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Relationships-1-300x259.png "Relationships 1")](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Relationships-1.png)[![](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Example-1-300x161.png "Example 1")](/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Example-1.png)

To cut a long story short, after [several months](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/4833ba99cd12b25a) of [posts](https://groups.google.com/group/robotlegs/browse_thread/thread/4d3eb6d8f8dd64bc#) back and forth with many excellent suggestions and contributions I felt it was time that the project migrated to its own home as not spam up the RL list too much. As such [SWft - Game Framework](https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework) mailing list was born! Its still very new and as such there arent many posts yet but I hope for that to grow as the project progresses.

We also have a website: [https://www.swft.co.uk](https://www.swft.co.uk) but its meerly a holding page for now.

**What exactly is it?**

Okay so I promised I would talk about what SWFt actually is. Well without going into too much detail (more posts will follow that will flesh out examples etc) SWFt lets you make AS3 Flash games in a modular component based fashion like you do with [Push Button Engine](https://pushbuttonengine.com/) but it lets you keep the strict-type, compile-time checked game structure like you may find in [Flixel ](https://flixel.org/)or [Flash Punk](https://flashpunk.net/).

Its still very alpha and has alot more work left to do on it but you can follow progress on our GitHub page here: [https://github.com/mikecann/Swft](https://github.com/mikecann/Swft) and some examples can also be found here: [https://github.com/mikecann/Swift-Examples](https://github.com/mikecann/Swift-Examples) (the red-blue circle experiment is currently broken)

As I say, its still very early days, but I have been wanting to blog about it for a while as its a very exciting project im currently working on :)

**Contributions**

If you are interested in contributing code or thoughts or anything then shoot a message on the mailing list: [https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework](https://groups.google.com/group/swft-framework)

Expect more posts in the coming weeks!

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