Finally! Hide Completed Tasks in Central Desktop

...and you don't have to delete your tasks!

If you've been a user of the Central Desktop platform and have experienced the frustration in having dozens of your completed tasks cluttering your task lists then this hack is for you.

What's The Problem

When using CD all of the tasks are organized into task lists and each task is an individual item. The problem occurs after you have completed a task and click the check box to mark it complete. When a task is marked complete CD continues to show those completed tasks which take up a large portion of your main tasks screen (especially if you have dozens of tasks...and you are getting them done :-) ) Although they are at least grouped / list into a bucket called 'completed tasks' it still makes it very cluttered to keep scrolling past all of these completed tasks all the time.

Some Solutions & Requests We May Have Tried

1. Click the  'delete' Link and Remove All Completed Tasks
   This seems to be one of the first things that everyone does after not wanting to see all the completed tasks anymore, we go and hit 'delete'. This clears out all the completed tasks for the list under which it was clicked and YES! we have cleaned up some screen space.
   
   But! Oh No! What about any comments you and your team mates made using the great comment feature CD offers on tasks. Crap, we can't access those anymore. Reporting? Forgot about all the project reports after this point as well. By using project reports you can go and generate reports to show what tasks and milestones have been completed by everyone over time. However, if you clicked 'delete' say Bye! Bye! to any reports because you just deleted some very important project history by deleting all those completed tasks.
   
   
2. Central Desktop Builds a Feature to Not Show Completed Tasks
   This of course would be the best case solution. If Central Desktop just built in an option that allowed us to say "Hey I don't want to see completed tasks in my main tasks view." In this case our task lists are not cluttered, all of our history is still there and all is at peace.
   

However, after 2 years of requesting this feature it hasn't been implemented just yet which brings us to the following which is my 2nd best solution for the time being and my recommended hack to remedy this issue.

My 2nd Best Solution. The Bookmarklet.

After really wanting a solution to this problem, this morning I took just about 5 minutes and wrote a couple quick Bookmarklets that help me solve this problem. This way I just created 2 browser bookmarks in my browser toolbar (ie, firefox, safari, no matter) and so when I am on a CD task list page now all you have to do is click on the bookmark

"CD - Hide Completed Tasks"
or
"CD - Show Completed Tasks"

and Voila! You can now at least toggle between hiding and showing all of those completed tasks in CD and your left with a nice, clean and sexy task list to sort through. Again, it's not the absolute best solution, the page still initially load all the completed task. Though this does make it much more manageable and I think it's the best we can come up with aside from working within CD.

Sample of How This Works

So How Can I Get This Hack?

Simple! Just drag each of the following 2 links to your browsers tool bar into your bookmarks section. That's It!

CD - Hide Completed Tasks
CD - Show Completed Tasks

Sample Video - How to Install This Solution
Hope this helps. Apologies for the quality I didn't realize how bad YouTube's video compression was. :-(.

Central Desktop Hacks is Born!

Woohoo! Central Desktop Hacks is born. After being an avid user of Central Desktop on many projects for the past few years I've found it to be an amazing project management tool that we internally in our company use daily for managing dozens of projects. Though there have just been a few little things in the interface that haven't been fixed and have made working with the tool a little tedious at times over the past couple years.

So this site was initially created today because after 2 years of waiting for a fix to "Not Show Completed Tasks" in the main task display area, and reading dozens of others requesting this same feature, I decided to take 5 minutes a couple hours ago, wrote a quick JavaScript bookmarklet to just solve this problem and Voila! at least a 2nd best solution that works for now was created. (If your not familiar with this issue check out "Finally! Hide Completed Central Desktop Tasks" from the homepage.)

After creating this tool I figured it would be best to share with all you other CD users out there in the world and just throw up a site for any other little hacks that may have been created by individuals or companies and also a place to share any best practices of how you are using CD.

Cheers,

Bryan Conzone
an avid CD user :-)