If your web work involves delivering sites to customers (as it does for many of us), you’ve probably run into the mismatch between the average customer and the average bug-tracking system. When the first round of a new site is ready to look at, and you’re ready for feedback from your client, there’s that awkward moment of trying to teach them how to use some developer-oriented tool to enter bugs. Often we give up and fall back on “just e-mail me and I’ll keep track of the issues myself,” with the associated data re-entry and potential for losing track of things.
That’s the problem that Taskee is here to solve.
After a quick registration process, this new service hands you back two lines of JavaScript. Include those lines in any web page, and when anyone browses to that page they’ll see the Taskee Open button in the upper right corner of the page. Clicking that button lets them log on to Taskee (assuming you’ve set up an account), where they can immediately enter comments, bugs, feature requests, complaints, or anything else related to the page they’re looking at in the browser. The Taskee window floats over your own web page, so it’s easy to refer back to the page you’re trying to comment on.
Taskee handles the rest: storing the bug reports, sending e-mail notifications, taking you to the page in question when you log into Taskee yourself and click on a bug. It’s a slick little idea that removes nearly all of the friction of communicating with people about web pages – and though I see it through the lens of software development, it would clearly be useful any time you needed to collaborate with someone else about a web site.
Taskee is still in beta, and some things aren’t perfect. Notably, you’ll find <select> and <object> tags get hidden when Taskee is open, so Flash and similar embedded objects won’t be visible. It would be nice to have some way to annotate the underlying page instead of just describing it as well. But for a free beta service that just launched, this one is already showing promise.
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