Mylar facilitates communication with other team members through the task repository. There’s a handy “Attach context” feature that appears on the task editor that lets you package up your task context and attach it to the task (bug) in the repository. The task context contains the information about the elements that are made visible in your workspace views. In essence, by attaching your context, you are allowing other developers to share the trimmed list of elements that you were working with at the time you saved the context. Other developers who might also be interested in the task can retrieve it by selecting “Retrieve Context” from the pop-up menu for the task.
Personally, I think that facilitating communication between developers is great all by itself and a worthy place to end my “five reasons”. However, since I started this series, I’ve developed another great reason to love Mylar: it has a really slick look and feel, and it integrates very naturally with the workbench (okay, that’s two other great reasons). Mylar just plain old looks good. And it behaves in a predictable way. The creators of Mylar have taken the “less is more” mantra to heart and have refined the user interface to be intuitive and powerful, but without excessive complexity.
I love the pop-ups that appear unobtrusively in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to let you know that changes have been made to tasks you have included on your task list (that is, when another developer makes a change in bugzilla, Mylar tells you about it). Mylar also marks the task on the task list. I also really like the hover help tips Mylar provides (including fancy graphics).
Mylar is a powerful tool with a refined look and intuitive user interface.
