I've been working in this space for my own task manager (multi-parent + infinite depth), and here's a couple things I've landed on:
- My objective is being able to show a "todo" list that is _actually actionable_. So I think early on its important to build in notions of "availability" (i.e. "this is not waiting on something else, you can work on this now")
- The dual is you kind of need nodes that represent "blockers". Here you have the parenting mechnaism that could get you there, but also stuff like setting dates on nodes (in Omnifocus this looks like the "defer until" date)
- I tried making a UI that handled N-node depth, but ended up figuring out that just displaying at most 2 levels of depth and then having fast loading when zooming in/out saved me a lot of API design headache and gets me 95% of the way there
- Even if your data is a tree structure, a lot of times just showing a flat list (perhaps with "parent node is X" annotation) is going to work out nicer. Notably with search
- My objective is being able to show a "todo" list that is _actually actionable_. So I think early on its important to build in notions of "availability" (i.e. "this is not waiting on something else, you can work on this now")
- The dual is you kind of need nodes that represent "blockers". Here you have the parenting mechnaism that could get you there, but also stuff like setting dates on nodes (in Omnifocus this looks like the "defer until" date)
- I tried making a UI that handled N-node depth, but ended up figuring out that just displaying at most 2 levels of depth and then having fast loading when zooming in/out saved me a lot of API design headache and gets me 95% of the way there
- Even if your data is a tree structure, a lot of times just showing a flat list (perhaps with "parent node is X" annotation) is going to work out nicer. Notably with search