Mylyn's task-focused interface has changed the way that many developers work. Current IDEs are overloaded with tens of thousands of artifacts, and as a result developers often spend more time searching, scrolling, and navigating than they spend programming. Mylyn focuses the Eclipse UI to show only the information relevant to the task-at-hand. This makes working with large systems much easier and multitasking effortless.

This talk will start with an overview of Mylyn's task management features including offline editing, background synchronizations and change notifications, and demonstrate how these work for repositories such as Bugzilla and JIRA. Demonstrations of the tool will show how developers can leverage Mylyn's automated context management to get a dramatic productivity boost when working with Java, Eclipse plug-in, and web applications. Mylyn's context sharing and change set management will then be used to show the tool can make the entire team more productive by realigning interaction around tasks.

The second part of the talk will overview how Mylyn's frameworks can be extended when building IDE, desktop, and server-side applications. A showcase of the ecosystem of tools built on Mylyn will cover tools ranging from task repository connectors for agile development to novel user interfaces for rich internet applications. The talk will conclude with an overview of how Mylyn-based tools can bring the benefits of the task-focused interface to non-programmers engaged with the software development process.