Always losing text I write in Jira tickets

[Robert Janik]

Hi Guys,

when I'm writing text in Jira, for example when I click "More Info Needed" in a ticket, I often accidentally swipe away using touch pad or possibly hit ESC on touch bar and lose the text I was writing. Imagine writing detailed instructions to a client, explanations and procedures that you painfully compile and than in an instant you lose half an hour of your work.

Do you even value our time? Why the app doesn't display a dialog whether to discard the text or save. When that happens I always have to open a text editor like BBEdit and start writing there and sometimes even saving into a file (just in case something goes wrong as always). In any case I don't understant why today in the digital world I have to lose information this way.

BTW why don't you provide rich client app (plain old GUI app) instead of browser solution. Everyone knows that browsers and HTML are the worst apps out there, you can lose text just by accidentally clicking close button on tab and the tab disappears. If I configure browser that may show some alert before closing browser, but that doesn't prevent badly written HTML interface from losing data and it's also inconvenient for browsing web in general as often you just want to close the page quickly and without any warning dialog when rogue page starts popping up alerts about cookies or ads or whatever.

Look at that! Now I'm wasting my time writing about this issue.

Could you PLEASE review all the flows in Jira and provide means of protecting users from losing text. Perhaps add a warning dialog or have the text saved automatically as draft and when reopening the ticket having ability to reuse the draft whether it's in comment section or "More Info Needed" or "Resolved" or any dialog where text can be entered.

Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

So, the first question is what the "client" is.  The majority of Jira users are using (mostly standard) browsers.  Other client applications will now be using the REST API to talk to Jira systems, so the question becomes, "what are the problems with your client application?"

You ask, "why don't you provide rich client app (plain old GUI app) instead of browser solution?"

The answer is that the browser is the best solution for most of the audience, and coding a "rich client" for every situation is an unmitigated nightmare.

The best answer for "not browser" is "expose a load of APIs, and let people code stuff that uses them, as it works best for them".  My probably cynical view is that I'd prefer Atlassian to improve the APIs so we can write better stuff to talk to them rather than ask them to write apps for a fraction of the market.

I have four historical examples.  The more recent one was a media organisation still running one of the biggest streaming services in the world, two are retail organisations that were very early to the idea of "use the app on your mobile device to shop", and the fourth is a generalist.

All of them were coding applications that had to be written for, and tested on, thousands of devices.  Coding for a (standards-compliant) browser was the starting point, because it was 0.01% of the effort.  I can absolutely guarantee that you are using at least one of them, three if you live in the UK.