remove the year from start/due dates if its this year

I'm confirming this, however I don't know that I agree on it. I think any task with a due date of more than 3 or so days should show the date, and not text.

Chris, I agree on showing the date. But for example, now is 08 February; I don't need to know that a task due in five days is due "13 February 2010", or that a task due in two months is due on "08 April 2010"; the 2010 part is obvious. On the other hand, for the same days in 2011 it is worth showing the year.

If we wanted to be specific and show the year for tasks due e.g. this December, it could be done by a user-controlled preference: "Show the year for dates more than [interval] away," with a drop-down for [3 days], [1 week], [1 month] etc.

The hardest part of this is how to get a locale-specific date format for day+month in addition to the usual one for day+month+year (see bug #515042).