Tom Morris

I just published a little script called remind.rb, which uses Ruby's chronic time parsing library, Growl and the UNIX at command to provide simple egg-timer notifications (super-easy GTD power-up for the command-line dork in you?). I did it because I have a rather nasty habit of leaving stuff on the train in the overhead storage. Having a little notification pop up on my screen a few minutes before I get to London in the morning to help me remember to pick up my bag or coat (etc.) seemed like a good idea. If you are sure you are going to be sitting in front of your computer for some time, set yourself a reminder. And there's no blimmin' 3rd-party bullshit shareware you need to have, Dashboard widgets to faff around with, and no crap UIs to learn. Just remind +1hr "Foo bar baz". The problem I have with some of the Dashboard widgets and timer apps I’d found so far is that many had to keep a process running, waiting for something to happen. Call me silly, but I already have a process running that does that - it’s called atrun. Most of the shareware timers I’d tried broke the Rule of Parsimony by being far too big for a simple problem (see Basics of Unix Philosophy). Most of the timers I tried were also pretty inflexible in not allowing one multiple timers going at once. I’m convinced more than ever that the shell is the right place for this kind of interaction. File it away with one command, manage the timers with atq/atrm and use Growl for notification. Linuxfolk may prefer to use libnotify (I’d suggest looking at pynotify, although it’s rather painful since it seems to lack any useful documentation).

In the spirit of releasing a bunch of hacks, here’s one more that I’d been meaning to put out for a time. I use Things.app for my to-do list. It’s pretty and matches up well with how I think. I much prefer it to OmniFocus, which always struck me as a being too glued to the outliner structure. And if I ever decide to use an iPhone or iPod touch, it works with that. With more recent versions, they have an AppleScript interface. Today, it seemed like a good idea to try out RubyOSA, the Ruby bridge to OSA. If you ever dreamed of writing AppleScript-style scripts without having to use the fugly syntax of AppleScript, RubyOSA (and MacPython, Jasconn and so on) is for you.

As part of the whole GTD thing, you need to collect up all the things of importance. I do carry a digital device around with me: my phone. It’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry or some other fancy smartphone. It’s a Sony Ericsson W890i. It’s like an unsexy iPhone that has, oh, proper Bluetooth support and can be used as a 3G dongle (BTW, you guys are so getting ripped-off with the whole 3G dongle thing - with a bit of nerdery and a standard 3G phone, it’s so much cheaper). I want to use this device as a collection bucket for stuff that needs to be done. Now, it has a built-in task manager and a notes function. No good. That’s a one-way street. You can put tasks and notes in, but you can’t get them back out again. And when I’m at my computer, I don’t want to be using my phone to manage my to-do list.

E-mail seems like the ideal way of doing that. So, I set up a secret e-mail account for this purpose on my domain. I can basically fling e-mail at it, and know that this will get dumped into my GTD Inbox when I next sync up. Then all I need to do is add that e-mail address to the inbox on my phone. But there’s more to it than that. The script that downloads that e-mail can do some filtering. I’ve got some plans for the future for this. I’m planning to make it so that there’s a “whitelist” of people who can send me e-mail. If your e-mail address is in my FOAF file, or in my address book, or anywhere else that a Ruby script on my laptop could easily get a yes-or-no answer, why not? Then, when we meet in person, if there’s something you want me to do, I can just say “send an e-mail to my todo address” and it’ll turn up in my to-do list.

The script I use is up on Gist. It obviously has RubyOSA as a dependency, and also uses TMail so that I can avoid thinking about e-mail parsing. I added some logic to snip the signature off. E-mail me if you have any idea how one could do that better. And if there’s any other Things.app users out there, any good reason why we shouldn’t use RubyOSA to build a nice convenience class for manipulating Things.app lists. There’s plenty of fun stuff we can do with the data in Things.app using the OSA interface: export it as iCal, RSS/Atom, OPML, geo stuff, HTML; bridging it into Twitter; making exporters/importers to other to-do list formats; using the Address Book and other places to identify co-workers; set up complicated rules.