Wednesday, November 29, 2006

New look for tiddler contents

Tiddler contents are now labelled "notes" and have a yellow tint like a post-it note.

Instant Refreshing

One of the funnest parts of the current MonkeyGTD is the automatic updating of the lists. Currently this is switched off in the alpha because it can be slow. It means you have to hammer on the "refresh" toolbar button quite a lot. I'd like to bring back the "instant refresh" feature before too long.

The D N W buttons take 2

A few people said they liked the D (done) N (next) W (waiting) buttons. They are handy for quickly flipping a task from Next to Waiting and back again. But the extra clutter was pretty cumbersome. So here's an attempt to keep the buttons but reduce the clutter a little bit. If you like it upgrade now. You will need to fetch MonkeyGTDPlugin, MonkeyGTDStyles and ToggleTag2. Here's a little screenshot: You just click the little N or the W to toggle it. The colours are supposed to be useful. Orange for wait. Green for go. And so far I'm keeping the checkbox as standard since the tick is quite to symbolise done.

If you're interested in having neat little toggle tag buttons in your other TiddlyWiki projects you can grab the (unfinished) plugin at http://mgtd-alpha.tiddlyspot.com/#ToggleTag2. Soon it will support a popup list so we could have Waiting and Next as a dropdown selector.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Preserving customisations when upgrading

This is a tricky one. Actually I don't have a good answer. Suppose you want to tweak your dashboards to get them just how you like them...

Actually I expect you do that. One of the major failures with the old MonkeyGTD was the fact that customising the dashboards was, though not impossible, fraught with pain. The nested forEachTiddler incantations with their quoting nightmares made it basically uncustomisable for all but the most hard-core. Take a look in your ViewDashboardTemplate to see how it's done now. If you spent two minutes looking at the listByTag macro you can create all kinds of custom lists. Here's an example:
 <div macro="listByTag title:'Next Actions'
  tags:'Action && Next && !Done'
  group:Context
  view:action
  "></div>
It's the list of next actions in a project. The project tag itself if implicit unless you add the parameter mode:global. view:action is so it displays the checkboxes etc. If you left that out you would get a standard tiddler link.

Anyway back to preserving customisations. If you upgrade via the suggested upgrade method it will overwrite your tiddler and destroy any of your customisations. I don't have a good solution for this other than make a copy of your customised ViewDashboardTemplate and ViewPanelTemplate and re-apply your tweaks.

Now it doesn't show [P] if there's no project

To get this update you need to fetch:
  • MonkeyGTDPlugin

MainMenu tweak and Realm select for Areas

I just changed the MainMenu plus added Realm checkboxes to Areas. Also tweaked the dashboard a little for Action and some others. To upgrade you just need these:
  • MainMenu
  • ViewDashboardTemplate
  • ViewPanelTemplate
  • MonkeyGTDStyles
The MainMenu idea comes from BJ over at (I hope he won't mind me posting) here. The Area/Realm issue was reported by Scott Kingery.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Welcome

A recap for the new folks...

MonkeyGTD is a TiddlyWiki powered GTD system. There's an old version that started as a kind of a TiddlyWiki tech demo. It suffers from the fact that I was a little clueless about GTD at the time. There's a very cool new version that isn't finished yet but it's pretty usable. There's also lots of MonkeyGTD users (who by the way I'd like to thank for their suggestions and encouraging emails). And there's a bunch of clever folk on the TiddlyWiki lists who are doing amazing stuff with TiddlyWiki. There's Daniel, my brother, GTD and TiddlyWiki advisor and number one tester, there's Clint, all-round good guy, and of course there's Jeremy Ruston without whom etc etc.

So this blog will have MonkeyGTD announcements and maybe some other random musings on GTD and TiddlyWiki. If that sounds like your cup-o-tea then hook up your preferred rss reader and welcome aboard.

New stuff in MonkeyGTD 2.1 alpha

I posted this on the mailing list yesterday:
There's a new "non-release" of the alpha... If you're actually using this you might like to upgrade. (click config, upgrade and follow the steps)

New stuff includes:
* actions in lists now have a "waiting for" and "next" checkbox (as well as the "done" checkbox) (actually I'm not 100% sure about this, it makes the screen look a little more cluttered)
* actions have a [P] next to them which you can mouseover to see the project the action belongs to (and click to go to the project) (suggested by Bob)
* if you click new ticklers tickler date box appears (thanks to BJ from http://tampageekland.tiddlyspot.com for this trick)
* now an action with no project shows an Area selector (suggested by Alfonso)
* Some of the dashboards are tweaked a little


Simon.

Check 1 2

Greetings from the Monkey.