Realms now work like they were supposed to

I'm excited about this. Firstly realms are now working the way I imagined. Try them out at the demo site. Click one of the realm buttons near the top to see what happens. Secondly realms are no longer hard coded in the main dashboard! (Thank goodness for that). So you can rename, create, delete Realms to you hearts content now. To get this update you probably need to fetch: DashboardsAndPanels, MonkeyGTDPlugin, MonkeyGTDStyles, ToggleTag2, StyleSheet and PageTemplate. There are a few other little fixes also, cosmetic and otherwise. A couple of issues: We still don't auto-populate the realm when creating new items. If something is in two realms it will never show. (It's done this way so that something with no realm will appear, but I plan to fix this somehow).

Also there is a new MainMenu which is quite a bit different. I'm going to focus on the main things you do with GTD. Currently "Do Work" and "Process Inbox" just take you to the Dashboard and "Review" just takes you to the Projects tiddler. Over time these will become specific task oriented dashboards.

Karthiik digs the Monkey and the 'Spot

...not very intuitive to start with.. but after playing with it for a couple of days, I am addcited to it now!!

Read the rest of his post.

Customising your dashboard

Alfonso writes:

Please, oh please. Change the project view!!! Having all of them repeated twice is extremely anoying. Instead of showing both, why don't you let people choose if they want the realm view or the area view? Thank you!

I think the time is right for the first mini-tutorial on customising your dashboards.

• Click the "More" tab on the right hand side
• Click "Shadowed"
• Scroll down to ProjectTiddlerDash and click on it
• Click the "edit" button or double click the tiddler to edit the contents of ProjectTiddlerDash
• It should look something like this:

<table width="100%"><tr> <td width="50%" style="vertical-align:top"> <div macro="listByTag title:'Projects by Area' tags:!Complete group:Area "></div> </td> <td width="50%" style="vertical-align:top"> <div macro="listByTag title:'Projects by Realm' group:Realm tags:!Complete sort:-title "></div> </td></tr></table>

• Now you need to edit it take out the parts you don't like:

<table width="100%"><tr> <td style="vertical-align:top"> <div macro="listByTag title:'Projects by Area' tags:!Complete group:Area "></div> </td> <!-- <td width="50%" style="vertical-align:top"> <div macro="listByTag title:'Projects by Realm' group:Realm tags:!Complete sort:-title "></div> </td> --> </tr></table>

• Notice that I just used html comments to remove the part I don't want. You could also just delete it. And I deleted the width="50%" for the td so the list can use all the available space.
• Now open your Project tiddler again (or refresh it if it's already open). Voila.

Note that this technique works for all of your dashboards which are all there under Shadowed. The one thing to note however is if you have a customised dashboard tiddler it masks the shadowed version of it and upgrades only update the shadow version. So for this example, if some future release of MonkeyGTD contains a new version of ProjectTiddlerDash then you won't see it unless you rename your customised version. You would then need to reapply your customisations as applicable.

Okay here is (my first ever) screencast of the above procedure. You probably need to click here to see it at full size.

Colour schemes!

Time for some eye candy while we wait on the core functionality to appear... Someone over here mentioned that red wasn't their favourite colour. Excellent point. Now you can choose from Red, Green, Blue, TiddlyWiki default (a brighter blue) and "Smoke". To get this update import PageTemplate, SelectPaletteMacro plus the palette tiddlers, MGTDBlue, MGTDRed, MGTDGreen and MGTDSmoke.

To try out the colour schemes go here and use the drop down on the right under options.

Of course you can create your own palettes. Copy one of the existing ones, eg MGTDGreen and tweak it. Tag it with "palette" to make it work with the selector. If you do create a nice colour scheme then email it to me or post it in the comments and I will include it on the main site.

New release of d cubed

Tom has released a 2.1 update for d3 that sounds pretty good. Check it out if you haven't already.

Little bug fix: tickler list now respects date format

To get the fix update your MonkeyGTDPlugin tiddler. Thanks to Scott K. for reporting this bug.

IE problems

I guess most of us are using Firefox but it is important that IE users can play too. I've learned recently there two rather large IE problems.

• The N and W buttons don't work properly (thanks BJ)
• The drop-down selectors for project and areas don't work properly (thanks Rol and BJ)

So I have some work to do on these bugs. Will let you know when they're squashed.

Update Okay the N and W buttons work now. Have to return false from the click handler because it's a link not a checkbox. But I noticed the css doesn't work. The W is supposed to be orange.

TampaGeek's take on MonkeyGTD

Take a look here. There are some pretty good ideas there, some of which I may steal. A quick poll: is Realm the best word? BJ prefers "Role" which I think may be closer to David Allen's terminology but just doesn't sound right to me.

American style (M-D-Y) dates now available

You can now change from D-M-Y to M-D-Y using the brand new MonkeyGTDSettings tiddler. Take a look here. To demo it, check the checkbox and hit refresh on the demo tickler. Also the date format is used in the modified/created date (under the tiddler titles).

MonkeyGTD and Tiddlyspot get a mention on ToDoOrElse.com

It's a couple of months old but take a look at this review.

Someday/Maybe in the 1.0 MonkeyGTD

I mentioned earlier that I didn't know much about GTD when I wrote the original MonkeyGTD. I think the worst mistake I made was to use Someday/Maybe on actions. Someday/Maybe in fact applies to projects has very little to do with actions. Probably the second worst mistake was that most of my example actions should in fact be projects. It's pretty basic GTD, but understanding that anything with more than one step has to be a project has helped me with my own personal stuff. So anyway, I feel like I ought to apologise for steering trusting new GTD'ers in the wrong direction so badly. Sorry!

Reorganisation of html for panels and dashboards

I've split up the dashboard and panel definitions into different files so they are easier to tweak. Then I shipped them as shadow tiddlers so you can experiment with them and if you mess them up you can delete them to get back to the defaults. I will explain more about this in upcoming posts.

(Another) tickler bug fix

Thanks very much to zajc for finding this problem. Ps, here is a little piece of javascript I did not know about. parseInt('09') is 0. Because of the leading zero it thinks it's an octal number. parseInt('09',10) is 9. Read more here.

MonkeyGTD in German

Ingo has created a Deutsch translation for MonkeyGTD. You can read about it over at his site.

Here's a screen shot of his empty file. Kontext and Projekt. Sehr gut. :)

Translating MonkeyGTD is a lot harder than it should be since as yet there is no "lingo" section like there is for TiddlyWiki itself. I would like to aim for lingo file translations in 2.2.

Tickler bug fix

Details here.