Tuesday, January 30, 2007

A few little things

Version r77. Let me see if I can remember:
  • Added InstantTimestampPlugin
  • Added CalendarPlugin from tiddlytools.com and added a calendar
  • Moved palette selector to the config tiddler
  • Fixed the single quote bug so you can have a single quote in your titles now (but round bracket bug remains)
  • Allow semi-colon (;) as a substitute for pipe (|) in the quick add projects/actions box (aka Process Inbox) since pipe is hard to type in some parts of the world.
  • New waiting for action in projects wasn't working right
  • Added some print styles to hide stuff you probably don't want to print (thanks Andrew C for these)
I think that's it. To update you need to fetch DashboardsAndPanels MonkeyGTDPlugin Config PageTemplate CalendarPlugin MonkeyGTDStyles InstantTimestampPlugin MonkeyGTDVersion (but there's no harm in fetching everything from http://mgtd-alpha.tiddlyspot.com/upgrade.html. Click continue if you get long running script warnings).

Monday, January 29, 2007

MonkeyGTD article on Oriol News Portal

I can't read it but it seems as though they liked it.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Quick-add for projects and actions

I was doing a long overdue inbox process the other day and I realised that MonkeyGTD was very slow and tedious at doing this. I realised I needed to be able to enter projects and actions as fast as I could type them instead of waiting for my system to keep up. So, here it is the new "Process Inbox" function. The format should be quite familiar to d3 users. It will even let you put in two dots if your fingers are used to it. MonkeyGTD alpha users. upgrade now and never be jealous of d3'ers easy action creation again. ;)

Warning, this is very buggy in IE. Apologies to IE users.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

IE7 and unicode chars

IE7 will show the star now. It works if I specify Arial Unicode MS in the css (which is not used by default by IE7, I guess is plain old Arial is the default). I suppose Wingdings would be an option also. Is that available on Macs? Upgrade MonkeyGTDStyles if you need this fix. (IE still has some font-size issues though, will get to that later).

I suppose an image could be used also but then you no longer have self-contained single file which is one of the great strengths TiddlyWiki.

Starry bug fix

Thanks Daniel W for finding this. Four tiddlers to update: MonkeyGTDPlugin, ViewTemplate, MonkeyGTDStyles, DashboardsAndPanels.

The symptom is that projects in project lists were running together instead of sitting nicely in a vertical list. Also if you don't see a nice star for the star character then you can edit MonkeyGTDPlugin tiddler and uncomment star: "*" and comment out the line above it. (Or if the * doesn't look great you could just try a "S" and use your imagination...).

Here's how they look in my browser:

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

IE css problems

Well I just took a look at the demo site in IE. Not too pretty. I'm sure I can improve that but for now Firefox is recommended. (Plus we still have more serious IE problems mentioned previously)

New subversion repository at Google Code

If you're a programmer and want to contribute or just take a look at my development stuff for MonkeyGTD then you can now go checkout from the svn repos. Instructions here. Project home here. You need svn (of course) and ruby for the build script.

This will benefit me also. I've spent a bit of time cleaning up the development environment and also switching over to the newly released ruby tools. (See here if you're interested in my ruby tools for developing/managing TiddlyWiki projects).

Starry starry...

So lets say you have 30 or 40 actions in your "Office" context. You know that there are a handful of them that you should be working on today but because the list of so long you stare at it wondering what you should do next. You pick out one action, do it, then come back to your list, stare at again, scanning up and down to find what you want to do next. As your eyes move up and down the text starts to swim before your eyes and you begin to think of procrastination activities (like coding MonkeyGTD perhaps ;). What you need is a way avoid the repeated scan and mental selection of actions to be done next. You could print our your list and use a highlighter pen. (I've done this). But perhaps there is a better way.

Some discussion recently on the mailing list suggested the addition of an Important flag. I tend to agree it's a practical necessity to help in the above scenario, however I am wary of it since if you concede that you need an Important flag then it's just a small step to conceding a multi-level priority indicator, ie, high/medium/low, or worse, level 1 2 3 4 .. 99 etc, which would the wrong direction for GTD I think. (If really want this it will be easy to add -- stay tuned for upcoming howto -- but it won't be in the default configuration).

So anyway instead of an Important flag, how about gmail-like stars. Go take a look. A star can mean whatever you like. In a project review you might star the projects that need some attention. In the scenario above you might star the actions you need to do right away. You can also star Areas or anything else you like. To see what's starred you click "starred" in the top menu. On the left are your starred actions. On the right are starred other things.

I've been using this now for a little while and so far I think it's pretty handy. To upgrade... er not sure, just fetch everthing.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

"from ho-hum to rockin"

Happy new year GTDers. Planned for 2007:
  • reduced ho-hum
  • increased rockin