Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Plans

I want to change the way that the views are done. Everything in NameDashboards really should be in separate tiddlers instead of the weird view template insertion method I've somehow ended up with. And probably shadowed ones at that. This will make customisation and building your own views a lot easier to explain. Also I'd like to use divs for the two and three column views instead of tables. This will make it easier to write the views in tiddler markup instead of html with macro attributes.

Showing full titles instead of [P] next to actions

A couple of people were asking for this (sorry I can't find their
names, hopefully they know who they are...). The latest update makes
this a configurable option under More/MGTD.

Sorry if doing all these updates is getting tiresome. I was going to
save this up but decided to stick with the 'release early/release
often' model. Remember you don't have to fetch every single update.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Subprojects/ associated contacts

It's a big one. We now have subprojects. We also have 'associated contacts' on all actions and projects. Plus some menu improvements. I'm slightly worried about the amount of clutter that subprojects has added to the project dashboards. (This is solvable in the long run but still...). Also I'm worried that the associated contact stuff is just a little bit too clever for it's own good. So give me feedback if you have any thoughts on these issues.

Demo. How to update.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

I upgraded and all my stuff has gone!

Make sure you have one or more realms activated. Looks like the upgrade has a side effect of switching off all your realms.

Subprojects

Coming soon... See the thread on the mailing for discussion on the matter. I think the approach of just showing the completed and non-completed sub projects in the project dashboard is a good one. I try to will sidestep UI complications like how to show trees of projects in the Project Dashboard. As for showing actions from subprojects in a parent projects dashboard, I still not sure yet. Will have to see how things go.

Tickler date format is now configurable

Set your preferred tickler date format under the More/MGTD tab.

Configuration options (and multiple contexts again)

Take a look under More... / MGTD. There are a couple of configuration options there now. One of them lets you restore the 2.1 behaviour where an action could have multiple contexts, as requested by Mike De B and discussed here. There are some other minor tweaks including one that makes Actions and Projects hide their status controls when they are Done or Complete, as requested by cmari on they mailing list - thanks cmari.

Demo. How to update.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Deleting stuff, new layout, better searching

  • Deleting old Actions and Projects - Check it out by clicking on Cleanup under the Review menu. If you want to change the days old value, just edit that tiddler and adjust accordingly. Note there's no button for deleting all old projects at once. You have to open them and delete them one by one with the new 'delete project' button.
  • Deleting projects - Projects now have a 'delete project' button which will find all the tasks, ticklers, reference items etc and nuke them as well as the project.
  • New layout - I've revamped the menus on the right. I think it's better now with less clutter and it's implemented a lot more simply. The css still needs a lot of TLC, sorry about that. Notice the search box is now up the top which helps with the overall de-clutter.
  • YourSearchPlugin - Makes search a thousand times more useful. The more TiddlyWiki savvy of you might have been using this already but if you've not seen it before you're in for a treat. (Note, I didn't write this, it's a TiddlyWiki plugin created by Udo Borkowski).b

Demo. How to update.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

What's coming up

See here.

Contributing to MonkeyGTD

See here.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Notifying when a project becomes due

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Byron ---- <----@mac.com> wrote:
Does your software have a notifier like iCal when a project becomes due?

Not exactly, but it has ticklers which can be used in this way. Ticklers will notify you when they're due by blinking in the top menu, though only when your MonkeyGTD is open in your browser. At the moment projects don't have due dates. To give a project a due date you could create a tickler titled "Project foo due to be finished today" and set the approriate date. It's also useful I think to make ticklers such as "Project foo due by end of this week" with a suitable date, or even "... by end of next week", depending on what is appropriate for your project.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

broken project title

http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/changeset/4549
Sorry about that. Thanks Ken for reporting. If you updated just now and your projects are broken, you need to just fetch TitleButtons to fix it. Or you could simply edit it yourself. Change Project to !Project on the first line. Save. Reload.

Delegating actions

Question one got me thinking about incorporating delegation of actions. And so... Things to notice:
  • You can delegate any waiting for or future action. (I consider future delegated actions as actions you know you're going to delegate but haven't done so yet).
  • There is a 'Delegated Task Dashboard' under Do Work and Review. (I couldn't decide where it belonged...)
  • If you click on a contact (or the applicable >> link) you can see what's been delegated to them.
  • Project dashboards now show Waiting For actions grouped by Contact, ie the person you're waiting on. (It was grouped by context).
Try it out here. Delegate 'Network Request' to Bert. Notice what happens. Then click [P] and take a look at the changed Project dashboard. Neat huh?

To get this new functionality update your MonkeyGTD the usual way.

Some Q/A

Will you release the delegate module in the core of a next version?
Possibly in some form. I'm not sure how best to integrate it with Waiting For, particularly so that it doesn't annoy people who don't need it. Perhaps any waiting for or future task can optionally be delegated. But next tasks can't because that would be weird. Actually that sounds pretty good.

Are you planning Agendas?
No. A simple approach is to use contexts, eg @dave-agenda, @bob-agenda. Then for instance, the agenda for the next time you see Dave is visible via the tasks in that context. Do you have any thoughts on how agendas should work other than this?

Are you planning Checklists?
No. But see here for ideas on how you can might use checklists in MonkeyGTD.

Are you planning Levels?
No. MonkeyGTD is good at organising lists. Personally I think the "high altitude" functions of GTD (which I think you are referring to) don't benefit much from what MonkeyGTD provides. Though perhaps the wiki function of MonkeyGTD could be useful.

Thoughts?

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Repeating ticklers?

Well not exactly, but ticklers now have a button to add a day/week/month/year to a tickler. So if you have a tickler you want to repeat monthly, instead of clicking done, just click +m. It's so simple it just might work. They don't look very good currently but they are functional. Also in this update:
  • Right menu is a little bit wider
  • Extra help for Quick Add contributed by Dean L, (thanks Dean).
  • Placeholders in place for the context sensitive help, ie the little question mark buttons. See MonkeyGTDHelp. (Contributions are welcome for this btw. My aim is for the help to give MonkeyGTD usage advice but also GTD best practice advice.
Quite a few tiddlers are updated so you better fetch them all via the regular update method.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Bug fix in MgtdTagControls

Plus some very minor tweaks in a couple of other places. The bug was causing context lists not to refresh properly when actions modified their contexts. Thanks very much to Tyson W for finding and reporting this one. New version is r416114.

Monday, April 14, 2008

New web site

A fix for theme problems

I'm not sure why the theme is getting switched. But here's a fix. Select the TW menu. Find MonkeyGTDTheme under the All tab. Edit it and add the tag "systemTheme". Then click "apply" from the tiddler toolbar. I'm not sure why this happens but I will look into it.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

For better or for worse

MonkeyGTD 3.0 alpha is available now on Tiddlyspot. (And pre 3.0 MonkeyGTD isn't). You'll probably want to edit your DefaultTiddlers to get rid of the WelcomeToTiddlyspot. http://tiddlyspot.com/

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Deferring to a person from your contact list

See here.

Is this something that most people would use? I think strict GTD describes using Waiting For to indicate a delegated task. But it doesn't discuss keeping track of who you delegated to. One concern would be that you should use either 'Waiting For' or 'Deferred To [Person]' exclusively, but not both as that might get confusing. Or perhaps 'Deferred To...' implies a 'Waiting For' status. It wouldn't be too hard to make a list showing all deferred actions, perhaps grouped by who they're deferred to which would be a useful addition to the action dashboards.

Where the documentation would be (if we had any)

http://www.tiddlywiki.org/wiki/MonkeyGTD

As it says on the front page, contributions are welcome. My thoughts on documentation are that anything is better than nothing, so if you are interesting in contributing anything at all don't hold back.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Thoughts on the rampant abuse of HideWhenPlugin

HideWhenPlugin is great. But it wasn't really meant to be worked as hard as I'm working it. It means that bucket loads of DOM (every element for every template) gets created and then removed at render time by HideWhen. It's not too efficient and sometimes you see things flicker and disappear when rendering. I imagine it might be slow on a slow machine. So a solution would be to use something that hijacks getTemplateForTiddler such as can be found in an old MPTW (TagBasedTemplates) or over at TiddlyTools.com. Or perhaps invent a way to apply conditional logic to the templates before they are loaded into the DOM.

Almost time

I think it's time to officially bless the 3.0 alpha for use. It's still incomplete and lacking in a few areas but it's already much better than 2.1 (and 1.0). So, look for an upgrade guide coming soon. What I will do is dig up my old stale 2.1 system and upgrade it to 3.0. I will write down what I did and post it here. Also I will enable a MonkeyGTD 3.0 flavour on Tiddlyspot in the next day or so. Stay tuned.

Ps, latest update in brief: There is a version number so now you can see what version you have. Some bug fixes in tickler sorting. Using a lighter weight date picker written by Saq Imtiaz.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

allow multiple contexts

Someone asked if they could have checkboxes for contexts instead of a drop down. This enables an action in multiple contexts, for instance @weekend and @call. Here's how to do it:

  • Select the TW menu (top right)
  • Under the "All" tab find the tiddler called "TitleButtons"
  • You will need to edit the section under !Action.
  • Find the following:
Context:<span macro="multiSelectTag Context allowNone:on"></span>

  • Replace it with either of these:
Context:<span macro="multiCheckboxTag Context"></span><br/>

Context:<span macro="groupOfSingleToggleTags Context"></span><br/>
  • If you still want one context per action but buttons instead of a drop down you could try this:
Context:<span macro="multiToggleTag Context"></span><br/>

  • The next action you click on should use the new elements. You can experiment to find what works best for you. You might want to remove or relocate the >> link (it's the eval macro span).
  • Note that the appearance of projects, ticklers and other items are also defined in TitleButtons. If you come up with a nice looking layout for any of these items, email me or post it here. At present the layout is pretty much place-holder and is due some refinement.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

getting from an action to its project

It's the >> link beside the drop-down project selector. I've added some more of those in a couple of other places. thanks to heller for the suggestion

Also there's a [P] link to match the action lists.

we have starred items view

Find it under "Do Work" It seems like I'm working all day and all night on this but actually that took about 5 minutes to write and about 10 minutes to tweak. (If you'll permit a small amount of hubris), it's a testament to the power of the MonkeyGTD framework. For instance to create the 'Starred Items' view I just typed the following. And mostly it was copy and paste:
!Starred Items
<table class="threecol"><tr><td>

<div macro="mgtdList title:'Starred Actions'
    startTag:Starred
    mode:global
    tags:'Action'
    view:ActionProj
    mode:global
    group:ActionStatus
    gView:bold
    newButtonTags:'Starred Action'
    "></div>

</td><td>

<div macro="mgtdList title:'Starred Projects'
    startTag:Starred
    mode:global
    tags:Project
    view:Project
    group:ProjectStatus
    gView:bold
    newButtonTags:'Starred Action'
    "></div>

</td><td>

<div macro="mgtdList title:'Other Starred Items'
    startTag:Starred
    mode:global
    tags:'!Project && !Action'
    view:star
    group:GTDComponent
    gView:bold
    newButtonTags:'Starred'
    "></div>

</td></tr></table> 



http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/demo3.html
http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/empty3.html
http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/upgrade3.html

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

we have reference items

new road map:
  • starred items views
  • fix up the menus (Do Work, Review) etc so they are less ugly and more useful
  • make everything look nicer
  • write some upgrade guides
  • include as tiddlyspot flavour
  • write some documentation
  • update the web site and archive old versions in a dark and hard-to-find location