FlexTime + Growl == No Procrastination
August 24th, 2006Chanpory Rith of LiveClever has come up with an… umm… clever way of hooking up FlexTime’s scripted cues to Growl for, as he puts it, a “gentler way to end procrastination.”
I love to see these creative applications of FlexTime’s scriptable interfaces, and hope to see more as people work through the possibilities.
August 26th, 2006 at 1:08 am
So how long until you add support for Growl… that change might just push me over to buying FlexTime… ;)
August 26th, 2006 at 6:06 am
Hi Chris – the plan right now is to integrate Growl support for the 1.1 update, so hopefully that won’t be terribly long from now. I need to look more carefully into Growl support and figure out how much functionality needs to be exposed to FlexTime users. If it’s just a matter of “passing text through” then that would be one thing, but if there are lots of options that might need to be exposed, then I’ll have to rework the UI in FlexTime a little bit for the “Show Text” cues.
Do you have any comments about this? What does “growl support” mean to you? Mainly not having to go to the trouble of writing a custom script to interface with it?
Thanks,
Daniel
August 28th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Well, I guess it means that it works automagically… so many of my apps just support Growl out of the box — and that someone had to write a script for it means that there would be some value in native integration.
What I’d like to see is the ability, as I can with other apps, to determine which notifications get sent to Growl — and how they’re presented. Especially with the productivity hack mentioned, it seems like a no-brainer — and it should be fairly trivial to add support. To the best of my knowledge, your description “passing text through” I think is pretty close to how it works, though I’ve not actually programmed such myself.
Anyway, keep me posted on 1.1!
August 30th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Daniel, I agree with Chris’s Growl integration suggestions. I don’t think it has to be too much more than just passing text through. I’m not sure how much you can do in Growl though. The only other thing might be that when a notification comes up in Growl, you’re able to click on it, to edit the activity in FlexTime.
August 31st, 2006 at 12:17 am
Hi,
to chime in here: I added basic Growl support to one of my apps – only displaying a notification for three different events – and it was really easy. It just took me a couple of minutes and it was working as intended. Catching events from growl should be easy as well.
I see another problem that is maybe to be considered: As programmer I invest a lot of time and thoughts in how to make a good interface to exchange important messages with the user. I do not only have to plan the sheets or windows, but also how to catch attention etc…. and then there comes growl which might handle everything completly different than I would do and which could interfere with my logic of getting the users attention…
Volker
August 31st, 2006 at 5:31 am
Thanks everybody, for the feedback.
It sounds like I won’t be doing any harm if I at least add a preference that says something like “Use Growl to display text messages,” and only enable that preference when and if Growl is installed/enabled for FlexTime.