dogMelon Note Studio

[lemayp]

Hello everyone,

several people have shown their interest in the GTD Like new create_actions_list plugin that has been added recently on the NoteStudio web site and several of you have asked me to get the new features/fixes I have made so far and documented in the following message thread: http://dogmelon.com.au/nsforum/viewtopic.php?t=878

I am currently working on an idea for the plugin that I think I will use and would like to share the idea in case it could also be usefull for others.

What I want to add is the possibility to put dated related information/task in my NoteStudio pages and ask the plugin/report to show me those tasks sorted by the task date.

My goal is not to replace a true alarm system such as outlook, but I would like to register in my notestudio pages things that I must do "around" a date, or that I must do every years at the same period.

For example, I could register something like:


Plant the tomatoes for May
Do the income tax report in february
Call the snow removal guy in Novembre

You know, those things that we don't have to do at a specific date, but around a date, but we don't want to have an alarm in outlook for a specific date.

So, the idea would be to use a predetermined tag for those things, such as [@Date]. The format of the [@Date] lines must be done in a way that it could be easily sortable. During my testing, I have used the following format:

[@Date] yy/mm/dd My action

So let's try that with the info mentionned before:


[@Date] 06/05/01 Plant the tomatoes
[@Date] 06/02/01 Do the income tax report
[@Date] 05/11/01 Call the snow removal guy


So, for the [@Date] support, the plugin would not print lines as they have founded in the book, but cumulate them and at the end sort them. The report would be different for [@Date] support as I am planning to put the tag line at the left of the report and the bookname/pagename at the right.

Once generated the report would looks like this


[@Date] 05/11/01 Call the snow removal guy | pagename
[@Date] 06/02/01 Do the income tax report | pagename
[@Date] 06/05/01 Plant the tomatoes | pagename

From there, we can see that the next dated activity is to call the guy who remove the snow in front of my driveway (Hey! I am in Canada, not in Australia!). Once done, I will go and update the date of this task to put the year as 2006 instead.

I am wandering if such enhancement could fit someone else need, or if anyone else would have some comments on this implementation.

Please note that my intention is only to put something that I think I will use and if I can accomodate someone at the same time I will do, but I can't promise that I will put there anyone's feature.

Please let me know what you think about this idea and from there I will see if I will publish the outcome of what I will implement.

regards,

Pierre

[sid-the-bad]

This sounds like a super addition to your extremely useful plugin. I'm sure there are other improvements possible but this calendar like function will be great.

My only possible suggestion is to make the date sensitive material sort to a different page than the non date sensitive material. Or how about a different page for each date, so that you effectively build a diary within NS.

Sid

[lemayp]

Sid,

I like your idea of a new page for all the dated related information. I don't think I will go to the level of a page per day, but separating the dated information from the non-dated one is interesting.

At this moment I have made a version that support what has been exposed here. I will check how I could extend it to support your suggestion. I think I will make this optional/configurable.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Pierre

[stuckagain]

Good idea but I have a few comments. Before I discovered NS & GTD, I used todo lists and then an outlined (nested) to do list for Palm called progect. I was always setting target dates in to do lists and then each day was finding that I never got these targets done and spent half my time changing targets dates, and losing focus of what was important.

I have found that a happy medium is to use week numbers. So something I want to be reminded of in the first week of January becomes [@01], and so on upto 52. Once a week, during the weekly review, I call up the tasks for the coming week and change them to [@na] etc. I guess I could instead use pick the date relating to the Monday for each week, but I lose some simplicity.

I had a some other ideas for plugins
1. A lists of the hyperlinked name of every page in each NS book.
2. A list of every orphaned page in each book.
3. I use Stephen Covey quadrants to help me prioritise my work. Each page has one of four links [@q1] to [@q4]: A report that lists all the pages in each quadrant, sub listed in A-Z order would be great

[lemayp]

The idea of my enhancement is not to requires someone to use a real date, or real date format, but rather use some kind of format that could be sortable. The idea behind what I want to implement is going in the same direction of how you have implemented your GTD, as the listed things to be done is not to be done on a specific date (this outlook would do that) but around a specific date.

To use my pluging, you would need to change your current entries that appears as:

[@01] do this
[@02] do that
...
[@45] do this other thing
[@46] Do that other thing...
...

to something like

[@date] 2006-01 do this
[@date] 2006-02 do that
..
[@date] 2005-45 do this other thing
[@date] 2005-46 do that other thing
...


As we reach week 45 of 2005, once something has been completed, you would need to change the 2005 year to 2006 and that entry will go back to the end of the list.

I think that going with a real date or with a week number, will both work fine with the changes I have done to the plugin.

For the other plugin suggestion, I have already sent an email to Ant about the fact that I would like to investigate the possibility to create a plugin that would list all orphan pages. This is a feature that I think is mising from NS at this moment, specially for user having a lot of pages. I have asked Ant to tell me if some API altready exist to extract from a pages all the link names refered by the page. Having such API would allow the possibility to create an orphan page plugin.

thanks for the feedback

Pierre

[stuckagain]

Many thanks. keep up the great work, and I'll try to keep the ideas, suggestions and feedback coming. Its the least I can contribute.

[lufad]

Hi,

Ant or Dan can you verify if this plugin work on a Mac? WordCount is working for me but Create Action List don't.

Please,

Luc

[ant]

I don't have a Mac near me just now. But I'm guessing that it will need some customisation, because of path issues.

These lines won't work, because your Mac won't have a C: drive:

[lemayp]

The next version of the plugin is currently in test phase. The following features have been added so far:

- Possibility to add multiple pages to skip
- Possibility to add a skip page with the format "bookname|pagename" or "pagename"
- Special handling for the [@Date] tag. Those will be sorted as described in this post and put at the end of the report.
- [@Date] tag entries report could be set in a distinct page if wanted (optional)
- Add a debug mechanism

At this moment the only known issue is with the Mac support. If anyone else than Luc is available to investigate with a Mac, please send me a private message with your email (I know that Luc is currently very busy).

I will eventually be willing to give to some people a beta version of the plugin. If you are interested to have it, please send me a private message with your email adress.

I am not planning to release this version before next week.

regards,

Pierre

[lemayp]

Another somehow important feature will be added to the next release. Althought this new feature will be configurable, the implementation of it will impact all users.

The feature I want to add is one that will allow the possibility to create sorted report for all tags. So far, I have added for release 1.1.0 (name of the next release) the possibility to sort the [@Date] and that feature is currently working the way I have described previously.

Now, I want to add an option to also sort all other tags as well. The idea behind this is to allow people the possibility to create entries with a priority level into it. That priority could be anything that is meaningful to you such as a "A" to "G" priority, or a number representing that priority or even something representing the Steven Covey Quadran.

Here are some examples:

[@Call] Call Mother in law
[@Call] Call my girlfriend
[@Call] Call the police



With no sorting, I might be calling my mother in law although that may not be my number 1 priority. Instead, entering the following anywhere in any NoteStudio Page would create a report sorted on priorities:

[@Call] (1) Call the police
[@Call] (2) Call my girlfriend
[@Call] (4) Call Mother in law

The sorting will be optional and a new option will be added to the create_actions_list.ini file:
sorted_report=1

But, and here where this affect all current users, in order to accomplish this, I must reverse the order of the report table to have the action description at the left and the NoteStudio Page reference at the right. Personnaly I prefer this as I want to see the action more than the page info, which is easier when readin a report on my palm.

Beta testers will be updated with this new feature later on. If anyone else would like to participate in the tests, I can accept some more people. Simply send me a personal message with your email adress and I will send you the necessary to test.

I hope to be able to deliver this new version next week.

regards,

Pierre

[ratz]

Ok this would be the bomb for this plugin, some times you just can't take the pda with you or you don't have one. If the summary this addin were formated correctly then you could use the pocketmod folding technique to take your actions list with you. I would suggest one action group per page but there might be better ways.

Any how, take a 10 minute detour over to http://www.pocketmod.com/ make one, print it, and fold it. Once you've done that you'll get it. Really you have to make one to get it.

This would be the perfect compliement to notestudio on a stick.....

[lemayp]

Ratz,

I agree with you, this little pocketmod is very interesting. I took some notes, tried it, created some personnal pages as Shockwave (.swf), created a little booklet and printed it. The booklet was pretty good.

The problem I can see at this moment, from my understanding, is that there is no easy way to create the destination format supported by the application (shockwafe format) from a text file or a plugin.

I will check that later if they come out with a way to import easily data in the utility.

The only thing I could see that the plugin could do for people using pocketmod would be to create a text file formatted with a way that could fit your pocketmod pages. For my testing, I was able to create 24 chars/22 lines pages using an arial 10 font. We could eventually have the plugin creating lines not longuer then 'n' characters (here 24) and with a dot line at every 'y' lines (here 23), telling you where to cut/paste things in the tool that you are using to generate the .swf file.

This would be a long and manual step for you to proceed. Probably once you will have the .swf file for each 8 pages (or 7 if you have a front page) created the first time, the task will not be very long to regenerate those pages that you would include in your booklet...

We could chat in a email exchange (send me a personnal message containing your email adress), or open a dedicated message thread for this. Maybe others would have some idea on what would be the best way to proceed. But at this moment I can't see any way a plugin could generate directly the different pages (.swf).


regards,

Pierre

Anyone else would like to have such feature supported?

[zap]

Hi Pierre

Just one question (not a request ) would it be possible to store the *.ini file content in the book? So that we have some kind of a config book where the plug-in developers store on single pages there config. It would solve also the problem of MAC users and would increase the portability of these plug-ins between several computers. This is just a two-pence idea from my side.

BTW I like your plug-in and use it quite often. Would be nice to have the phyton thinggy also on the palm but... well let's have some dreams.

regards Michel

[lemayp]

Michel,

I will take a good note about your suggestion as I agree that it would help on the portability. That would requires several changes to the code as we rely on temporary files prior of creating the 2 reports as well as for debugging purpose.

But I will surely investigate this eventually. This would requires "hardcoding" the ini page name as this is the only way for the plugin to find its initialisation content...

I can't promise anything, but will take a deeper look at this eventuality.


regards,

Pierre

[lemayp]

Hello everyone,

I just would like to let you know that version 1.1.0 of the Create GTD Actions list plugin is now available. I have sent the file to Ant at DogMelon to update the version available to download from their site.

I have also put the plugin in an alternate temporary location: http://pages.videotron.com/lemayp/NS/create_actions_list_1.1.0.zip

Please make sure to take a look at the readme and sample configuration file prior of using the plugin.

I would like to thanks a lot the people who have volunteered to beta test the plugin. Their help has been very appreciated.

Hope you will find this new version usefull.

regards,

Pierre