The Procrastinator’s Clock: Desktop Editions

By request, I've made stand-alone PC and Mac versions of The Procrastinator's Clock. If you missed it yesterday, it's a clock that is up to 15 minutes fast, but speeds up and slows down randomly to keep you from guessing how fast it really is.

I've made a few quick improvements too:

• Quarter hour chimes have been added. Enable them by clicking the speaker icons at the top of the time display. At the top of the hour, you'll hear a low chime ring an equal number of times to the hour. On the 15, 30, and 45-minute marks, you'll hear a high chime ring 1, 2, and 3 times respectively.
• Bug fix: 12:00 midnight to 12:59AM now displays correctly (it was showing 0:00 - 0:59)
• Scaling is now supported and looks a little nicer. Try typing CTRL-F (Command-F on Mac) to go full-screen, and ESC to cancel.
• Aesthetic fix: color on the disabled AM/PM indicator desaturated so it doesn't look awful.
• Added MochiBot tracking support to SWF and projectors.

To grab the new files, visit the Procrastinator's Clock Page and scroll to the very bottom. Enjoy! :-)

Minor Update to Emergent Task Timer Online

Quick note on the Emergent Task Timer Online: I have updated the data saving to be hopefully more robust. If you were experiencing data loss, hopefully that problem is gone. If you ARE losing data, please report this to me. Unless you like losing data. In particular, text changes to the descriptions should now be automatically saved after you pause typing for about a second.

If you want to watch the saving queue to see when it's updating, get into the console and type dbg tracesave and you'll be able to see when and what is being saved at any given time.

The current version is 06-0803X; if you don't see this, then try force-refreshing your browser.

UPDATE

Someone asked for a stand-alone projector version; they are now available on the ETT Alpha page. Note that they use different cookies than the online version, and I think the cookie is also dependent on the filename of the projector file. This will go away once I get some time to implement saving to a central server. If anyone has some tips on the best way to implement a user administration system in PHP4, I could use them :-)

Emergent Task Tracker Updates

I had a couple hours free this weekend to hack in some new features to the interactive version of the Emergent Task Tracker Alpha. There's a few new features:

• I am now allowing non-US character sets for task entry. The rest of the application has not been localized, but you should be able to now enter and display your native language if it's not basic LATIN. Japanese should work, for example. This is not a full internationalization pass by any means, and unfortunately users of bidirectional languages (Farsi, Arabic, and Hebrew for example) are likely to have some problems (Flash does not support BIDI text input).

• You can now customize the alarm sound by uploading an MP3 to a web server. Type set alarmURL http://location/of/file.mp3 in the command line (CTRL-SHIFT-TILDE to get the console). You can use the alarmplay command to see what alarm is currently set, and alarmdefault to reset it back to the default. The location of the alarm URL is saved, so you should only have to do it once.

• The current time cursor should now be displayed if the default starting time causes it to be out-of-range. This should help alleviate some confusion when the cursor doesn't show up.

This should help make the application a little more useful in its current alpha development state. For more information, see last Friday's post.

Feel free to post feedback :-) The next thing I'll be doing is probably adding drag-and-drop; I'm using a slightly different Flash programming approach than I usually do, so it's interesting to work out new (to me) paradigms for old techniques.

After that, the big question is how to sync all the task data to a server database. I've never written a real webservice before on the server side, so I have a lot of questions about "best practices" to create a service that handles multiple transactions from multiple clients seamlessly and securely. I think my data architecture will translate well to a database (it's designed to be reused by different incarnations of the PCEO tools), but I'm also not that well-versed in SQL and PHP. Should be interesting...looking forward to finally learning how to do this stuff :-)

The Printable CEO™ Online Emergent Task Timer

I was getting pretty fed up with my kitchen timer-based Emergent Task Timer sheet. The sheet itself I like a lot, but I was continuously getting out of sync with my kitchen timer. I sometimes would get lost in my work and forget to mark where I was leaving off between tasks. Very annoying.

To resolve the kitchen timer issue, I put together a quick Flash 8 prototype. Once I got going, I added more of the functionality of the paper-based form and ended up with something that is usable day-to-day. It's useful enough to release to the public, I think: Emergent Task Tracker Online Tool. This is an alpha-quality release, but I am finding it already useful in my day-to-day.

Basic Instructions

As this is a functional prototype, a lot of the UI hasn't yet been worked out and may be confusing. The basic operation is this:

• Choose a start hour. If you're starting work at 9AM, set the start hour to 9. The timer uses 24 hour time, which I am partial too because it makes it easier to calculate things like time durations.

• Enter some names of tasks on the left side. I don't have drag and drop working yet, so you'll have to make do with just filling text in.

• Track the current time by looking for the red vertical line. If you don't see it, it's possibly not visible on the current range of hours you have displayed. Just adjust the start time (base it on the current time) and you'll see it.

• Optionally turn on the 15-minute alarm by checking the box in the lower left corner.

• Print your sheet when you need a hardcopy with the PRINT button in the lower right.

• Don't Worry about Closing the Window...I'm using "Local Shared Objects" that save data persistently between sessions; it's sort of like a "Flash Cookie". The upshot is that if you accidently close the browser window, you won't lose your data...just open it up again and it should all be there.

Workarounds

Right now, the ETT tool tracks a single day consisting of 24 hours.

There currently isn't a convenient way to browse the day. To see other parts of the day, just set the start time to something else. I'll be adding those kinds of UI elements as the feature set starts to finalize.

If you want to erase the current day and start a new sheet, you need to go into the debugger:

1. Click the movie, type CTRL-SHIFT-~ (tilde, usually upper left of your keyboard).

2. Click in the bottom line of the console (the input line) and type lsoclear. This erases the persistent storage (the local shared object, or LSO).

3. Reload the web page, and the hour tracking information for the CURRENT DAY will be created.

More Later

I'm pretty tired and I still have to clean up the house for Creative Retreating this weekend, but I'm jazzed to have gotten one of my backburnered projects actually off the ground. Yay! GTD helped me maintain momentum with all that next-action talk. Dang...it actually worked!

There's some interesting things about the software design, particularly the data structures for the tasks and hours, that would be fun to talk about. In the meantime, please feel free to give the prototype a browse and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Updates

• Additional changes are noted in this post

US Pipe Interactive Calculators

I recently did two interactive calculators for US Pipe & Foundry, a company that makes pipes and pipe fittings for the water works industry.

The two pieces I worked on are the MJ FIELD LOK® Time-Savings Calculator and the HDD with TR FLEX® Pipe Calculator; you can find them in US Pipe's suite of online tools.

This is the kind of project I really enjoy, combining elements of information design in the context of an industry that I know nothing about. I love learning about infrastructure and process in all forms, particularly ones that are not readily discernable unless you're paying attention. There is an entire waterworks system that is one of the everyday miracles of modern society, and we take it for granted.

If that isn't interesting enough, US Pipe also does their marketing differently than what one might expect with respect to their industry. For example, US Pipe has a separate website for their MJ FIELD LOK® GASKETS, which are used to connect and restrain water pipes without the fuss of pouring concrete. Instead of drab tables and ugly photos (par for the course with most industrial B2B), there's a slick Flash-based presentation stuffed with professionally art-directed photo assets, coordinated by a real creative agency. Who knew the pipe industry had a sense of humor? I find the combination of creative presentation and tangible benefit just awesome. YEAH!

So anyway, you can check out the MJ FIELD LOK® Time-Savings Calculator and the HDD with TR FLEX® Pipe Calculator in US Pipe's suite of online tools. Pretty straightfoward stuff from a technical Flash perspective, but a lot of fun to make. I implemented this using the hybrid-movieclip approach, which is quite fast and flexible; wrapping some AS2 stuff on top made it a bit more convenient from the scripting side of things.