Control Option Command

Indeed. Why does this ordinarily quite burlesque and colorful blog suddenly look like the works of Jacob Nielsen?

If you are new to this blog; move along, but if you’ve come to expect bright colors and swirly shit all over the place, take a while and harken.

I need a project to get back to my former glory, and I need to deliver myself a prompt, swift kick in the rear to get going. The best way to do this is to just publish this new design for the blog while it’s still butt-ugly so that I’ll have an incentive to fix it the fuck up as soon as humanly possible.

If you really miss the old design go visit Kajas blog.

That is all.

Let me get the cheesy redundant joke done right off the bat:

On top of my list of things to get done is to finish Dave Allens Getting Things Done.

How droll. What fun.¹

On top of the personal hit list of Andy Kim of The Potion Factory I’m willing to bet a few shillings you’ll find “Finish The Hit List Touch”, the fabled iPhone companion app to The Hit List Mac. I’m not sure that’s sound prioritizing though. I think perhaps he should bump up “Reconsider customer communication strategies” to number 1.

If you’re unacquainted with the app, its history and the state of things today, let me offer a brief summary.

Read the rest of this article »

I use 2Do app on the iPhone to Get Something Done. It’s a beautiful, well-functioning and well-considered application of the Delicious Persuasion, and I’ve mused more than once that the best thing in-danger-of-vaporware company The Potion Factory could do would be to sub-contract these guys to handle their iPhone companion app. That’s a story for another day though. Suffice it to say that Guided Ways has produced a sterling piece of software and regularly updates the app with new functionality.¹

So I was browsing their site over my microwaved cup of mud this morning and stumbled over this FAQ item. For the unclicky of you; It’s a reply to what seems to be an actual Frequently Asked Question about why the Guided Ways Software site contains links to software and utilities for reading the Quran, calculating prayer timings and so forth. Not on the 2Doapp.com site mind you, on the external site of the software company. 2Doapp.com, as far as I can tell contains no references to any religious practices. It is, in its nature, a wholly secular app.

It saddens me deeply that Guided Ways needs to address this “issue”. I had some notion, perhaps naive, that the people who were somewhat ahead in technology ² were somehow above petty religious hatred and bigotry. I attributed that kind of moronic attitudes to backwards and isolated luddites who refused to deal with the inevitable globality ³ of today. Alas. Fear-mongering, narrow-mindedness and hate speech seems to have made Islamophobia ubiquitous.

Personally I find all religion disgusting, but that is my a personal view, and I don’t equate the flaws I perceive in religion with the ethical backbone of individuals of that faith. If the developers were using their site to preach in favor of, say, discrimination and persecution of homosexuals I wouldn’t want to give them my business, just as I wouldn’t with any christian fundamentalist spouting the same crap. So long as that is not the case I have no bigger qualms about buying from Guided Ways than from a christian, hindu, buddhist or atheist developer. I disagree with their view on the world, but as long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom and happiness of others I would die defending their right to hold those views. ⁴ The Quran does, as do the bible, contain views that are in conflict with my, and hopefully your, ethics but as long as we differentiate between the faith of Reverend Phelps and that of, say, the Bishop of Oxford⁵ it’s downright hypocritical if we don’t also differentiate between the faiths of, say Muhammad Ali and that of Osama Bin Laden.

I could go on, but I’ll try to sum up my stance now. If you equate Islam with terrorism and are frightened of muslims, and do not maintain the same attitude towards christians you are a hypocrite, and would do well to read Amin Maloofs texts on religious bigotry.
If you do refuse to do business with both muslims and christians out of disregard for religion you are, as we say in Norwegian “shooting sparrows with cannons”, and as we say in English “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. Good luck with that.

Oh. And check out 2Do on iTunes.

Edit: I updated the app to work on Snow Leopard. Go here to get the app or source code.

So this all started out with me pining for the release of the fabled iPhone version of The Hit List. I started out just wanting to create a script that would let me use Things Touch to gather tasks when I was out and about and then transfer them to The Hit List and delete them from things. Seeing how I already had a license for Things this seemed to be my best option for the time being. (Sorry Appigo Todo. It’s not you, it’s me.)

So this is all just exposition, because:
1. It’s too klugey a way of going about this to actually be useful
And 2. it’s easier to achieve almost as good a result by just syncing through iCal.

So now I’m sitting here with a heap of useless code and decided to see if I could repurpose it to do some good.
I present to you the Things Migrator. This is a small app that does one thing only. It grabs all of your to-dos from Things and migrates them over to The Hit List.

Now, not all of the same metaphors apply in The Hit List as they do in Things, so some of the data will inevitably be lost or confuddled. Below is a short summary of how the migrator will treat the different kinds of data.
Tags are transformed into /Tags or /Multi word tags/, Projects become Lists and you can map Areas into /Tags, /Area name tags/ or @contexts.

Issues that may or may not be improved upon:

• It’ll only migrate open tasks and it’ll ignore Things’ “activation date”, “creation date”, and pretty much anything to do with “per sons”.
• Links to local files will not be read. I can’t figure out how to decode the stupid HEX-string I get into a proper path. Instead the script will insert a note alerting you to the fact that somehting’s missing.
• URL links will for now show up as the full HTML link, i.e. <a href="http://ctrloptcmd.com">my link</a>. I’m sure it’s easily fixable, but it’ll have to wait until I know if anyone at all wants it seeing how this string parsing in AppleScript is getting on my balls.
• It is, as mentioned before, a one way street. There’s no syncing back to Things from THL per now, and I don’t know if there ever will.

Please note that this is experimental stuff and I take no responsibility for crap that may happen!

That said, it seems to work pretty well and you can download the application (with a nice GUI) or the full XCode project here.

Comments and feedback is always appreciated.

I’m a sucker for nice illustrations, and these are pretty damn awesome.