Comments on: FlexTime 1.0 Beta

By: Red Sweater Blog - FlexTime Nearing 1.0

Red Sweater Blog - FlexTime Nearing 1.0 — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:33:13 +0000

[...] Over the past several months I have been putting a lot of work into FlexTime, the project I first announced here back in late December. [...]

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 16:10:30 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, Michael. I have gotten a few private responses to this and, like yours, they surprise me with the innovative ways people are trying to use the very simple utility. I never would have considered it as a “diversion timer,” but now that you mention it, something like a repeating routine of “50 minutes on”, “10 minutes off” could be good for the body and soul :)

I appreciate the feedback about the confusing UI. Right now, in the table view representing activities, being the “selected row” means it’s active and either is running or will be run when the routine starts.

One thing I’m planning on adding soon is a “Run AppleScript…” cue feature. That should take care of a lot of items like speakable text and Growl notifications (for the record FastScripts also supports a modest Growl-like functionality). Over time the ones that are most popular could be included as standard cue types.

By: Michael McCracken

Michael McCracken — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:14:18 +0000

I really like this idea - I tried using it to time a web-browsing sidetrack from work, but I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. I wasn’t sure what the double-click action on the activity list does, and it isn’t clear which activity is currently running. Putting the spinner in the tableview might solve that problem.

I’d also vote for Growl support and the ability to add speaking text to an action, so you can find out what you’re supposed to be doing next without switching over to FlexTime.

Thanks for sharing it, and keep it up, I think the possibility of using this for ad-hoc timing of work and rest/slack periods could be really nice.