Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Year: ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░ 99%

Good morning. It's 4:25 am and let's try and not waste an entire day. Another entire day.

Tinderbox has a feature that watches a folder in the Finder, Apple Notes, DEVONthink, and even Tot. It doesn't sync both ways, but it will import new notes from within those watched places and make new notes in a Tinderbox outline. This makes it easy to add notes to my Tinderbox file from a phone or iPad. It wouldn't be too much trouble to just copy and paste, but watched folders make it even easier.

I have a top-level Agent in my Tinderbox daybook named "Today". All it does is collect notes using a $Date=date(today); query. Given that I'm putting both blog content and personal logging into the document, the Today container is a handy way to see everything going on today. I'll probably modify it to use a date attribute so I can easily jump to any day and see what I wrote then. Neat.

Update: I did change the agent query to use my $Date attribute, like this:

$Date=$Date(agent);

I also changed the agent's $DisplayExpression to reflect the day:

"Created " + if($Date==date(today)){"Today"} else {$Date.format("l");}

So now I just set the $Date attribute of the "Today" agent to any date and it collects all the dated content created that day.

I think I've fixed the RSS feed's date. The feed template didn't have a "pubDate" element at all. This probably happened when changing the feed template to do daily posts instead of one item per post. Anyway, sorry about that. Let me know if anything looks amiss.

Tinderbox is an expensive piece of software, no doubt. You know how people dismiss spending $5 for an app, since "it costs the same as a Starbucks coffee."? Well, I like to think of Tinderbox as no more expensive than buying tickets to a play...a really good play that performs continually all day, every day, and helps me get stuff done and stay organized and publish a blog and...and...and. It's actually cheap, when you think of it that way. 😀 Alex's note made me think of this.

I'm rebuilding my Tinderbox "Dashboard" for the new year. I neglected the whole Daybook last year but I'm determined to not let that happen this year.

The dashboard is a Tinderbox "Map" view littered with agents showing various summary and aggregate information from the entire document.

In the "Days remaining this year" note, I used to only show the resulting integer. I'd forgotten that in map view, notes can visually plot the values of various attributes (as in the Weight Graph, shown). The note's edict (an edict is like a rule, but runs less often) sets the note's $Subtitle to the number of days remaining in the year, like so:

$Subtitle=days(date("today"),date("12/31/2021 6:00 PM"))

I cheated in the screenshot using "42" because with only 2 days left this year, it doesn't make for a great demo. The inspector for that note looks like this:

The note uses the built-in "Dashboard" prototype to make things prettier.

The note's $DisplayExpression is simply $Name + ": " + $Subtitle

Neat, eh?