Feature Request: Time Entry change

[Alan Limebeer]

Hi MLO Team,

I'm a (very) long time user of MLO, having first used it on a PocketPC Phone Edition (anyone remember those)? Long before Apple even started thinking about phones, Microsoft released the now long dead Windows CE. I've since moved on to (currently) being a registered Desktop, Android, and CloudSync user. In all the years I've searched for tools to fully implement a GTD process, nothing (among literally hundreds of products I've looked at over the years) has ever been able to come close to being able to do it all in one tool. Except for MLO (and one other tool that DavidCo developed internally, but it was based on Lotus Notes (uhg), and didn't have anywhere near the functionality of your amazing little piece of software. 

I checked the website and couldn't find a specific method for submitting feature requests and product feedback so I thought I'd put it here, since I found a bunch of others already posted to this group when I did a search. As an aside, before I get into it, have you considered implementing UserVoice (https://www.uservoice.com/product/product-management/)? If you haven't heard of it, it's fantastic (at least from a user persepctive). There are a number of small development projects who make products that I use that have implemented it to gather feature requests from their user base. It does a whole lot more to support product development, apparently, but my experience with it is as a user. What makes it so fantastic from that point of view is that it maintains a list of features requested by the community, or suggested by the developers, and allows the users to vote on the features they'd most like to see. Each person gets a finite number of votes to apply, and can add one, two, or three votes to an item. These votes are then locked until either the user removes them to place somewhere else, the feature is implemented and the developer marks it complete, or it's retired.

Anyway, I'm not posting about user voice. I wanted to ask if it would be possible to add a capability to time entry fields/controls. I live on 24-hour time and have all clocks in my life set to the 24-hour format. When ever I reference time in writing I simply have to type 4 digits. E.G. 7:39p = 1939; 3:07am = 0307.

So far the only place I enter time data is in due dates and reminders, but since my workflow is heavily dependent on reminders I interact with these fields very often. What I'd like to be able to do is enter the time of a reminder just as I've described above, without having to put in the colon.

I realize this is a special case and, as a hobbyist developer myself, I understand that one tries to avoid special cases as much as possible, but this one in particular would be really really nice to have :)

I know it probably doesn't seem like much, but since there's no : on the number pad, it's actually quite a distruptive shift to have to change over to the main keys, press shift then ;, then go back to the number pad to finish. In fact, even cooler would be, if I enter only two numbers, they be assumed to be the hour, and the minutes just set to :00.

At the moment, when i try to enter time like this, the control thinks I'm entering a year, and blows up my date. I've attached a couple of screen shots to illustrate.

I just spent an hour or so researching online the best practices for storing dates in software (datetime or separate date and time fields) and it looks to me like the controls that have been used conform to established best practices. I don't know how easy it to would be to code up the logic on the controls to evaluate for the condition I've asked for on the LeaveControl event, but if it's not too much trouble I'd really love it!

Thanks so much for building such a fantastic product! You have a customer for life.

Regards,

Alan Limebeer

[Alan Limebeer]

Wow! You know how some days you just feel like an idiot? I just had one of those ones. After writing this novel, i posted it and looked at the top of the topics list and what do I see? I pinned topic on adding feature requests, that directs users to UserVoice, of all things. Grrrrrrr. D'oh.

[pottster]

Hi Alan,

I suspect this will not be possible, certainly in the short term.

Have you considered re-mapping the number pad keys. I have re-mapped my NumLock key since I always have this set to on. You could for instance, remap the NumLock key to a colon and that way you wouldn't take your hands from the numberpad. The easiest way to do this is using AutoHotKey. If you are familiar with AHK I can provide you with a script, if not, I can provide you with an .exe file. Let me know.

[Alan Limebeer]

Hey Pottster,

Great suggestion! I considered that as a workaround, but I couldn't decide what key to use. NumLock is a fantastic idea! I'll do that. I appreciate the offer for the script, thank you, but I've already got a remapping tool that changes the keyboard layout in the registry that I use to shut CAPS LOCK

[Alan Limebeer]

hmmm... must have hit some weird key combo cause I wasn't done writing that last post...

Anyway, as I was saying, I have a tool to kill CAPS LOCK so I'll just do the same with NUM LOCK.

Thanks again,

Alan