[TW5] TimerActions Plugin - trigger action widgets based on different timers

[Jed Carty]

This plugin gives a way to trigger a script made of action widgets similar to how the startup actions work. But instead of running when the wiki starts it runs after a set amount of time. Either after a set amount (run after 10 minutes) of time or periodically (run every minute).

You can set up as many timers as you want and you can start/stop and configure them independently.

The plugin is available on GitHub: https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-TimerActions

And there is a demo wiki here: https://ooktech.com/TiddlyWiki/TimerActions/

[TonyM]

Jed,

I am yet to install this, but reviewing its capabilities I am seriously impressed. This will really help me in my Getting things done platform.

I really like the variable resolution of the timers, for standard task management a minute +- a minute is usually enough so being able to change this is brilliant, even if it was necessary.

I will of course want to start timers from my own code, and when you Add another timer type that runs at a specific date/time in the future it will be great for project management.

I imagine if we can collect some common timer actions like 

• a popup with link to the relevant tiddler, 
  
• add an item to an action queue
• A dismiss and start again action
• etc..

Nice work, thanks again.

Tony

[Jed Carty]

You can start timers from your own code by setting the value for the task name in $:/plugins/OokTech/TimerActions/TaskList as anything other than false. You can manually create tasks by creating a tiddler with the fields listed in the Internals section of the readme and list the timer in the $:/plugins/OokTech/TimerActions/TaskList tiddler.

[TonyM]

Thanks for that Jed

Cool stuff you make

Tony

[Thomas Elmiger]

Hi Jed,

This is great to make sure that reminders for my ToDoNow will pop up after a defined interval. I will check how to integrate and recommend it.

Hints after a first test:

• how resource consuming is this? Would it save the world if we set the update value to 600000?
• calculating milliseconds is not very intuitive, maybe give more example vaues to copy: 1 day, 1 hour, 10 minutes
  
• prefix timer tiddlers with $:/config/TimerAction/ to avoid conflicts and appearance in search results?
  
• broken list formatting in the licence: can be fixed by removing indenting with spaces
• typo in the .js file: ellapsed time => elapsed (only one l)
  

Thanks a lot!

Thomas

[Jed Carty]

The timer itself should barely use any resources, particularly compared to the browser or even just the wiki. Setting the update timer to longer intervals will probably have no effect on performance as long as it is significantly shorter than the period for the actions, otherwise the timing between the actions can be inaccurate. The savings from making the update interval longer are almost certainly going to be lost in the normal variations of power usage by the browser. The analytics built into many websites take much more energy than this, if you want an example.

I have given up on trying to figure out what is generally considered intuitive or simple. I can add a quick table to it. I briefly considered writing something so you could give times in other ways but got bored before I wrote or found a parser for it.

Next time I feel like looking at this I can see about adding a prefix but that leads to more annoyance than I want to think about now if people use something other than the simple interface I made to make timed events and give them different prefixes. 

[David Gifford]

I added this to both the task management misc and Calendars/timers/timeline categories in the TiddlyWiki toolmap (https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM)

Dave

[springer]

Jed and all,

TimerActions (at demo site) hits Internal JavaScript Error when I try to trigger navigate action, such as:

<$action-navigate $to="$:/ControlPanel"/>

... Any sense of why that would be?