"Reminders" feature - your comments are needed

[shahar]

After some weeks of not touching Glista, I've been working in the last
few weeks on a feature which I think will bring Glista to the next
maturity level. Since the beginning, people have either asked for or
mentioned the fact that Glista has no concept of "due time" for
tasks.

Personally, I don't believe in "due time" sort of features (hehe)
because I usually don't care when a task is due (unlike a meeting for
example) - by the time it's due, it's too late anyway. I do care about
being reminded though, and this is why I decided to add the ability to
set a reminder for each task.

Most of the infrastructure for this is done, but there are some things
I just can't decide:

1. What is the best way of reminding people? I had some ideas on
implementing the actual reminder itself:
- A simple pop-up window with a message
- libnotify style message on the desktop (If you're not sure what that
is: http://images.google.com/images?q=libnotify )
- play a sound
- run an arbitrary command set by the user
- probably lots of other options I haven't thought of.

Any ideas on what you'd like to see?

2. The multitude of features gives me some UI headaches - I need some
way to represent the fact that an item has a reminder set for it. The
natural choice is a small clock like icon next to the item - but now
this becomes a mess with the note icon and all. I'm thinking about
removing the "note" icon, and bolding up (or underlining, or both) the
text instead in order to designate that there is a note set on an
item. Any objections or suggestions?

Comments are welcome!

Shahar.

[jcinacio]

On Dec 19, 2:35 pm, shahar <shahar.ev...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After some weeks of not touching Glista, I've been working in the last
> few weeks on a feature which I think will bring Glista to the next
> maturity level. Since the beginning, people have either asked for or
> mentioned the fact that Glista has no concept of "due time" for
> tasks.
>
> Personally, I don't believe in "due time" sort of features (hehe)
> because I usually don't care when a task is due (unlike a meeting for
> example) - by the time it's due, it's too late anyway. I do care about
> being reminded though, and this is why I decided to add the ability to
> set a reminder for each task.
>
> Most of the infrastructure for this is done, but there are some things
> I just can't decide:
>
> 1. What is the best way of reminding people? I had some ideas on
> implementing the actual reminder itself:
> - A simple pop-up window with a message
> - libnotify style message on the desktop (If you're not sure what that
> is:http://images.google.com/images?q=libnotify)
> - play a sound
> - run an arbitrary command set by the user
> - probably lots of other options I haven't thought of.
>
> Any ideas on what you'd like to see?
>

IMHO, libnotify is probably the best option (i would probably not like
to have a pop-up appear in some situations)
The sound, command and others would be OK as additional choices (not
sure if you were thinking about having multiple reminder options
though) and i can imagine how they would be useful.

> 2. The multitude of features gives me some UI headaches - I need some
> way to represent the fact that an item has a reminder set for it. The
> natural choice is a small clock like icon next to the item - but now
> this becomes a mess with the note icon and all. I'm thinking about
> removing the "note" icon, and bolding up (or underlining, or both) the
> text instead in order to designate that there is a note set on an
> item. Any objections or suggestions?
>

Sounds like a good idea - i think that (since categories are bold), an
underline would probably be enough. another option would be setting
the color to blue (link style) - not sure if is possible or makes
things look bad though...

> Comments are welcome!
>
> Shahar.


Keep up the great work! :)

[shahar]

Hi,

cool, I'll go with the underline then (I'll keep the coloring for
future possibility of adding labels / importance to tasks :)

Thanks for the feedback!

Shahar.

[shahar]

On Dec 19, 5:56 pm, jcinacio <jcina...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've thought a bit about having more than one method, so now I'm
experimenting with a plugin architecture for the reminder messaging
functionality. So if this works out (I'm not really experienced with
plugins) one will be able to set / change the reminder method at
runtime.

Shahar.