outubro, 2009

Writing — Comments
26
out 09

NaNoWriMo

2009_poster_smaller_0

National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, is the biggest writing contest in the world, but contest for what? Best novel? No way, it’s a contest against you, that always wanted to write a book and never managed to finish.

In November, you need to reach 50.000 words, don’t worry about quality and editing, this is for december, november is the month to produce volume, it’s less then 2000 words a day. If you already tried to write anything, you’ll know that 2000 words a day is hard, but good enough to achieve.

One other important thing is, no one will look into your writings, unless you want to send to someone, NaNoWriMo doesn’t request or save what you write, it’s all yours and you can publish whenever you want, remember it’s a personal challenge.

Let’s see some statistics:

1999: 21 participants and six winners

2000: 140 participants and 29 winners

2001: 5000 participants and more than 700 winners

2002: 13,500 participants and around 2,100 winners

2003: 25,500 participants and about 3,500 winners

2004: 42,000 participants and just shy of 6,000 winners

2005: 59,000 participants and 9,769 winners

2006: 79,813 participants and 12,948 winners

2007: 101,510 participants and 15,333 winners

2008: 119,301participants and 21,683 winners

I am in, will be using Scrivener, hope you motivate your self and join us! See you there in http://www.NaNoWriMo.org!

Design — Comments
24
out 09

Readability and Design

Everyone noted the new layout? I’ve been using for quite some time now, an application called Readability, it’s a bookmark you put in your menubar and whenever the website you’re browsing is crappy to read, you just push this button and voila. It will magically add readability to the content.

This theme change is all about design and readability, unfortunately you won’t have to use it in this website.

Life / Software — Comments
4
out 09

Things notify with Growl

Recently I started using Things as my Task manager, I’ve tested many others including the OmniFocus. In the beginning you might think that OmniFocus is more complete, but in the end you’ll see that they do the same job, with the difference that Things is much better designed.

I was missing some tasks because I am very used to look at my iCal all the time, but not to Things. So I’ve turned on iCal sync and created my first two applescripts, one that will display using growl all your tasks in your Today box, and the other was made for privacy, it will only show the number of tasks pending for today. I suggest you to use Lingon to schedule it.

Growl notify by name

thingsnotifybyname

And here is the code:

code:

-- Checks to see if GrowlHelperApp is running, then registers this script with Growl
tell application "System Events"
	if application process "GrowlHelperApp" exists then
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to register as application "Things" all notifications {"Reminder"} default notifications {"Reminder"} icon of application "Things"
	end if
end tell
 
tell application "System Events"
	if application process "Things" exists then
		tell application "Things"
			set todayTasksCount to (count to do of list "Today")
			set todayTasks to to dos of list "Today"
		end tell
 
		if todayTasksCount is greater than 0 then
			set fullTaskName to ""
			repeat with taskItem in todayTasks
				set taskName to name of taskItem
				set fullTaskName to fullTaskName & "; " & taskName
				tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Reminder" title "Reminder" description taskName application name "Things" icon of application "Things"
			end repeat
		end if
	end if
end tell

Growl notify by count

thingsnotifybycount

And here is the code:

code:

-- Checks to see if GrowlHelperApp is running, then registers this script with Growl
tell application "System Events"
	if application process "GrowlHelperApp" exists then
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to register as application "Things" all notifications {"Reminder"} default notifications {"Reminder"} icon of application "Things"
	end if
end tell
 
tell application "System Events"
	if application process "Things" exists then
		tell application "Things" to set todayTasksCount to (count to do of list "Today")
 
		if todayTasksCount is greater than 0 then
			set growlTitle to "You still have " & todayTasksCount & " task(s) for today"
			tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Reminder" title "Reminder" description growlTitle application name "Things" icon of application "Things"
		end if
	end if
end tell