getting things gnome

Synchronize Getting Things Gnome! with your android phone

By pcabido in android, gnome, gtg 14 Comments Tags: , , , ,

At this point of your life you should know about Getting Things Gnome! and how easy it makes your life!

A port of GTG for android is in my perspective far a way as there is no native python support, etc. So how can you have your GTG tasks on your android phone?

Easy!

  1. Signup for a (free) Remember The Milk account
  2. Activate GTG’s Remember The Milk plugin and sync your tasks with RTM
  3. Install Astrid on your android phone (available on android market)
  4. Sync Astrid with RTM

Signup for a (free) Remember The Milk account
Remember The Milk allows you to manage your tasks online. Just go to http://www.rememberthemilk.com and signup for a (free) account.

Activate GTG’s Remember The Milk plugin and sync your tasks with RTM
Thanks to Luca Invernizzi’s GTG plugin, Remember The Milk, it’s possible to sync GTG with Remember The Milk. The plugin is currently at version 0.3.

Plugin for synchronising Getting Things Gnome! with the web service Remember the milk  (http://www.rememberthemilk.com)
Please note that task descriptions are not synchronized in this version.
Legal note: This product uses the Remember The Milk API but
is not endorsed or certified by Remember, The Milk.

Luca’s RTM plugin is shipped with GTG so if you have the latest version you only need to activate the plugin.

Activate GTG's RTM plugin

Activate GTG's RTM plugin

After activating the plugin you only need to sync the tasks between GTG and RTM.

Sync tasks between GTG and RTM

Sync tasks between GTG and RTM

Install Astrid on your android phone (available on android market)
This step is actually very easy. Just open the Android Market and search for Astrid and install it.

Sync Astrid with RTM
Open Astrid and in the Synchronization menu Activate the Remember The Milk service and also activate the Main Menu Shortcut.

Astrid's Sync menu

Astrid's Sync menu

The Sync shortcut in the main menu comes up handy to sync Astrid with RTM with minimum effort. Then all you need is to hit the sync button.

Astrid & RTM Sync in action

Astrid & RTM Sync in action

That’s it. This is as simple as it can get. No more excuses for not being organized!

One more thing, by default Remember The Milk will send email notification of tasks on their deadline and it’s also a nice feature to have.

I’ll leave you guys with one more screen shot of the Astrid’s home widget that also comes in handy.

Astrid's home screen widget

Astrid's home screen widget

Finally and for the just for those of you who are wondering, I’m using…

Changes to GTG’s plugin manager

By pcabido in gnome, gtg No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Today I just had to code. For days I’ve been studying for my last exams (I hope!). Kevin Mehall made me the suggestion to add a preferences button on the dialog manager in order to allow a user to set the preferences/configure a plugin. The idea is based on the Gedit system. I think I never gave credit to Gedit but I actually based allot of things on their plugin system.

It looks like this:
preferences_plugin_manager

You can read about it and how to make your plugin configurable in the plugin howto along with all the other info.

Notification area plugin for GTG

By pcabido in gnome 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

As requested and discussed before I made a notification area plugin for GTG. This allows you to click on the notification area icon to “minimize” GTG. It also has a small context menu. Keep in mind that if you minimize GTG it will minimize normally (it will not “disappear”), this plugin does not change GTG’s UI or how it works.

gtg_notification_area

Anyway You should read Lionel’s article on “There’s no tray icon in GNOME!“. It is a MUST READ!

The plugin is available in the current development branch.

GSoC 09: Aditional documentation for my work

By pcabido in gnome, gsoc 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

I made some documentation for my work that I had not yet advertised, so here are the links:

Getting Things Gnome 12 weeks after SoC

By pcabido in gnome, gsoc 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

SoC is ending and 12 weeks after I’m very happy with the experience. The first weeks were difficult, I had university assignments and exams to do and it wasn’t easy finding the equilibrium between SoC and the university stuff, some of those weeks were exhaustive. Still it was a great experience, I would do it again! My mentor, Lionel Dricot aka ploum, was always available and helpful during the hole 12 weeks. The GNOME and Getting Things Gnome communities were also very important and contributed in a very positive way to my SoC experience.

My SoC project and the goal was to add Geolocalized tasks (using geoclue and libchamplain) in Getting Things Gnome witch I achieved.

Getting Things Gnome is a task manager and if you don’t know it yet you can read all about it here and see some of the many reasons for why you should use it or try it at least. One of the concepts of the application is the “Work View”. The “Work View” concept will only show tasks that you can do “right now”, it doesn’t display tasks that depend on other tasks, tasks that cannot start before a given date or with tags you have marked as non workable. The main idea of my project is to add a here to the right now, extending the work view concept to “right here and right now”. The extension of the concept is now available if you enable the geolocalized-tasks plugin that packed allong with GTG (only in the current development version that you can get here).
To try it you will need:

  • libchamplain installed with python support
  • Geoclue installed with the main providers
  • my newly created python-geoclue module

I’ll provide the detailed instructions to test it in a few days. I’m currently in contact with Keith Preston so that the python-geoclue module can be integrated in the Geoclue project, so I’ll have some news on that (were you can get it, how to install it, how you can use it, etc) very soon.

During SoC I also added plugin support to GTG and plugins with new features are emerging. It is very satisfactory to see my work being useful. Some of the plugins that already exist are:

  • Geolocalized-tasks plugin (my plugin)
  • Hamster Time Tracker Integration by Kevin Mehall
  • Remember the milk sync plugin by Luca Invernizzi

So if you have any request for a new feature, don’t hesitate to add it to the whish list or just digg in because it’s now easier to add features to GTG.

Geolocalized tasks in Getting Things Gnome!

By pcabido in gnome, gsoc 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

For the past two/three days I’ve been fighting with video in linux to make a screencast. I found out that recordmydesktop didn’t work in any of my computers (it was always so slow!). I finally got it to work in a old laptop, a compaq evo n1020v and was able to record the plugin working.
After that I had another challenge, to edit the four small videos into the final video and finally to be able to use the html5 video tag I had to add the ogg mime types to apache’s config.
Well.. the result was this video (still a little sluggish, the next one will be better):

For those that don’t have a html5 compatible browser, here is the youtube link or the direct link to the ogg video.

There are still some glitches in the plugin but in a general way it works ok. More features are coming soon!

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