Hawksworx

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve recently been concentrating on developing my pet project, teamtasks again. Teamtasks is a simple application built using TiddlyWiki to provide a place to manage your tasks alongside other content in your very own personal wiki.

This little project is by no means new. I have been tinkering with it for quite a while but have been working on other projects so teamtasks has had to sit patiently in the corner and wait for me to get back to working on it.

Rather gratifyingly, quite a few people had seen the early work on teamtasks and expressed interest in using it for all manor of purposes. The attention made me realise that it was time to promote teamtasks from its place in my playground (version 0.3 can still be found there for those keen on glancing in the rear view mirror) to the big time! Or at least, a place of its own. And so getteamtasks.com was born. From there you can download the latest version (v0.4 at time of writing) and configure it to fit your task management habits.

This is an open source project and I’m doing my best to resist the urge to tinker with it until I think that it’s perfect before letting it out into the wild, so you may find things about teamtasks that don’t work perfectly or you just don’t like. If that’s the case, then please let me know, or better yet, fix it and then show me. I’m living by the old “Release early. Release often” mantra here and welcome contributions, in the form of suggestions, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, criticism, praise, sticky buns, pats on the back, or hugs.

Along with the new site and new release, there is a new way to get in touch and keep track of developments. Obviously, you can leave your comments here, but now you can also follow teamtasks on Twitter. You’d get to hear about teamtasks developments if you just followed me on Twitter too of course, but then you’d also be subject to other random utterances.

After just a few hours of launching getteamtasks.com, I have already had a nice response. This really helps to keep me motivated and on track. As the project gains a little momentum, it also gains more pairs of hands to do the work. We’ve spent some time here at Osmosoft today planning the next set of enhancements for teamtasks which will soon be listed on the site for you to inspect.

Roll on version 0.5!

Just in time for the 2008 NBA playoffs, and heavily influenced by Robbie Clutton’s marvelous UK football scores service, I have created NBA Results

This simple service monitors results published as RSS feeds from TotallyScores and then sends updates to twitter. By following NBA Results on Twitter, you can get alerts of all NBA match results. Only interested in updates for your team? That’s fine, you can choose instead to follow your team. There are currently accounts for:

twitter.com/celtics_results

twitter.com/cavs_results

twitter.com/hornets_results

twitter.com/jazz_results

twitter.com/lakers_results

twitter.com/magic_results

twitter.com/pistons_results

twitter.com/spurs_results

I’ll be adding more teams ready for next season, but if you want to make sure that you can get updates on Twitter of your team’s results, feel free to email me (phawksworth [at] gmail [dot] com) and push your team to the top of my todo list.

I’m also readying MLB Results to provide Major League Baseball results. MLB Results will be active very soon. As with the NBA teams, please poke me if you want to get updates for your team and I’ll be sure to create their account.

The code which drives this, is my first outing into the world of Python. You can find the code here. Feel free to take it and use it as you wish. I also welcome feedback and suggestions on the code, please be gentle though, as I said, this is my first time playing with Python.

Many thanks to the nice folks at Carsonified for permission to use their site’s background image on NBA Results. Thanks also to Balakov who published the image used for each NBA team twitter account icon under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

Recently, we at Osmosoft have been trying to make good on one of our pledges: To introduce a unit testing framework to TiddlyWiki development.

Along the way we examined several Javascript testing frameworks and found that JSSpec suited our needs quite nicely. JSSpec resembles the popular RSpec testing framework popularly used by Ruby developers.

As a result, I have been dabbling away at writing tests in my favored text editor - the rather lovely Textmate. Since this is a repetitive task, I figured that it was worth creating some helper to speed things along. Textmate offers an easy to make powerful bundles to automate tasks and help you in your code development and so I quickly put together a JSSpec bundle. This simple bundle offers a set of snippets which can act as a quick reference of what methods are available in JSSpec and let you rapidly create your test code. Textmate users can download this bundle and just double-click it to make it available for use in Textmate.

I won’t go into the workings of testing with JSSpec here, rather, you can learn about that at the official site.

Feel free to take this bundle and modify it to fit your purpose. Enjoy.

For a while I have been meaning to start posting screencasts of some of my work to spread the word, and to explain some of the details that are difficult to describe in text.

After much tinkering, I think that I have arrived at a nice setup and have found a good way to distribute the screencasts, making them available to stream over the web or to download for consumption in your own sweet time.

In this post, I’ll share my findings so that you can set yourself up with a similar environment. I use a Mac, and so these tips are leveled squarely at the Mac users out there. Sorry to everyone else, but I’m just writing about what I know.

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It seems that the Twitterverse is all of a flutter following recent blog posts from Phillie Casablanca and Paul Downey. I’m watching this with keen interest and it has been the subject of much impassioned discussion in our office.

Frustrated by the noisy habits of some twitterers, Phil opened a discussion on good Twitter practices that led to him posting the 10 Commandments of Twitter, an attempt to articulate some of the good, and highlight some of the annoying, practices when posting tweets. For the record, I’m right behind him, and was quick to follow the 10 commandments. It has been interesting though, to observe the response to his post, and to see how many people agree and how many people strongly object to his suggestions.

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Last week the entire Osmosoft team visited Paris to attend the LeWeb3 conference. Initially, we had intended to be attending simply as delegates, but as time went by, we decided that we might be able to build something handy to use at the conference, and that perhaps, others might find it useful too.

And so, RippleRap (then dubbed ‘TiddleLeWeb’) was conceived. We considered that building a tool based on TiddlyWiki where you could make notes on the conference and effortlessly share those notes with others, while being shielded from network hiccups, would be cool. To be ready, we had much to do, and little time to do it.

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I stumbled upon a simple method for opening a Finder window at your current Terminal session location recently. Since it is something that I have a regular need for, I thought that there might be other Mac users out there who might also find this useful from time to time.

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Today I humbly release version 0.3 of TeamTasks to the world. TeamTasks is a simple tool for managing tasks and to-do list and is built on Tiddlywiki. Because of its TiddlyWiki foundation, it allows you to intertwine wiki content and task items, in order to build a meaningful set of notes and reminders, in a single, portable file.

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I recently attended the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference at London’s ExCel and I’m feeling good. Although I have been developing web applications since the late nineties, I am new to the conference circuit and have been soaking this up.

I have attended various trade-shows and what-not in the past, but these have not been quite so focussed on the kind of thing that interest so very much. Namely, making great things for the web. FOWA hits the bullseye for me. With a great balance of inspiration and guidance for the entrepreneur, and techie insights and advice for the developer, it caters for each part of my interest.

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This week, we celebrated the 3rd Anniversary of TiddlyWiki arriving on the Internet. We were fortunate to be joined at Osmosoft Towers by a number of enthusiastic TiddlyWiki users and developers.

Personally I was excited to put faces to the names of people who I had only so far met in the various TiddlyWiki user groups and chat rooms. I have found that if I have a question about how to achieve something using TiddlyWiki, I could almost always get the answer from someone in one of the groups. Being able to get to know some of these folks has been great. Not only does it make it even easier to engage with them online when I have a stupid question, but also it drives home the fact that work done on TiddlyWiki has real value to real people, and that gives me a huge sense of satisfaction.

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