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!

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.

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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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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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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The new look Osmosoft website is now live at www.osmosoft.com

After posting my initial doodling for this site, I received some great feedback and was keen to get the site built. It remains pretty close to the original design, but with a few deviations.

The site is simply a TiddlyWiki with some custom styling and was nice and easy to put together. I also plan to release the basic style as a theme on www.TiddlyThemes.com so that others can dip into it and use the bits that they like.

As ever, I’d love to here any comments people might have.

Following on from some previous work re-branding the Osmosoft.com website, we have now discovered that we can take a slightly different approach to our branding. Previously we were expecting to be very tightly constrained by the BT branding guidelines (what with being acquired by BT and all), but after a consultation with the people in the know, we have learned that we have rather more latitude.

With that in mind, and retaining the consideration that we want to fit in with the general brand principles of BT, even if we add our own bit of ‘Osmosoft Special Sauce’, I’ve been working on a new identity.

This work is gaining some momentum now, but as with other projects, there is value in sharing the work prior to its completion and gathering feedback. Hey, we are an open source house here, after all.

As ever, I’d welcome comments and suggestions. Keep in mind that this work is by no means definitive, and that it currently contains temporary photo stock that would be replaced before we went live with the brand.

Recently, I have been wearing my UI designer hat and exploring ways to present TiddlyWiki in a more approachable way. I have blogged before about being surprised at how easy it is to give a TiddlyWiki site a new flavor, but my recent ventures have attempted to retain more of the existing TiddlyWiki functionality (rather than hiding it away), while providing a simpler and more user friendly view.

I’ll be setting some of this work free before too long, but for now, I thought I’d post a screenshot of my work in progress. You never know, it might generate some ideas via any discussion that ensues.

Some UI elements that I am working on include a revised tab view of the tiddler lists and timeline view. This uses the existing TiddlyWiki macro to display tabbed content, the gradient macro to create a subtle ‘paper’ feeling to the scrollable listing panel, and also the slider macro to make a nice collapsable section that appears across the top of the page.

I’m also planning on adding some large, friendly buttons in the currently blank space in the top panel to provide some help with getting started. I’d love to hear any comments or suggestions about the direction this is taking.

Once this theme has matured a little, I’ll be posting it the growing set of TiddlyWiki themes that can be found at TiddlyThemes.com

Over the last couple of days I have got to meet some members of the BT SDK team. I’m likely to be working quite closely with some of these guys over the coming months in my role at Osmosoft and so it was great to get to meet them and see how they work.

There is a great feeling of energy and enthusiasm in the team, which I found infectious. I personally am rather excited about getting the chance to play with some of the cool features of the BT SDK to build some funky web apps. As a newcomer to the telecoms sector, I find that the functionality being exposed through the SDK are inspiring me to build all kinds of gizmos, widgets, gadget, and do-hickies. I’ll be shouting about some of those here soon, no doubt.

..but I find myself wondering, what would you build?

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&[Osmosoft]:http://www.osmosoft.com Since we recently redeveloped the [Osmosoft][] web site, we figured that we had better have some decent analytics on the site to monitor the activity. Google Analytics is perfectly good enough for our needs, and so I set about implementing it.

After signing up for a free Google Analytics account, it is a simple task to start tracking the hits on your site. You just need to add the javascript code that google generates for you onto into your code. The best way to do this in TiddlyWiki, is to modify the MarkupPostHead tiddler. This tiddler exists precisely for this kind of task. It inserts code into the end of the Head of your TiddlyWiki page.

The code you insert here looks something like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script;
<script type="text/javascript">
  _uacct = "UA-123456789";
  urchinTracker();
;/script>

With this code in place, Google will start collecting information about the traffic to your site and present it to you via your Google Analytics account. But there is a problem, and that is that you really want to know what content your visitors are looking at within your site. You want their navigation in your site to be recorded too. On a traditional site, that’s no problem. Each page just has this same bit of javascript included and Google can register hits on each page. In TiddlyWiki however, everything happens within a single page so this kind of mechanism won’t quite do the job.

Thankfully both Google Analytics and TiddlyWiki are flexible enough for us to find a pretty simple solution.

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