Erudition / Minder

Assistant & life planner for individuals with weak Executive Functions. (Pre-alpha)
https://erudition.github.io/Minder
GNU General Public License v3.0
10 stars 0 forks source link
android calendar cross-platform real-time time-tracker todo-list

Awesome Humane Tech

Minder

The ultimate assistant for ADHD. Keeps track of what you should be doing and sends effective reminders (including zaps) if you're off task.

But how does Minder know what you should be doing?

Docket

Todo list + Calendar + Time Tracker = Life Planner

Tasker

Minder is the formalization of a ton of Tasker scripts I had set up to accomplish the same task. I had been co-developing Minder with Docket, so I started to use Tasker's Javascript features to move more of Minder's logic into the Elm codebase.

Todoist

As a temporary measure, I used Todoist to stand in for Docket until it's ready. It's proprietary, but it has an accessible API that I could even use in Tasker. Currently Todoist is still used for task management while Minder is being fleshed out.

Capacitor

Eventually Tasker's imperative-ness and the bloat of the scripts got to be too much and I decided to create a full-blown app - but how? I wanted to use Elm, so naturally I looked at something like Cordova/PhoneGap, which displays web pages in native apps. I found a promising new kid on the block, Capacitor, and ended up using that instead. A large portion of the commit history is on the Capacitor version of the project.

NativeScript

But Capacitor didn't really replace the Tasker functionality, like local notifications, triggering Pavlok Zaps, monitoring the apps the user spent time on for time tracking, etc. And of course using a webview is not a great start for performance, it's always better to go native.

However, giving up Capacitor seemed to mean giving up iOS/Android dual-compatibility until I found NativeScript. NativeScript would run JS in the full Android environment, meaning I could eventually implement all the Tasker features myself like any other native app. Awesome! Alas, I held off on it for a long time because of a big issue: My Elm-powered app would have an awesome logical foundation, but... no webview or HTML means Elm can't put anything on the screen!

Much later, seeing the power of NativeScript to easily handle my local notifications, I decided to just go for it. So I said goodbye to Capacitor for good, and even to the awkward Elm Integration with Tasker. I was now working strictly with Elm and NativeScript... and loving it. Native is great! Except I still have no solution for putting things on the screen. So I guess I'm going to learn to use NativeScript's XML-based view system for now, and have Elm in headless mode sending it all the data it needs to build the view. Ugh. One day I hope to hack the Elm VirtualDOM to work directly on the NS views though.

Dev Journal

9/14/2019

== Using GitHub Under Protest ==

This project is currently hosted on GitHub. This is not ideal; GitHub is a proprietary, trade-secret system that is not Free, Libre, Open Souce Software (FLO). We are deeply concerned about using a proprietary system like GitHub to develop our FOSS project. In the long term, we may make the move to Nest, powered by Pijul. We urge you to read about the Give up GitHub campaign from the Software Freedom Conservancy to understand some of the reasons why GitHub is not a good place to host FLOSS projects.

Logo of the GiveUpGitHub campaign