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SelfControlApp / selfcontrol

:skull: Mac app to block your own access to distracting websites etc for a predetermined period of time. It can not be undone by the app or by a restart – you must wait for the timer to run out.
http://selfcontrolapp.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
4.06k stars 401 forks source link

Option to leave timer unlocked (allowing you to turn it off) #113

Open kcrwfrd opened 11 years ago

kcrwfrd commented 11 years ago

It would be very useful if, before setting a timer, you could set an option to have the timer "locked" or not. To me, the presence of some small barrier is enough to prevent me from fully diverting my attention; I don't need to absolutely lock myself out. In fact, that can become a huge problem: I set a SelfControl timer so I could focus on a web project that I had to complete for a deadline, but then I needed to add a Facebook 'like' button to the site. I couldn't access Facebook's developer documentation because I had FB blocked in SelfControl, and so I was pretty much screwed and missed the deadline.

Or, if you could just document your SelfControl killer script, that would be sufficient. Having to manually call a bash script to kill SelfControl should be a big enough barrier, no?

cstigler commented 11 years ago

All good ideas, but my free time is very limited right now. If you would like to write a patch though, it would be very welcome. I think the experience should probably stay the same by default to avoid user confusion, just with a checkbox in Preferences to make it a "soft lock" instead.

kcrwfrd commented 11 years ago

Hmm. Unfortunately, I'm not an OS X or cocoa developer. But I might try and take a look. In the interim, would you mind posting a way to disable the app in a gist or something?

Thanks for the awesome app!

slambert commented 11 years ago

@kvcrawford I believe there's some users that would be very mad at us if we did that.

cstigler commented 11 years ago

To elaborate on this -- we have an application called the SelfControl Killer which we give out to users who are having problems. But, it also resets everything (clears your blocklist, resets preferences, etc.) so it's not really a good thing to use regularly. We don't have a pre-made function to remove the block without those side effects.

kcrwfrd commented 11 years ago

Alright, well would you guys mind sending a copy of that app to kvcrawford at gmail? Thanks again

cstigler commented 11 years ago

Yup, done.

On Apr 10, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Kevin Crawford notifications@github.com wrote:

Alright, well would you guys mind sending a copy of that app to kvcrawford at gmail? Thanks again

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

ghost commented 11 years ago

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA please don't ever, ever do that. Some lives depend on it. Like really really.

BlueMona commented 11 years ago

This is pretty funny. Come on guys. For me the fact that the existing ways of disabling the app (through terminal) are somewhat annoying/difficult is enough to stop me from doing it (I haven't tried and don't plan to because I don't want a precedent/realization that it is easy). If you don't even have that degree of actual self-control you might want to think of improving that instead of being completely reliant on an app doing it for you.

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 12:44 PM, manoucho notifications@github.com wrote:

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA please don't ever, ever do that. Some lives depend on it. Like really really.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/slambert/selfcontrol/issues/113#issuecomment-16456331 .

Mona