http://kvet.ch/articles/2006/08/14/tricks-with-tracks

I suspect you can do the same with ActiveDesktop.

I thought I had posted this here but apparently I did not!

I tried to place the tracks on the desktop by the means of ActiveDesktop, but it requested to login. And when I login the browser is loaded and I’m now in its window instead of ActiveDesktop. And if I can stay in the ActiveDesktop it will be very useful, cuz I don’t need to browse through my tabs to get to tracks. I just hit the clear desktop button and here I am with the tracks before my eyes! Very useful! Is there a way to do it?

Pick the TXT feed url and put that on your desktop.

Thanks! But it’s just text. It’s not the tracks itself. In this case i only can monitor it and not work with it. I once again need to go to my browser window, browse through tabs and so on… :(

yeah, i like having just the list on the desktop.  on the mac you could have a dashboard widget show the html version.

you could always look at making a Konfabulator widget, or see if there is a pre-made one that can be pointed at a url.

alex-and-r: I’m not a Windows user, so I’m probably no help at all on this. What happens in ActiveDesktop usually when you click a link? Does it open that link in IE itself? If so, then it’s going to be tough, because the login page redirects you to the main page. If ActiveDesktop can store cookies, one hacky option might be to log in using IE, then copy the Tracks session cookie across to ActiveDesktop. Then it would think you were logged in and show you the main page.

Anyone else got any ideas? I agree that a Konfabulator/Dashboard widget would be great. With the recent changes in Rails 1.2, we should be able to beef up the API quite a bit, which would make a widget quite capable.

I’ve been using GeekTool to display my due today or tomorrow tasks on my Mac desktop and I love it. I use this:

What I’d like to do is have these same tasks listed, but color coded for those due today or previously (red) and those due tomorrow (yellow). I imagine there’s some fancy way to do this with shell commands (and having GeekTool add the color to the different outputs). For example, could you do the above curl with due=0 to get the red ones, then somehow do a kind of diff between the results of that curl and a curl with due=1 to get the others? I’m not experienced enough with command-line-fu to get this to work: would anyone else want to take up the challenge?

Craig: Hmm, that’s a fun little problem. I’m working on a solution now, and I think it will work. More later…

OK, I’ve got something working. What I decided to do was to use a Ruby script to fetch the feeds and process them into three separate text files (stored locally) which contain today/overdue actions, actions due tomorrow and actions due in the next week. You can then display each of the text files using GeekTool, placing and colouring each of the files as you wish (see attached screenshot).

Put the following into a file called

:

When you run this, you should get 3 text files in your TEMP_DIR, called today.txt, tomorrow.txt and later.txt.

Set up display of those files in GeekTool, then you just need to arrange for the coloured_actions.rb script to be called periodically. You could either do this using cron, or set up a script in GeekTool, making the window tiny and transparent, then set it to refresh every 30 mins or whatever you choose.

I’m sure the script could be made more elegant. One thing is that some of the context headers get removed from the later file, because they are often duplicated in the different periods.

Thanks for taking up my challenge.

I’m not getting it to work for me. I’m afraid I might need still clearer directions. When you say run the script, should that be accomplished by just typing its name in Terminal “bin/coloured_actions.rb”? That gets me “(-h will show valid options)” but no files in ~/tmp/.

Or am I to type in “ruby bin/coloured_actions.rb”? That gets no error, but also no files in ~/tmp/.

Does it matter than I run Locomotive for Tracks? That I didn’t have a pre-existing ~/bin directory?

I imagine these sound like dumb questions. If you don’t have the patience or time to hand-hold me through this I’d certainly understand.

Again, I appreciate your efforts to make my idea a reality.

OK, first things first.

1. Make sure that you’ve changed the URL and the TEMP_DIR path at the top of the script to match your set up. The URL should be the plain TXT feed url, without the ?due=0 part (that gets added automatically). So it will be something like:

If you’re using ~/tmp as your temp directory, make sure it actually works, and use the full path in the script. The ‘shebang’ line (the first in the script) should find where you have Ruby on most systems, but just to check, type ‘which ruby’ (without the quotes) in the Terminal and copy that path into the shebang, to replace /usr/bin/env ruby.

If that’s all OK, copy the file to ~/bin if you haven’t already, and no, it doesn’t matter if you have to create the file. Check that it’s executable, and if necessary do

Now, while you’re still in the bin directory in Terminal, run the following:

That *should* work

Then you should be able to choose those files to view in GeekTool, as if you were viewing a Console file. I just remembered that GeekTool allows you to show an icon (different on success and failure) for a script, so that’s what I’ve got now to actually call the script periodically. I made a tiny transparent window which sits in the bottom right of my screen. When the script runs without error, it shows a little green spot, and if it fails, it shows a little red spot.

No luck.

When I enter “which ruby” in a regular Terminal window, I get “/usr/bin/ruby”
When I go into Locomotive and open a Terminal window associated with my Tracks, I get “/Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/standardRailsSept2006.locobundle/powerpc/bin/ruby”
But neither of these seem to work when entered into the shebang line. Am I supposed to keep the -wKU switches, or are those for the env command only? (I think I tried both ways with no luck.)

On permissions, my ~/bin directory is 755 and ~/bin/coloured_actions.rb is 755 too; my ~/tmp directory is 777. From my home directory I was able to “touch /tmp/testfile” and it appeared in the directory.

curl works fine, so the problem doesn’t seem to be getting stuff from Tracks - it must be either working with the stuff or writing it to those txt files.