I suspect this will be all over the 43folders, Attention and ProductivityOnMac world before long (or maybe it is passed already and I missed it)....

It's not Yojimbo, either!

I've been playing a bit today with a MacOSX lifestreams-like tool, OnLife. It's interesting though clearly young.

Basically, OnLife uses Applescript and other ObjC like plugins to monitor a selected series of applications - by default things like NetNewsWire, Mail.app, Safari, iTunes, Adium and MSWord are included. It doesn't dive too deeply in most applications, preferring to record that some document named 'foo' was in focus from time X to time Y. With some more exposed applications, it digs a bit deeper, caching a snapshot of a web page, or a snippet of email text.

It's certainly interesting - in my early use it has raised my consciousness of what I am doing in odd ways. It's not perfect - there seems to be some system pausing as OnLife polls various applications (this is as much Applescript, likely, as OnLife). The OmniOutliner plugin doesn't seem to capture information yet (possibly a distinction between OO and OOPro). The UI is a bit clumsy in rescaling. It doesn't use Core Data.

This would be richer if I was an OSX user full time, but since most of my day is in the Windows XP and/or Solaris world, mostly my avocational time is being tracked for me.

What will be interesting with a tool like OnLife is extending it - can the Applescript extensions allow me to find what Ecto document I was last working on? Can the Omnioutliner plugin be fixed (perhaps even to grok KinklessGTD documents?).

In discussion with a friend about this today, we waxed off on how a growl or growl++ centralized notification or pubsub system for this would be better. Of course, as soon as we started the conversation we realized we had both read the same DrunkenBatman essay....

Technorati Tags: 43folders, gtd, yojimbo

Posted by esinclai at January 24, 2006 09:09 PM |