[RobertChin retain];

I’m currently busy working on the next version of Active Timer — including features such as:

• Being able to block certain applications
• Attribute last idle time to a task (after coming back from idle, you can assign the previous idle interval to a specific item)
• And more!

New in this sub-update:

• Fixed problem with negative times (the main reason I am releasing this interim update)
• Start/Pause is now assigned to enter key, just hit enter and go.
• An easier way to deselect all items (just click on the label, “Sum of times:” — before you had to command click to deselect a selected item)

For now, download Active Timer 1.3.3.

Active Timer 1.3 has been released unto the world! It has improved accuracy (sub millisecond precision — and no, this doesn’t take any additional processing power), better idle time calculation (idle time will now be retroactively transferred to the idle category!) and if those features weren’t enough — it’s now able to keep track of your per-window spent time. This is the first release where I’ve used a small pool of beta testers. This was immensely successful, allowing me to track down many more bugs than usual. As such, I’m looking to expand the Active Timer beta test pool, so leave a comment if you want to join the pool (if you haven’t left a comment already).

If you have any requests for Active Timer 1.4, please also leave a comment. I’ll be deciding on the feature set for 1.4 in the next few weeks and welcome all input. In the mean time, I’ll be working on F-Script Anywhere and NicePlayer.

F-Script Anywhere is coming along nicely — the next release will have an auto-injection feature, to allow you to choose a set of applications that you want F-Script Anywhere to automatically inject into (this was a request by Ken Ferry, who enjoyed this feature which was a result of the SIMBL version of FSA). FSA just needs a little more testing before release.

NicePlayer has been built as a universal binary, however I’ve been holding off on its release until I can get the Xine Plugin to also work universal. I’ve spent many hours on the Xine-lib code getting it to compile, but it’s slow going due to a number of complicated issues. I’d welcome any comments pertaining to whether people think that NicePlayer universal should be released before Xine Plugin universal.

I released Active Timer 1.2 today. The biggest new feature is probably the fact that it can keep track of your idle time as a separate item. Leave suggestions for new feature in the comments!

So apparently recently the Internet (and blog world) have discovered Active Timer, a small app I wrote about a year and a half ago. Apparently people find the app useful, go figure. Now that other people actually use the app, I’ve become compelled to add a couple features, hopefully sometime this week. It’s also kind of ugly, so I may have to shiny-it-up a bit.

By the way, this entry brought to you by Jay’s recent update.

In my free time this past week, I hacked together a couple of new things. The first being Personality Services, a completely useless but totally fun OS X Service that mutates selected text into one of a different personality (Jive, Texan, Swedish Chef, etc.).

I also updated Active Timer, a small app I wrote last year to keep track of how much time I was spending on my senior project versus reading Slashdot. It’s a neat little app, this update doesn’t add much functionality except keeping track of things at seconds resolution (rather than at five seconds). This is a large user interface improvement due to the fact that people would continually download the application, run it for a few seconds, and then decide it didn’t work (it did, but only kept track of things in five second increments). Anyway, this should stem the few complaints posted in the comments on VT. I also redid portions of the app to use Cocoa bindings, just for fun. You can’t really tell though, except now you can sort the various tables, something that comes for free.

I should probably come up with actual project pages for those applications, although I’m kind of ashamed at having spent time creating Personality Services.

In other news, I now have a small portion of VI implemented as a subclass of NSTextView. I hope to bring it to the point where I can use APE to replace all NSTextView subclasses with my class, so that I can get VI commands in every Cocoa text box.