Personality Services, Active Timer

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.

6 Responses to “Personality Services, Active Timer”

  1. Jay Tuley says:

    I’m kind of ashamed at having spent time creating Personality Services.

    Dude, I totally miss this from back when I was using tik.

  2. Jay Tuley says:

    Sorry I misspoke I should have said:

    Doode-a, I tutelly meess thees frum beck vhee I ves useeng teek.

  3. Mark Nelson says:

    Useful !!!

    I’ve dreamed of a program that would do this, and got to the point of getting something similar (without a UI) working on AppleScript, but never could figure out how to do it in Cola. Congratulations!

  4. Adam says:

    If I can make a suggestion add idle time to active timer. That way I know when I’m away at a meeting and I can leave the timer up and running.

  5. Ramon Perez-Gatell says:

    I found out about Active Timer from MacWorld and I was surprised to find that you have done what I’ve been looking for months. It would be a homerun, for me at least, if you could make a further enhancement to Active Timer that could make it capable of keeping tabs (or time) on which document is open in addition or instead of which application. You see my documents are named with a prefix that refers to each particular job, say 123, and if I know what doc was opened I know how much time per project, not just per application. I usually have one program open with documents from 3 or 4 different jobs.

  6. ad7am says:

    Great app! I’ve been using it for a while now.

    Here’s another feature request: a way to have Active Timer come to the foreground over other apps at regular intervals.

    I currently run the app Happy Wife > to regularly open a dialog window to remind me to get back to work when I’m websurfing. Being able to combine the functionalities of these two apps would be amazing.

    Thanks!

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