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Building todometer: a meter-based to-do list

Cassidy Williams on May 01, 2017

After a bunch of on and off development, I finally finished a side project I've been wanting to do for years. In general, I love completing thin...
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Ben Halpern

I just downloaded it and am using it. Having fun already, also have spotted an opportunity to make a pull request, which I'm excited about because I have not used Electron at all and just needed an excuse. Such awesome stuff Cassidy. Great post!

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Mattias P Johansson

Whenever I need to deal with time in redux, I generally set up an Action that uses setInterval to dispatch another action every 100ms or to Redux with the current time, which updates the reducer state with the current time. That way, time becomes completely reactive and declarative and updates work fine. The action is started from componentDidMount.

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Cassidy Williams

That's a good idea to have it live in the action.

That being said, I didn't want to just check for the time every second (or so), I wanted to just set a countdown to midnight and let the app refresh from there.

That being said, thank you, that'll be really helpful for when I do something like that outside of Electron!

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Peter Kim Frank

Looks great, thank you for sharing!!

I've been using todometer all day and have been enjoying it so far.

I had a few small comments / requests, for you, or anyone who wants to submit a pull request.

  • I enjoy tabbing / shift-tabbing, to keep things keyboard-only. The animation feedback that indicates where the "focus" is currently at is definitely helpful, but it also disappears rather quickly. It might be helpful to extend that indicator slightly -- just so you don't get "lost" as you alt-tab around.

  • It's nice to push items down to "do later," and I recognize that you can "reset progress" and send everything back up at once. Ideally, it would be possible to send an individual item back to the main queue; like a "reverse" on the main functionality. So, basically, having the yellow "pause button" visible on the "Do Later" items that sends them back up.

Also, one quick observation / feedback:

  • I had attempted to use the cmd+Q hotkey to close the app and noticed that it didn't work. To my knowledge, this was my first time I'd seen that on a desktop app for Mac. I'm curious if Electron provides any feedback/guidance on which global hotkeys developers are supposed to enable on their apps.

Again, GREAT job and thank you for sharing. I look forward to using todometer and hopefully contributing one day :)

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Kat

Looks good! :) I need positive reinforcement to finish my tasks. Mobile is totally a great idea (read some comments) and if you want some positive constructed feedback on anything, I'd be happy to. I'm seriously in need of a UX change to my current how-to-get-things-done sort of thing and this makes me reflect.

Soon you'll have bug fixes and features on your too haha :)

PS: Probably stupid question but bear with me how do you guys get both your github and your twitter recognized by this thing?

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Thomas Schweizer

It looks really cool ! I'll definitely give it a try when it's out for Windows !

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Cassidy Williams

Just launched it for Windows!!

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Thomas Schweizer

Nice ! I'll try it today at work :)

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Pamela Alvarez

Awesome! Looks great! You inspire me to redo my to-do-list.

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Jess Lee

Ahh, congrats on finishing a side project -- especially since it's been on your TO DO list for so long! 😉

What resources did you use to pick up Electron?

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Cassidy Williams

Hahaha thank you!

Honestly it was just a LOT of googling whenever I wanted to do a specific thing. One of the things that took the longest was making sure the application windows stayed open (just hidden) when you hit the Close button. A bunch of people had different solutions for their specific apps, and it was a lot of trial and error to figure out how to make it work for me.

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Kayla Cohn 👩🏽‍💻

Congrats on your release - it looks super slick! Im in the design process for my electron app that I plan on building with react and redux. Will def be looking into your source! Congrats again!

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Gabriel

Any idea when you can launch it for windows? Looks cool. Can't wait to test it.

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Cassidy Williams

Just did!! Go ahead and check it out!!

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Carl Furrow

Really great work! Love the look and feel.

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Mark M. Muskardin

Hey good job! :)

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Bart Hermans

Will this run on mobile?

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Cassidy Williams

It's a desktop app right now, but thinking about mobile next!

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Bart Hermans

Cool. Patiently waiting for the Windows version to try it out.