Remind Like Water, part 2

So, after some investigation and experimentation, here are the tools so far for my “Remind Like Water” project.

• Remind
• Growl
• iCal
• Quicksilver

A tiny Applescript is also used, but only due to iCal’s apparent inability to deal directly with a shell command script.

This project isn’t complete by any means, but these are the first steps, seeing if my idea is feasible.

Remind

I created a “Remind” folder in my home folder, as well as making a ~/.reminders file via Terminal.

Inside the Remind folder are several files for various purposes:

• birthdays (family and friends)
• home (non-work appointments and errands)
• local (hometown events)
• office (work meetings and events)
• recurring (daily and other tasks)
• seasons (http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Earth_Seasons)
• sports (baseball games)
• sunrisesunset (http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind_Cookbook)
• tv (weekly television shows)

All of these are included in .reminders with lines that look like:

INCLUDE /Users/robert/Remind/birthdays

Growl

Installed the growlnotify utility, which enables me to interact with the Growl notification system, running Remind commands, the results of which are displayed in Growl message windows.

iCal

Created a new event called “Remind” that is scheduled for 05:00 and repeats every day. It uses an alarm to run a script (unfortunately an Applescript is necessary) called whatupdog.scpt

whatupdog

This command, once Remind is set up properly, serves to get your current day’s reminders, then display them in a Growl sticky message:

remind ~/.reminders | growlnotify -s

Just to avoid any directory and portability issues, here’s what it will look like with all the pathnames added (assuming everything is in the same place on your system):

/usr/local/bin/remind /Users/robert/.reminders | /usr/local/bin/growlnotfiy -s

I put that line in a file called whatupdog which is saved in my ~/Scripts folder and made executable via chmod.

Also there is an Applescript that contains only this line:

do shell script "/Users/robert/Scripts/whatupdog"

saved as whatupdog.scpt in the same spot.

Thanks to the iCal alarm mentioned above, I would then get a sticky Growl note every morning — and since iCal handles alerts even if the computer is asleep or off, I theoretically won’t miss anything.

Quicksilver

This will eventually be used to append events and to-do items to the various ~/Remind files.

More to come.