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Regular Expressions in Document Titles
I would like to be able to use a regular expression as a document title in Activities. I have several files that start with a pattern, (for example invoice_), so I could use something like invoice_. to record an activity called invoicing.
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Inappropriate?I'm chasing this feature from both Slife and RescueTime.
Whoever implements it (1) first (2) well will get my dollars. Whoever opensources their code first will be quickly swimming in features like this and will win my code contributions.
I bought Slife 1.x, but switched to RT for the lower memory usage eventually. However, Slife offers more detail ... but neither Slife nor RT are flexible enough to let me define smart enough rules to let the apps do what they are really capable of - which is intelligently decide what projects I'm working on, and when.
Knowing which app isn't really all that useful. Knowing what I'm doing is. The information is right there ...
I’m hopeful
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Inappropriate?Yeah, this, and a couple of other features, would make Slife really great. -
Inappropriate?This is a real popular feature request, and we would like to support pattern matching in doc/site titles very soon.
We are looking into this:
http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/
@xurizaemon - when you say "either Slife nor RT are flexible enough to let me define smart enough rules to let the apps do what they are really capable of - which is intelligently decide what projects I'm working on, and when", what else are you thinking besides the pattern matching?
Also, do you find Slife 2.0 to be doing better performance-wise? We know we can improve it in terms of performance, but I was wondering what your thoughts are.
Thanks for the great feedback!2 Comments
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This is one of the best points
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ethomaz - I run OSX Slife 2 and VMWare on Leopard (10.5.3). Occasionally - and only since reinstalling Slife after the 2.0 release - I've had complete lockups of my system.
I'm not yet convinced it's Slife, but I'll let you know if I observe anything further that might help. -
Please do, we definitely need to fix Slife if it's causing lockups like you are describing.
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Inappropriate?I'm more of a web programming guy than a desktop programming guy, but from the feature list regexkit looks like it would work well and be easy to implement, plus I'm already familiar with the PCRE regex engine from my work with PHP. I say go for it, at least in a test build, and see if it messes with performance & memory usage too much.
I think xurizaemon would probably forgive a very slight increase in memory usage if there was full PCRE regex support for document titles.
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?@ethomaz - slife2 doesn't seem to do what i saw with 1 - occasional sudden thrashing death when ram got gobbled - i may have triggered this with some specific behaviour (eg switching networks) but removing slife did prevent it happening for me
i haven't yet observed it happen again but have only been running slife2 for a few days
i am totally happy about the processor cost / ram (?) of regex use - and don't think it would be as significant a bite as the graphing anyway. it saves MY memory and processor time (the ones in my head) - that's what computers are for :)
what i mean is, rather than focussing on which app is running, i want to be able to group activities (not applications) together. same app, different websites or files, different customer. when i can quickly see an overview of who i worked for on tuesday from slife - rather than what applications i ran on tuesday - i will save time on billing, and that will be good.
thanks for listening -
Inappropriate?"when i can quickly see an overview of who i worked for on tuesday from slife - rather than what applications i ran on tuesday"
- That says exactly what I want to say as well
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Here are two ideas, let me know what you guys think:
1) Add a level to the hierarchy and call it "Clients". That way you would be able to associate activities with clients and see how you spend your time from an even higher level.
2) Have a view like the Day View, except that instead of apps on the left, you would have the activities. You could click on the individual dots just like in the Day view and the dots would refer to the corresponding activity.
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?I like them both. #1 might belong in the my, (non-existant), accounting software, though, but it might be cool to do it in Slife too.
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Inappropriate?Just ideas, it's more likely that we would go with #2 than #1. It looks like lots of people would like to see more reporting options in Slife itself.
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Inappropriate?Will either of #1 or #2 mean that Slife can tell me the difference between "Adobe Photoshop - CLIENT_A Picture 1.psd" and "Adobe Photoshop - CLIENT_B Picture 2.psd"?
.*CLIENT_A.* => Client A
.*CLIENT_B.* => Client B
etc ... I think the functionality this thread is after is really about being able to group by document / webpage / ..., rather than being able to group applications into clients. (I'm not sure if #1 or #2 will mean this is possible.)
I’m wondering
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Inappropriate?I like the idea of #2 - at a minimum it'll be cool, and it may actually be really useful, depending on my workflow.
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Inappropriate?@xurizaemon - If you already include the name of your clients in your files, then Slife can group your activities by client TODAY. You don't need #1 or #2.
Create an activity, call it something like "Client A". Then, open it up and create a new item under Web & Document Titles with the name of the client ('Client A').
That's it, Slife will observe your document names and associate the ones that include 'Client A' with the the 'Client A' activity. -
Inappropriate?As Slife remembers the mane of open files,
those ones are generaly located in some subdirectories...
So it sounds quite easy to match activities entries with the full path of documents instead of just the document name ?
for example :
- projects:client_A:subdir:file1
- projects:client_A:file2
- projects:client_B:some_files
what do you think of that ?
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?We've been talking about this here.
Apparently it's harder than you would think, and I can imagine that programs may not make the whole path available to other programs for security purposes...
I'm hoping they'll figure it out, though.
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?Yep, we are still working on it, figuring out the best way to go. It's a cool idea.
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