Ubiqutious task entry -- anywhere, anytime

[iNik]

I just completed a mad plan to enable me to add tasks to my OmniFocus inbox from anywhere, anytime, even if my Mac is unavailable (which it usually is). This is not for the faint of heart, but it isn't that hard to set up if you're fairly geeky.

What I did was set up a Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/) to capture OmniFocus tasks. I then used Griffin's Proxi application (http://proxi.griffintechnology.com/) to monitor that twitter account. Upon receiving a new tweet, it posts said tweet to OmniFocus.

Here's how:

Go to twitter.com (http://www.twitter.com/) and create a new account for your tasks. (You COULD use your regular Twitter account, if you have one, but that will cause all your new tasks to get sent to all your friends -- probably not ideal.)

You'll probably want to click "protect my updates" in the Settings area. That will ensure that nobody else can twitter to you. (You will NEVER tweet to this account from another twitter account, only from your own, so it's quite safe from other folks sending tasks to you.)

Then install Proxi (http://proxi.griffintechnology.com/), and create a new Twitter Monitor trigger. Set whatever you want in there, I have a filter of "screenname" just in case something goes weird and I get a tweet from another account. Do as you like.

For the action, just set up an AppleScript that says:

Tell Application "OmniFocus" to tell default document
parse tasks with transport text("MESSAGE")
end tell

Note that MESSAGE should be dragged and dropped from the variables pane, and that you must manually enclose it in quotes.

You may also want to add a screen message or growl notification task to alert you that you got a new task. Totally up to you.

From Twitter, you can just post to the "What are you doing?" screen to "tweet," and thereby give Proxi a new task to send to OmniFocus. (Yup, universal web-based task entry.) You can also set up an IM account and/or an SMS interface, so you can set up new tasks via either service.

For even greater fun, sign up for the Jott service (http://www.jott.com/) and add a Twitter link (http://www.jott.com/how-to/jott-links). Now you can phone up OmniFocus to add tasks!

If you want to email into Twitter (especially handy for those of us using Gmail who can't take advantage of scriptable mail rules), try EmailTwitter (http://emailtwitter.com/).

For any and all of these interfaces, the text will be parsed using the same rules as the mail rule or Quicksilver script, so you can direct to > Projects, @Contexts, etc. (SAYING those things to Jott on the phone may be tricky, however)

The best part is that all of this inbox-filling-fun can happen asynchronously from your OmniFocus usage. There's no need to keep your Mac on serving a web interface or anything. As soon as your Mac boots up/wakes up, it'll pull in all the waiting tasks from Twitter.

The potential downside is that all of this stuff is sent plain text and shared with a variety of services. If your tasks have anything sensitive in them, you may want to consider jotting them down in a notebook and entering them later.

[ext555]

this is great ! thanks so much for sharing .. I never thought of using twitter : ) and yes , it is hard to get Jott to understand the symbols ; )

I find I have to speak slowly and clearly for it to understand anything .. but I usually can tell what I was trying to remember .

Jott also works great with Google Calendar .

[ext555]

I finally got aroud to setting this up but it doesn't seem to be working .
I set up a twitter account .. protected it etc .. added the custom applescript with the variable " message " dropped in and enclosed in quotes , omni focus never gets an update ?
I assumed that proxi has to be kept open ?

ok .. got it working and got it to work with Jott also :D awesome !!

[Tim Wood]

Nice work -- that's pretty darn sweet!

[buffington]

This is really promising and would work wonders for me except for the fact that the Twitter trigger in Proxi doesn't allow you to check direct messages for an account.

This basically means that I can't use my normal Twitter account to send a direct SMS message to my "task bot" account and then have Proxi grab those messages and send them to OmniFocus.

I have a few possible workarounds for this which I'd like to try out. I'll report back here at some point, but for now, Proxi's Twitter monitor won't do the trick.

[jgrafix]

What did you do to get it working? I seem to be having the same problem.

Nevermind. I had to set the twitter trigger to only watch for posts from friends.

Very nice hack!

[RobTrew]

For any and all of these interfaces, the text will be parsed using the same rules as the mail rule or Quicksilver script, so you can direct to > Projects, @Contexts, etc.


Following a change in the Omnifocus Applescript library, you may need to amend your Applescript slightly to:

tell application "OmniFocus" to tell default document
parse tasks with transport text ("[Message]") without as single task
end tell

(No need to drag [Message] from the Proxi values list as long as it is pasted as above, in square brackets)

You will then be able make use of the full "parse tasks" syntax

[From Omnifocus, see Help/Release Notes/Archive/November 2]

including not only:

- Specifying due dates (in flexible formats)
(precede with #)

but also:

- including several tasks in a single twitter.
(begin additional tasks with --)

and finally, of course:

- appending notes to tasks
(just add additional lines, or split a single line into title // note with a pair of forward slashes)

[bozarthj]

Oh wow, this is absolutely what I was looking for.

I have a shiny 24-inch alum iMac at home, yet I work on Windows at work.

And the Jott idea along with it sealed the deal. I will have to try this when I get home.

One question (since I haven't installed Proxi yet or configured everything):
Does Proxi spit out garbage on the screen or anything when grabbing the tweets? My wife uses the Mac and I don't want her to freak out if OF or Proxi spits a bunch of stuff on the screen at her.

[BwanaZulia]

This is soooo cool. I will try this today (just wrote a note myself about it). :)

BZ

[RobTrew]

Does Proxi spit out garbage on the screen or anything when grabbing the tweets?

No - only if you specifically ask it to emit notifying growls or text messages - otherwise it's a discreet process.

[berchman]

I use Adium to manage multiple IM accounts. How would I go about adding this new twitter account to Adium so that I can send IM messages to the new twitter account so my OF gets updated?

thanks in advance.

[devn]

I use Adium to manage multiple IM accounts. How would I go about adding this new twitter account to Adium so that I can send IM messages to the new twitter account so my OF gets updated?

thanks in advance.

Berchman, there are a few ways you can do this.
Twitter has an IM bot, but you need to go to your twitter preferences in Mobile and IM, and set it up to recognize you.
Also, I know that http://imified.com/index.htm (imified) offers a neat service that will interface with many other services.

Cheers,
D

[inkfreq]

You are my new personal Messiah!

This is exactly the type of thing I have been wanting, a way to use my iPhone to capture all the random junk in my head and not have to carry around an extra set of writing tools!

Now, I admit that I am totally new to Proxy. Just a question here, but does this program continue to run as a system service after I close it down, or do I need to leave this up and running at all times to capture?

[RobTrew]

does this program continue to run as a system service after I close it down, or do I need to leave this up and running at all times to capture?

To use it unobtrusively, and without intervention, go to Proxi Preferences and check both "Start at login" and "Hide dock and menu bar"

It will then always be in the background (though not in the dock), and accessible (if you need to get at it) through a special icon in the OS X menu bar.

[inkfreq]

To use it unobtrusively, and without intervention, go to Proxi Preferences and check both "Start at login" and "Hide dock and menu bar"

It will then always be in the background (though not in the dock), and accessible (if you need to get at it) through a special icon in the OS X menu bar.

Awesome! That's exactly what I was hoping for!

[bozarthj]

FYI on the idea of using Proxi:
It works well, obviously, but since I set it up to check the twitter account every 5 minutes, my iMac never went to sleep. I'll have to look, but the only solution I saw was to force my Mac to sleep, or increase the twitter monitor check to greater than the sleep timer.

[bozarthj]

If you want to email into Twitter (especially handy for those of us using Gmail who can't take advantage of scriptable mail rules), try EmailTwitter (http://emailtwitter.com/).

If you load up your Gmail into Mail.app (thanks to the much-loved, newly-implemented IMAP feature), you can take advantage of the scriptable mail rules.

[julamoor]

This has the potential to solve everything!

So, I've established my Twitter Acct, installed Proxi and got it set up but something's not quite right.

Here are my Twitter Settings:
Protect my updates

Here are my Proxi settings:
Watching for tweets from everyone
Trigger Filter is set at 'any' (have tried with same results set as 'all')
Trigger Filter ScreenName is mytwitterscreenname

Here's what's happening:
With this filter on, I get nothing sent to OmniFocus, even though I see it being accepted at Twitter.

When I delete the filter, I get every other Twitter message available sent to my OF inbox, but still none of mine.

So, something's working ... just not the way i need it to. I know it's probably something simple, but since I'm new to both Twitter and Proxi, I'm just missing it.

Any / all suggestions appreciated.

Running OF build: 96797

[julamoor]

Nevermind.

It *was* easy - switched Twitter monitor to monitor friends instead of everyone. Sweet hack.

[zsection]

Absolutely bloody awesome.

[fudster]

I've set this up now, and it works great. Love it.

Had it working throughout the day yesterday, and this morning it wasn't working - the incoming tweets were not being received. Was poking around to find out what happened, but couldn't find anything that had changed. I could see the tweets getting posted on my twitter page, but Proxi wasn't getting them.

Then all of a sudden all the pending tweets poured into my OF inbox.

Is the twitter API ever down, or stuck, intermittently? I'm wondering things were just jammed on the twitter side somewhere.

[fudster]

I've had it with Proxi. I welcomed the recent update, but it broke my workflow - when an error occurred in Proxi accessing twitter, notably when my mac was waking up from sleep and the network wasn't quite yet available, it would just stop trying. So it could go a day or more before I noticed that my twitter captures were not showing up in my OF inbox.

Don't like to gripe but I emailed Griffin support about it - and they just replied (and I quote): "unfortunately I don't have a solution for you". I've always liked Griffin's stuff and I still do - it just seems to me like Proxi doesn't get much in terms of resources.

I use Dragon and Vlingo to do voice captures via twitter on my iPhone and I count on it almost every day - so I've now switched to using Twitterific. See this tip for how to get it working - there is a sample script that's easy to modify.

http://www.macworld.com/article/138566/2009/01/twitterrific_applescript.html

Took about 10 minutes to replace Proxi. If you do this don't forget to execute the defaults command on the command line - it's required.

[pash85]

Can someone please write up a sample script that I can download and run this feature ? I am by no means smart to figure this by myself (without running into problems) and dont want to risk breaking something else on my mac.. will appreciate if there are step by step guidelines as to how to achieve this..
Will really appreciate someone's help as this is an awesome feature !!!

[fudster]

I just posted the script for processing tweets via Twitterific in the other thread where you posted - I think that should do it. Cheers.

[iNik]

Resurrecting this old post, because it's cool and I missed it.

Proxi's dead (sob), but there's a newish web service that can do the same thing for you called ifttt (short for "if this then that"). (http://ifttt.com/)

With this service you can set any number of triggering events, which can include an incredibly large number of online actions: emails, phone calls (a la the Jott suggestion here), tweets... all kinds of stuff. Once the event triggers, then it can do all kinds of things with them, again, linking together all kinds of online services.

To use this for ubiquitous task entry, build any number of "tasks" using the triggering events you want. In keeping with this thread, phone call and Twitter are key, although there are lots of services that can push out an RSS feed or send an email, so those are good options, too.

For the "do this" step, just have it send an email that triggers your send-to-Omnifocus email rule. Easy peasy, and no custom AppleScripting required.

Here's an ifttt recipe to work from: http://ifttt.com/recipes/14744

[fudster]

Very nice! Thanks iNik, I'm definitely going to give that a try.