Borkware Stackinator
(last updated August 1, 2003)
What It Is
Stackinator is a light-weight temporary to-do manager, created for those folks who frequently get interrupted and need to keep track of "where was I?"Stackinator is freeware. Use and enjoy. The source code is available too. Any questions or comments? Send them to stackinator-help@borkware.com
The original suggestion from Bork read:
Back when I worked at a desktop, I kept a little piece of paper on the desk where wrote down what I was doing if I got interrupted, or if I was going on a detour unrelated to the task at hand. When I'd get done with the interruption or the detour, I could see what I was working on. Now that I spend all my time on a laptop, I don't have that any more.The Stackinator is a simple little program where you can add stuff to the top of your "stack of things to do", to keep track of the context of whatever it was you were doing. When you're finished with something, just pop it off the top of the stack and go back to whatever it was you were doing before hand.For instance. Here I am in the middle of a work day:
I started working on unit tests. As part of that, I was adding testing stubs to a task manager. As I was doing that, Bob came in with a crashing problem. So I pushed that to the top of my stack. When I'm done with Bob's problem, I can go back to my stubby stuff.
As I was looking at Bob's problem, I noticed something a little odd in the Command Data Block code. So I just type in the new task, click Add, and it's added to the top of my task-stack:
Now I can go to lunch and come back and know exactly what I was doing. Once I finish with the CDB problem, I can go back to fixing Bob's problem.
How to use it
To add items, type some text and click Add:
To delete items, click on the X thingie, or select the item and type Backspace.
There are two preferences you can tweak to control how the Stackinator window behaves:
Float above all windows makes the Stackinator window appear above all other windows, so it is instantly available and viewable. This is handy for folks with large screens.
The Hot-Key is a key you can specify that will pull the Stackinator window to the front. This is handy for folks with small screens, or don't like strange windows staying at the top of the window stack all the time.
You can set the Hot-Key too:
Just type the key combination you want, and click OK.
Versions
- 1.0 : it works! (August 1, 2003)
Download
Download Stackinator (v1.0), 82K (compressed disk image format)
Download Pröject (with source) (v1.0), 45K (tar.gz format)
Known Problems
in 1.0
- None so far.
Items of interest about the code
- Global hot-keys, with functionality provided by Quentin Carnicalli's hotkey library
- An NSTableView subclass that lets you remove rows with the Delete key
- Using an NSPanel to provide a small-title-bar window
- But for the most part, anyone who has worked through a Basic Cocoa book could write this program.
