this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Idea 1
I've been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn't completely thumb chewing stupid. I've yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you'd get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.
I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like "take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5" and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.
And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the "journal" apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a "view" mode to see what you've done. Also: Don't be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don't want some light mode Gnome lookin' bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.
Idea 2
Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.
Idea 3
You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This "seems quite complex." The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It's a general purpose engineering CAD system and it's designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can't think in terms of "put a mortise and tenon joint here" you have to think "create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions." And then it doesn't give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn't write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so...I'm not sure why they bother at this point.
I've been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I've thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as "monumental."
Ad. 2, have you seen https://www.zombietrackergps.net/ztgps/ ?
How can there not be a good todo app???
Is it just that there's no Linux one but there is mobile?
Maybe with Kotlin Multiplatform someone will get an existing mobile one running on Linux as that would be useful.
I can't imagine it'd be too hard given a todo app doesn't need a lot of Android specific functionality. I'm in the middle of converting my app to target desktop/ios/android and its been going very well and the tooling is improving rapidly.
That or someone might write a nice one as a starter project as Multiplatform from the start to learn it?
I'm after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I've yet to find the thing I'm after.
I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we'd get the occasional "citizen inventor" off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they'd describe their "invention" to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn't work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what's happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.
Also, just searched Mint's software manager for "todo" and came up with this:
TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with...someone. Worthless.
Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as "Endeavour". I'm guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome's PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.
Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome's name that isn't below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn't it.
OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I'm looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren't obvious what they're for with no tool tips and...it's just combative, it's trying really hard to be a pain.
Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a "todo.txt syntax" which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.
Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a "Sign in with Google" button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.
That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn't seem relevant.
I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I've yet to find since.
Just saw your edit. I think I got a better idea of what you meant now with what PalmOS had. Such a shame about requiring an account to use the apps that are available. I get why they might do it if you want to share data across devices / platforms, but if you only want it locally and you're okay with that, they should let you make that choice, especially for desktop apps.
It should also be common or required practice to make note of "Google account required" or something in the app's description.
I'd greatly appreciate a "requires account" on app stores.
Especially on something like Flathub and especially for apps that can plausibly run locally. Like, I kinda know beforehand I'll need an account with Discord to use the Discord app, because it's primarily for communicating with other people. But a todo app? Dafuq does that need the internet for?
So what do you really want when you say journaling your peogess.
Is that something like
Recurring Fitness Run 5k 2 times a week.
As you check it off for number one, it prompts you to leave a note about it? And maybe you can see all your notes by category or chronologically?
Or is the journaling a completely separate thing? I can see how the two might not be done as separate things as you're really getting into 2 wholly different apps.
As I look through Flathub, maybe KOrganizer is the closest thing to what I'm looking for, although it's got KDE's disease of being hideously overcrowded with every possible feature.
I think what I'm after is somewhere between KOrganizer and RedNotebook. I currently use RedNotebook to keep my journal, which in my case takes the form of talking about my day, what I did, what I'm thinking, and sometimes what I'm planning. It has no todo list functionality, but I can use it as a sort of note to self thing, it has a search function that allows me to easily look back. I almost always have it open and running on my computer.
imagine RedNotebook, but with some todo and checklist functionality so that I get today's page, there's a blank page for a journal entry so I can record what I did today, and maybe a separate side pane for daily tasks, maybe several panes stacked vertically for "regularly scheduled" where daily stuff like "change cat's water dish" or weekly stuff like "garbage day" or monthly stuff like "water bill due" could pop up, and it would serve not only as a reminder to do those things, but a record of having done them. And maybe another pane for ongoing stuff, like...say I want to list all the things I want to build in the wood shop this summer; this might not be time based but just a running checklist. It would be kind of cool to be able to look back at that and see when things were added, checked off, or removed.
Lifeograph might be designed for this but 1. damn if I can figure out how it works and 2. it won't stop shining bright white rectangles at me.
Looks like Lifeograph has a 3.0 release candiate which is brand new last month. Maybe they've have made things simpler and added a better theme?
Item1: I would love something along these lines. Honestly, I wish I could configure Thunderbird to be my journal and reference my to-do items programmatically from inside journal entries.
Similar to your wish for first class dark mode, I want light mode to also be first class. Too many apps lately have made dark mode default and the light mode is unusable.
I'm starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I'm just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.
I am one of those gifted folks that enjoy astigmatism. I have tried dark mode and dark themes many times over the years and it just doesn't work for me. The screenshots are gorgeous tho!