Improve the slider or add another method to set the amount of time [feature request]

[SteveBell]

The slider looks nice and works, but if one wants to use SelfControl for a very short time span, it's unuable. The shortest amount I was able to determine was 15 minutes. But what if I just want to write a mail for 10 minutes and still make sure I don't visit any sites or get stuck clicking on twitter links and the like?

Not sure how to solve this.
a) Change the slider, so that in the beginning the time span is shorter (make it unlinear).
b) add a field to enter the minutes that SelfControl shall be active

Thanks for this great tool :)

[slambert]

in earlier versions the slider went from 1 minute up to 12 hours. There were a lot of requests for more time, so when we upped it to 24 hours, we included some UI improvements done in a fork by Jay Williams here on github. He created the 15 minute increments.

We didn't include a text field because there is more of a chance for a typo - writing 100 instead of 10 for example.

My thought is if you can do 10 minutes, you can do 15 minutes. But if you have an idea for a user interface design that works around these issues, let's take a look!

[SteveBell]

Well, what about the unlinear idea? Start with small steps and the further the slider gets to the right side the bigger the steps become (e.g. on the very left it's minutes for every step and on the very right it's 30 minutes per step in between you could have 5/10/15 minutes).

[SteveBell]

already closed? :3

[slambert]

shouldn't have been closed (the comment and close button below can be confusing)

[SteveBell]

ok, thanks for reopening. (actually I was about to click "comment and close" right now myself... just noticed in the last second ;)

[SteveBell]

saw the workaround you posted in the wiki. works great, thank you!

more complex but also more elegant would be that unlinear solution. but I can talk all day. I'm no programmer and have no clue how hard that is to implement.

[slambert]

I'll edit the original ticket and we'll list it as an enhancement.

[franciscolourenco]

why does it need to be a slider? why not an infinite rotary knob?
Or just a text box? <--useful for keyboard addicts

[slambert]

@aristidesfl - slider makes it less likely someone will accidentally type an extra zero.

What I'd like to see is a way to set the max and interval in the preferences rather than through the command line. Anyone want to step up and code it?

[AndrewAskins]

@slambert I'm not sure if you're still following this or not, but I've been looking for an open source project to contribute to and I love your app. It's helped me tremendously. I'd like to take a stab at the interval preferences problem you mentioned, and also maybe try to come up with a way to do more detailed scheduling. I personally would like to be able to block myself for certain hours on certain days. Would like to hear your thoughts...

[cstigler]

@AndrewAskins your contributions would definitely be welcome! Although we'll appreciate any improvements you can make, it'd be especially great if you could find a fix for issue #66 (where SelfControl freezes on newer systems). It's related to some sort of code signing permissions thing, but it doesn't break on my system and I couldn't find a working fix for others. Anyway, whatever you do please send us a pull request!

[AndrewAskins]

@cstigler I'll start looking into that right away, thanks!