Many people(including us) have creative pursuits; projects we want to allocate time for; goals to accomplish. In our team, I write; Gem(a contributor to the project) plays music. It’s always been hard for us, and we suspect for many other people, to stay on task. More specifically, it’s even harder to keep track of one’s progress. The timers of our world—smartphones, desktops, etc—aren’t designed to accurately time the tasks we do.
One of the reasons for this is that human error is inevitable. A writer like myself may set the timer to 30 minutes, but halfway through the writing session, I might go make tea. If one is doing it right, making tea takes time. I forget to stop my timer, which is supposed to keep me attached to the keyboard for 30 minutes. In the meantime, while time runs out, I’m setting up the pot, waiting for it to boil, take my tea bag to dip in, fetch milk, make toast. When I come back to my novel, the timer ran out!
Even though my timer counted 30 minutes, I only did 15 minutes of writing. This is not ideal. Tasker aims to solve this problem, or at the very least make our timers more accurate (hence mitigating human errors) by binding our timers to hardware.
This means that while a session is opened in Tasker, it will be detecting hardware interaction. We DO NOT record keyboard strokes or sound. We buffer it temporarily and throw it away once we run it through some logic.
Tasker has the concept of "commitments". A commitment in Tasker is exactly what it sounds like; it is an activity that one commits to for a certain period of time, or indefinitely. This could be something like committing to write a novel within a year. Or play an instrument everyday, which is what I use it for.
As you can see in the image above I have a commitment called "Practice Guitar". You can also see that I have committed to 25 minutes, 5 times a week.
You can also see that I have done that twice for that particular week on Sunday and Tuesday. I have done 25 minutes(the time goal of this commitment) of productive time which is in blue. Productive Time in Tasker is the time one spends actually doing the task--which in this case, it is practicing guitar. This gets measured by detecting microphone interaction. In a nutshell, if there is noise in the room, the Productive timer will tick; If there is no noise, the Unproductive timer will tick the productive one will stop. Like mentioned earlier, sound nor key strokes are recorded. They are briefly looked at by the app and gets thrown away. You are free to look at the code to confirm this; any class that inherits the Hook Class is a class that either detects keyboard, mouse or audio input.
So if I want to practice guitar(the task I'm committed to), all I have to do is double-click on my commitment and I get the new session window:
As you can see when you start a new session for a commitment, you have a name and hooks to choose from. The name is simply a name you want to give this particular session. The hooks are the hardware hooks. So in my case of playing guitar, I would choose the mic hook as I would like Tasker to detect audio input. But we also have mouse and keyboard! So if you want to commit to writing a novel, for example, you can! Just create a new commitment and select the keyboard hook for your session.
Once you start a session, Tasker will show a live feed of your current productive and unproductive time as you can see above. You can also pause a session while in the middle of it. Once you are done, Tasker will save that for you and you can come back the next day/or next week to make sure you stay committed!
You can get it here
1.Right-click the AppImage
2.Click on "properties"
3.Make sure to check the "Allow Executing file as a program" box
To make your life more convinient with appimages I highly recommend downloading this https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher
NOTE: For the mouse and keyboard hooks to work, you must give accessibility permissions to Tasker. For the Microphone hooks, you must give Microphone permission to Tasker.
If you were prompted to give permission, like in the image above, then tick the box in Accessbility menu for Tasker and restart Tasker. You only have to do this once. After the first time you do it, you will always be able to use the mouse and keyboard hooks.
You also have to give Microphone permissions to Tasker just like the mouse/keyboard hooks. Except for the Microphone, you don't have to restart Tasker after you allow Microphone Access.
When updating Tasker in macOS; meaning re-downloading a new .app file from the release page, to avoid any headaches, re-enable all of the accessibility and microphone permisions on macOS preferences. That means removing Tasker from the list of allowed apps on the Accessibility and Microphone sections and re-adding that new Tasker.app file you just downloaded. If you don't do this, Tasker wil not work properly because macOS still thinks that those permissions belong to the older Tasker version you had.
docker pull thebigg1/tasker-linux-ci:latest
sudo docker run -it thebigg1/tasker-linux-ci:latest bash
git clone https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker.git
cd Tasker
git submodule update --recursive --init
rm -r build
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
docker pull thebigg1/tasker-linux-ci:latest
sudo docker run -it thebigg1/tasker-linux-ci:latest bash
git clone https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker.git
cd Tasker
git submodule update --recursive --init
patch /mxe/usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static/qt5/lib/cmake/Qt5Core/Qt5CoreConfigExtras.cmake misc/docker/linux/Qt5CoreConfigExtras.cmake.patch
rm -r build
mkdir build
cd build
i686-w64-mingw32.static-cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_FORCED=true -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/mxe/usr/i686-w64-mingw32.static/qt5/lib/cmake ..
make
The default branch is main PRs and issues always welcome! Another way to help is to test Tasker with different keyboard/mouse/hardware and post an issue if a specific one does not work!
Would like to give credit to the devs at https://github.com/kwhat/libuiohook libuiiohook is the library that makes it possible for Tasker to detect mouse and keyboard interaction!
Tasker is built using Qt 5 using c++. So you need to be comfortable using those technologies. If you aren't that's cool, we're still learning!
To get started I highly recommend these resources:
Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++