[Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Announcing a home screen plugin to display the time remaining until (or passed since) a number of configurable target dates.

After installing and loading the plugin (it should display automatically after first install, but you can enable/disable through the "Home" menu) you can configure it two ways: if you have never used it before it will display with a button stating "Click here to set up your countdowns", or you can always configure through the "Home", "Applet Settings","Countdown" menu options.

Once in the configuration screen you can add, edit, or delete countdowns (which each have some configuration options or their own) or change the general settings or translation options.

General settings allow you to select the "refresh" rate (how often it will change the numbers displayed), show or hide entries that have passed their target date, or configure the heading and normal font settings.

The "translation" options allow you to change how the units display in the countdown. For example, if instead of "years" you want "yrs" or "Y" you can change that. If you want all the units in a different language, you can have that too.

Entry specific options are title, date, and time for the entry, as well as which units to show (years, weeks, days, hours, minutes) and whether to hide the entry until closer to the target (a specified number of days).

Hopefully some people find this application useful. I wrote it because we have a bunch of events coming up I want to keep track of: moving, birthdays, vacations, etc.

You can get the plugin from this garage page: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/countdown-home/ I will upload to maemo-extras later today. Version 0.3 is now in maemo-extras

EDIT: Version 0.3 is now out. No major changes, but the package is now available through the application manager in the maemo-extras repository. Minor changes are: bug fix when displaying hours or minutes with more than one of the larger units selected. Feature added to hide leading zero units (ie. it won't show the "0 years" part of a countdown even if years is selected).

One-click install is available here: http://repository.maemo.org/extras/d...n-home.install
Maemo downloads page here: http://maemo.org/downloads/product/O...ountdown-home/

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Pretty cool and useful!

Thanks!

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Very nice. This is exactly the kind of app that should be bundled by default on devices in this class.
Thanks!

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Looks very cool..... Now what to put in it...

Retirement.... vacations..... time to go home from work (5:00pm) time to drink the first beer (5:15 pm)

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Brilliant, fiferboy, you never fail to amaze.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Thanks everyone.

In case anyone wonders what is next for countdown home, I have recurrence in mind (useful for birthdays, meetings, etc) which is the main reason I added the "hide until X days before" option (who wants to see a birthday is 364 days away?).

I almost put recurrence in this version, but my brain started going mushy with all the different cases and ended up taking it out and fixing some memory leaks instead.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Very nice, Fiferboy. Put alarms in it and the ability to sync with Google Calendar and this is all I need to replace the other calendar apps I was testing. ;)

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

alephito, I have almost entirely gone off the idea of putting alarms in it, mostly because I am not out to replace any PIM packages. I realize your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I really just wanted a light-weight application to show me how much time is left to certain events (I am a big counter downer).

Even though I mentioned recurring events in my previous post, I am still not 100% sure I want to resurrect that idea. At first I thought it would be quite a nice addition, but the more I think of all the possible cases the more uncertain I am whether I will be able to do it. If I do put in recurrence, though, I am sure alarms will eventually follow.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

So, fiferboy, how many programs do you plan on writing in 21 years, 29 weeks & 3 days? :P

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

qwerty, I already have my trifecta of plugins (statusbar, task navigator, and home - being large-statusbar-clock, personal-menu, and countdown-home) so I figure I need one "real" application to complete my resume.

I have actually written a fairly involved application (it was the first I wrote and the reason I got the tablet) but have not polished it to a releasable level. I have scattered a plethora of hints about this application in my screenshots, and another hint is in my garage profile. I have had a couple of inquiries, but it is not something that would appeal to the masses.

If anyone has ideas for other applications, I am always willing to consider them. I cannot promise I will be able to do it, though. I have another program that is about 50% done, and stalled.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Yeah, I was joking.

Thanks for all your plugins. I am a big fan of them.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

I see in the screenshots that you can manually select to show/hide the minutes/hours etc, but can it automatically hide the days for example if it goes to 0 days remaining. i.e. from:
"1 day 1 hour 2 minutes"
would automatically change to:
"23 hours 59 minutes"
as it counts down?

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

atarii, I have been thinking about putting that in. It is not there right now but it should be easy enough to put in the next version.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

I was babbling about this in another thread but I thought I'd toss it out here, too.

I know you can't put a floating calculator on top of a window but sometimes I really want an onscreen calculator I can use when trying to figure things out using numbers on a webpage (mostly, I admit, when I'm trying to figure out my finances and bank balances).

I thought an application that would be a small-space basic calculator, position-able to one corner of the window, maybe with one continuous line of adding machine tape that runs semi-transparently along the bottom (or top) of the screen as an option.

Xword (the crossword puzzle application) has the toolbar layout of letters preferences so you can choose to have the letters appear on the left or right of the screen (good for me, a lefty, since the letters on the left mean I'm not always reaching across the puzzle to choose letters. The position options could be upper left corner, upper right, lower left, lower right, etc.

If the basic calculator could take up, what, a third or quarter of the space allotted to the letters in this application, and then have the rest of the window be completely translucent so that the underlaying window (with the numbers you want to calculate) is clearly visible, then I figure that's the next best thing to having an actual dragable calculator.

And it's just one of those why-didn't-they-*think*-about-these-things things :-)

But I figure one of your real strengths is recognizing core basic, common sense needs for users so, OK, I'll pipe up about it.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Updated first post to reflect version 0.3 release.

Countdown Home is now in the maemo Extras repository. There is also a maemo.org download page for it. Both are linked in the first post.

Changes in 0.3 are: bug fixed where hours and minutes would be calculated incorrectly when showing more than one large unit. Feature added to hide leading units with a value of zero, as suggested by Atarii.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Hehe, I thought this was a good choice of thread to say happy birthday fiferboy! :P

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

:D Thanks. Did my screenshots give it away?

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Well, I saw the birthdays thing at the main page and remembered this thread :D

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Feliz cumpleaños, Andrew.

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Thanks, alephito. One of my son's favourite books (Happy Birthday, Maisy) tought me that phrase!

Re: [Announce] OS2008 Countdown Home
 

Fiferboy:

First of all thanks for this great app. I started using it a few days ago and it has proved of great value. However I've found one detail which might be a bug worth correcting. Reading the bug information in maemo.org it seems I am not the only one to have stumbled upon it.

Apparently the "Hide this event until closer to the date" feature is not working. I attached 2 screenshots to show this. Hope you can take a look at it.

In a similar note I was wondering if there is a way to "hide" the Countdown Window when no events are set, other than deactivating the applet in HOME > SELECT APPLET.

As I said, thanks for a great addition to the Maemo apps available.

Angel B
Mexico City