I’ve been quiet over the past few days for a few reasons: I’ve been taking advantage of the warmer weather recently to get out of the house and take some photos, as well as catching up with some old friends. But most importantly, I’ve been diving head first into Xcode and Cocoa to work on a new piece of software that I’ve been meaning to write for some time: High Priority.
High Priority in Action (Sort by Priority)
What is High Priority? Perhaps it would be best to start off describing the application through a screenshot. In the photo above, you can see High Priority in action, displaying all of the To Do items I currently have in Apple’s simple to use calendar program, iCal. Take a close look at where the icon is situated in the menu bar. That’s right, High Priority is a menu extra meaning it can be moved around as you please. Moreover, if you don’t like it, you can simply command-drag it off the menu bar and presto, it’s gone.
High Priority in Action (Sort by Title)
I wanted to make High Priority customizable, easy to use, and very Macintosh like. To that degree, I’ve gone ahead and allowed a lot of customizability through a settings dialog. Sort by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status, or Title. Choose between images depicting priority or status, or no image at all. Don’t like Tooltips, disable them. Moreover, I’ve tried to make the program mimic iCal as much as possible. You can have To Do items not show up if they’ve been completed, you can color the menu items by their respective calendar color, and so forth. The screenshots below of the settings dialog show the ones that I’ve thought of and implemented . If you have your own ideas, feel free to add them as a comment or contact me.
High Priority General Settings
High Priority Advanced Settings
Moreover, I want High Priority to be a semi-replacement for iCal. One of the problems with iCal is the need to have the application open to view or edit your To Do items. I hate having resources being taken up by an application I hardly use. Plus, having the To Do items in the menu bar is much more convenient and with editing, makes it possible to quickly go ahead and add a new To Do item or check one off as you think about it.
High Priority in Action
So far, quite a bit of High Priority has been implemented. Pretty much everything I’ve described, except for the editing, has been coded and is working. There’s some bugs that need to be fixed, plus some additional features to implement, but the foundation for the application has been written and I’m feel pretty good about it.
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