Show the OmniFocus Tasks You Did Today on your Desktop

This morning Ken Case retweeted this:

Using Automator, not TextExpander

I’ve wanted a solution to show me what I accomplished in a day for a while, but I don’t use TextExpander. Luckily Colter Reed’s script to log today’s completed OmniFocus tasks is Javascript for Automation, which can be run with the built-in OSX app, Automator, so I built an Automator workflow that runs the script, (I just pasted Colter Reed’s script into an Automator “Run Javascript” action, then made one tweak when I ran into a small problem). If you’ve never used Automator before don’t worry – I hadn’t either! Here’s my Automator workflow file, (it’ll need to be unzipped). It returns a bunch of text, which we’ll deal with next.

Put the Results on your Desktop with GeekTool

GeekTool can take text from a shell script and display it on your desktop, and you can set it to refresh that text however often you want. I created a new shell Geeklet with GeekTool with the following script:

Automator Runner ~/Developer/Scripts/omnifocus-completed.workflow | sed -e 's/^"//' -e 's/"$//' -e 's/\\"/"/g'

For some reason the Automator Runner returns the text with quotation marks around it, so the parts after the pipe remove the quotation marks, (using instructions from Stackoverflow).

When choosing your refresh interval keep in mind that the script grabs focus from OmniFocus when it runs, which will be annoying if you are working in OmniFocus and you have a short refresh interval. I also don’t know how much battery this will eat for those of us on laptops.

With some font & colour tweaking, my desktop now looks like this:

Update (October 9, 2015): This morning a bunch of tasks I did last night, but before midnight, were still on my desktop, so I went debugging. It looks like OmniFocus, (at least my version, which is a pre-release test version), is exposing the completedDate value to Javascript as a UTC date/time, but with a Timezone offset set, so things done in the evening might remain on the list of “today’s” completed tasks, (this might reverse on the other side of the world, with things you do in the morning not appearing). To fix this I’ve modified the startOfDay() function to take the Timezone Offset into account. I assume this is a bug and will be temporary, so I’m not updating the downloadable Automator action above. Here’s the updated startOfDay() function:

function startOfDay() {
// The day started at midnight this morning
    var d = new Date(),
    hours = 0,
    minutes = 0;
    
    if( d.getTimezoneOffset() !== 0 ) {
        hours = Math.round( d.getTimezoneOffset() / 60 );
        minutes = d.getTimezoneOffset() % 60;
    }
    
    d.setHours( hours );
    d.setMinutes( minutes );
    d.setSeconds( 0 );
    
    return d;
}

Update (November 3, 2015): I used quotation marks in a task name, and they came out escaped on my desktop. I’ve updated the command line for the geeklet to strip the slashes from before double quotation marks;