leTTerheaD

Just a note: that capitalization is pretty annoying to type, so I think I’ll leave the inclusion of “TTD”, my shorthand for “things to do”, as a nomenclatural easter egg. (See below.)

Letterhead will be, I hope, a pretty cool little app. One notable feature, if you know me and my programming history, is that it will be, in fact, a real live coded app and not a webapp. I’m not entirely sure yet, but it’ll probably use one of the many bindings for Qt, or possibly wxWidgets. Who knows?

Letterhead’s basic purpose is to track my next actions, goals, and successes. The next actions are the most important, as they’re the ones that help me actually get things done —- and if you haven’t at least familiarized yourself with David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy, do so now! —- and the project was actually born from my next actions list. While working on implementing an internal wiki for Acadia Insurance, I happened to write myself a note that included [[this syntax]]. Now, that happens to be the DokuWiki syntax for links, but when I wrote the note, I somewhat subconsciously used it as a way to say to myself “this needs more thought —- write something about this when you’ve finished getting this idea down”. A day or two later, I looked back at that note and thought (as in fact I wrote on one of my notepads), “[[This]] is the coolest note-taking tip I’ve ever invented.” Letterhead was born when I realized that Notepad++, my editor of choice, couldn’t perform syntax highlighting on the [[link]] pattern, only [[ with a space before and after the brackets ]]. I decided to write my own live-parsing editor, and that meant I could implement some other note-taking syntax I’ve been using for a while. Some of it’s adapted from Merlin Mann, if memory serves, and others are my own.

Writing my own app also means I could, say, click on — incomplete items to make them + complete items. Nifty, no? I could also use code-folding functionality for @projects, and I think I’d like the app to autosave to a specified file. That way, the workflow simplifies to: specify a .ttd file (this preference is stored somewhere) and begin editing. Huzzah for simplicity!

What’s In A Name?

For a while, i.e. when I was writing never-completed Java apps, I named my programs after animals, mostly birds. There was CodKey, a really simple cipher program, and then something I can’t remember, and then at some point I planned to write Raven, which was to be a sheet-music database. I’ve also tentatively titled my yet-to-be written CMS “Brisk CMS”, mainly because I felt like creating a logo and “brisk” sounds nice. For Letterhead, I wanted to include “TTD” in the name, so to Onelook I went. Their wildcard search, by the way, is a very handy tool. There are less words than you may imagine that have the “* t * t * d ” pattern, at least when you count the words that could even *possibly serve as app names. I actually really like Letterhead, but it was a close call —- it was nearly named magnificenT frigaTebirD, which is a bad choice for so many reasons.

Stay tuned, folks!