Add Things Extension

[loris]

Description

Here is the first working version of a Things extension. It currently uses JXA (ie, AppleScript using JavaScript) to communicate with Things, so Things needs to be installed and running.
It is very basic at the moment: it includes several commands to list the To-Dos from Things lists (Inbox, Today, etc) and allows to filter and open to-dos.

Expect several improvements and new features in the coming days (have a look at the screenshot for some hints).

Feel free to test, give me feedbacks or contribute.

Type of change

• New extension

Screencast

Checklist

• I read the documentation about publishing

[danielrgjoseph]

What time zone are the scripts working in? It appears that for tasks due today, it gives the time of midnight of the day before. I am not sure if this is the intended behavior. For example, if a task is due today and it's 6 am, the today script says due 6 hrs ago. It could perhaps be more beneficial to just say today or perhaps could to the next day's midnight, so instead of due 6 hrs ago, it would say due in 16 hrs if that makes sense.

[loris]

@Daniel-Joseph great feedback, indeed I was planning to do something like this. I stumbled upon a Things workflow for Alfred and the author is doing something similar to what you suggested (ie, displaying "today"), here: https://github.com/xilopaint/alfred-things/blob/master/src/things.applescript#L96

[loris]

@Daniel-Joseph added a new formatDueDate method that mimic the way due dates are displayed in Things (well except the red coloring, but we cannot do that in Raycast List UI at the moment).

Here is Raycast:

And Things:

[danielrgjoseph]

Oh wow that's a really nice and quick fix. I think I just found another unintended bug. For recurring tasks in upcoming, the date before this last commit would say in 17000 days, and now after your most recent changes says Jan 1 even if the recurring task is set to be due this week. I do not personally know how to address this.

[loris]

@Daniel-Joseph interesting, it looks like a really strange bug (or maybe on purpose), but the dueDate for a recurring task with deadlines is indeed "Mon Jan 01 4001 00:00:00 GMT+0100" when using Apple Script

I guess, Things is storing recurring deadlines in another structure I am not aware of (or, I'm afraid, is not available through Script). I'll keep looking.

[PitNikola]

Hey @loris, thanks for your contribution! This is really impressive, I didn't realise that it's possible to build such extension with Things, I thought they are pretty limited when it comes to API.

Few minor things to improve:

• Let's add an icon for "Mark as Completed" action, otherwise it looks a bit off. There is Icon.Checkmark that would probably fit well.

• I noticed that when I run "Mark as Completed" with one of my items, it didn't disappear from the list or gave any indication that it was successful. Do you think we could show a toast and also delete the item from the list? Or maybe change icon to checkmark and then delete after short delay to make it even nicer. What do you think?

[loris]

Hi @PitNikola, thanks for the review!
Regarding your 2 feedbacks, sorry I should have made it clearer: as you can see in the code, the "Mark as completed" action is wrapper in a environment.isDevelopment condition, so you were not supposed to see it (well you, because you tested in in dev condition, but not real users yet). It is not ready yet, for the reason you invoked in your feedback #2, right now using script to change the status of a to-do also move it to the "Logbook" list, I need to dig deeper to see how it can stay in the list.

Do you think we can release the first version (which is read-only) as it is right now so that I can start getting feedbacks? (For instance, I planned to add a "Create To-Do" form, but I'm not even sure this will be useful since Things has a powerful "Quick entry" form that can be invoked with global shortcut)

Thanks

[PitNikola]

Ah, got it! Yeah, I was running in Dev env. Ok, then it's fine, we can ship it like this and see.