GLADOS – Generic Life Activity Data Organization System | Hacker News Reader

GLADOS – Generic Life Activity Data Organization System

github.com

80 pointsmajestic841 comments

This is amazing. I just started working on my own todo list system[1] the other week after trying tons of todo list apps. I focused on a command line flat file system first because I've started using hledger and I have a markdown wiki in Obsidian but I want to develop a graphical interface eventually. Yours is lovely. Great ui! I hope you don't mind me taking inspiration!

The biggest thing I've found lacking in most todo list apps is recurring checklists. The closest I've come to having the feature set I wanted was Microsoft's Todo[2] app, which was based on Wunderlist[3]. Microsoft bought and killed it before I had the chance to use it but it sounded pretty excellent.

I still haven't set up my checklist system but I started to take inspiration from scrum at work to just design a hierarchical todo list system with separate files for each long term "epic" project, and then a rolling todo list that should have copies of the lines from the epic files (all of them have unique ids) so that I can check them off easily. The workflow is still evolving.

Thanks for sharing! I'm gonna be watching your repo!

1: https://github.com/mas-4/scrummy 2: https://todo.microsoft.com/tasks/ 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

I just looked at your repo, and I really like the "long term projects" idea that can span multiple events over days. While I have considered it for GLADOS, I've haven't solved the problem to my satisfaction.

Right now, I use structured events for all personal projects: https://imgur.com/a/nehojJN but there isn't an overall project status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLaDOS

Cheeky name.

A tribute :)

Lots of good memories playing the game in university.

Note the favicon picture.

I also started developing something similar.

I guess we all eventually end up building a new DB UI

https://github.com/egeozcan/mahresources

> I guess we all eventually end up building a new DB UI

Very true. I've found Neo4j to be very useful as a note-taking app (or maybe more a mix of a mindmap and a knowledge graph?) and have been meaning to write a UI to better support that use case for a while now.

This was a triumph...

I'm making a note here: huge success

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Thank you :)

Now that I see the value, I wish I had built this sooner, would have helped me a lot over the years.

You could always print out a physical companion to your database if you wanted to add a little more pizazz. ;)

https://www.instructables.com/A-fully-3D-printable-GlaDOS-Ro...

I so want that now!

We're in the process of setting up our new work digs and I'm gonna print one to live above "the lab" (our electrical/electronic hardware workshop). Someday I'm hoping to hook up some facial recognition so it can emit sassy text-to-speech when it recognizes someone.

If there was someone selling this, I would buy it!

Thanks for creating this. I'm not sure its going to work for my purposes but I like that you can add custom properties (Structured Data) to tasks. Ill install it and check it out. I have been looking for something to replace my todo list app "Alarmed" which is on the IOS but has not been updated in awhile and concerned with it be abandonware soon. The think I need most is group tasks into specific catagories and setting recurring reminders for my list of to-dos as I constantly need to be continuously reminded if tasks.

> group tasks into specific categories

I do this using a separate "topic" for each of my projects, and "structure" for "Project Work". See https://imgur.com/a/nehojJN

> setting recurring reminders for my list

I actually wrote a plugin for this [1]. If there are no recent "events" for a given "topic", it shows up on the sidebar. As I mentioned in another comment, the original goal was conversation reminders with friends, but I use it for project work too.

> I'm not sure its going to work for my purposes

I'd recommend looking at the backup files, since they're basically JSON data that can be transformed and exported to whatever else you want, in case you find something better.

[1] https://github.com/kaustubh-karkare/glados/blob/master/src/p...

This is great.

I also made an "audience of one" list manager that I've been using for over a year.

It's very specific to my personal preferences (so very different from what you built) and like yours, desktop only.

I'd love to see it, if you're willing to share!

You can see it here: https://radar.braintapper.com - it's hosted on the cheapest possible VPS, so it's obviously not scalable (was public for friends and family, but I guess we're all friends here, haha)

The original (buggy) prototype, which was static and stored data in the browser (eventually I added syncing via PouchDb/CouchDb) is here: https://bt-apps.github.io/braintapper_radar/

Very interesting. Is the UI written with mobile in mind, or do you only use it in desktop settings (like work-related productivity)?

Desktop only for now. I use the "Saved Messages" feature in Telegram to make notes on phone, and transfer them over later, and delete those messages to avoid build up.

From the beginning, it was never limited to work-related productivity. Examples of things that I've been regularly tracking:

  - Habits: Wake Up / Sleep times, Daily Routine items I want to build consistency on, like exercising and meditation.
  - Tracking TV Shows, Movies, Books, Articles.
  - Meal Tracking, although it does not include calorie counting. I also track my weight, and find that graph particularly useful.
  - Birthday / Anniversary Reminders, with multiple warning days to adjust for timezone difference.
  - Conversations and Meeting notes, so that I can quickly remind myself about previous discussion when I am about to talk to someone.

Fun fact: I ended up accidentally impressing the girl who became my fiance with my "good memory" because of this.

I also added custom things like "conversation reminders" since I'm an introvert and needed a bit of a nudge if I have not spoken to certain friends in X days.

Television Example - https://imgur.com/a/gLZKkjn

That sounds like you get a lot of good utility out of it. A lot of it are things were I would have expected a mobile use case, but maybe there is value in explicitly making it two steps: rough recording in telegram and later taking the time to go over it again and put it more nearly into Glados.

> maybe there is value in explicitly making it two steps

Not that I can tell. Telegram is ultimately a workaround, not a feature. Not building a mobile app is primarily the result of the limits on my time (and to a smaller extent, skills, but that can be solved with time too).

Great work and thanks for the descriptive README.

Are you planning to make the app usable by non programmer users in the future ?

Thank you, I put in a lot of effort in that README, since I've seen a lot of other projects where they have been less than impressive.

> Are you planning to make the app usable by non programmer users in the future?

I do not have such plan in the near future. A major concern is the cost of supporting such users, and a minor one is the ease of understanding of the basic building blocks (events, topics, structures) since modeling your data using these requires a programmer mindset.

Here come the test results:

You are a horrible person. That’s what it says, “a horrible person.”

We weren’t even testing for that.

One of my favorite moments in the game too!

Is the 'anti-todo list' pattern you mention in your readme the same as keeping a journal of your activities (specifically a bullet journal), or is there some other distinction I'm missing?

You're not missing anything, that's exactly it.

I'm always super interested in these kind of tools. Unfortunately the demo movie isn't loading for me, not even when I directly browse to the source url.

Does this help? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd3JJi8zSk4

I hate to say but the text there is impossible to read.

Apologies: it is a desktop app, and so I recorded the demo on [HD resolution](https://github.com/kaustubh-karkare/glados/blob/master/src/d...) to make it look as close to my intended experience as possible.

I'm assuming you're on mobile, so later today, I'll try making a separate demo video specifically for this case.

On tablet it’s too tiny as well.

It did seem like for most of you pr demo about half the screen is blank. I think you could easily reduce the resolution by 1/3 and not confuse the demo at all.

Okay, I had to make a few adjustments, but here is a lower resolution version. I verified that I can read the text easily on my phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPBIkdDUrQY

Better. I can’t decide if the line wrapping on the one element is demonstrating a necessary feature or suggests a little more trickery on sizing. I’d probably leave it but it would secretly bug me.

Yes, thanks! Much appreciated. Made a todo to check out the repo when I'm on my laptop again :).