when-command
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almostearthling
Cuttlefish + When
I read the When article in Webupd8 and the comments below in which someone suggested incorporating the best bits of Cuttlefish in to the When-command project.
I have been using Cuttlefish for the last three years and greatly appreciate its easy to configure means of automating tasks and reactions. However, I have always wanted more from Cuttlefish. Particularly when I'm using it within Elementary OS. Where I'd like the option to quickly add a command which will mount devices / discs upon insertion – elementary doesn't have an automount option – and then open a specified application. This would be especially useful for my elderly and technically-befuddled relatives. They who have otherwise enjoyed Elementary's simplicity but cannot quite grasp mounting devices via a file browser.
For myself I would like a simple and streamlined GUI through which I can quickly add / edit a command to monitor the downloads folder and to automatically move a specific file type to a specific folder. This would make my life much easier.
If this sort of thing could be incorporated into When, with something like Cuttlefish's easy to configure GUI, then I imagine that When will quickly become a must-have for almost every Linux desktop user.
Thanks for all you efforts. And good luck.
Hello, and thank you for your appreciation. As I said in the Webupd8 discussion, if I bumped into Cuttlefish before I probably wouldn't even begin the development of When. I managed to know that Cuttlefish existed right there, and just to discover that it was almost abandoned, while When already reached some sort of maturity. However I downloaded the source of Cuttlefish to see what ideas I can steal from it to make When a more usable utility.
For the moment being I'm concentrating my efforts in reaching a stable release with the features I imagined at the beginning, the only enhancements I'm working at are the ones that are somehow needed to better manage tests and to focus on stability. However I was thinking of a way to make configuration easier for users that wouldn't want to tinker with settings and dependencies and don't like to switch between dialog boxes just to get the thing to perform a simple task. Looking at Cuttlefish's screenshots (I still didn't run it), I imagined that the answer to this can be summarized in these two things:
- predefined and configurable actions
- wizard interface.
Also in that spirit I decided to begin from the bottom, and to provide When with the ability to load items (tasks, conditions and signal handlers) from the command line. While this can look like a contradiction at first, it actually represents a way to achieve at least two goals: the first is the possibility to create libraries of actions and events, and the second is the possibility to write a separate utility that can create those items in an easier way, to feed the actual applet with. That is probably what I'll do in the (hopefully near) future: in this way I can keep the applet as essential as it is, while providing a more user-friendly and possibly more complex and complete GUI to create items.
I am currently working at the forthcoming When Wizard, which could probably be something close to what some users expect. I say close because the interface is somewhat different from Cuttlefish, however it should not be much more difficult. As I said above the interface is wizard-like (it reminds a little the good old Microsoft wizards, but intentionally), and the architecture is plugin-based, so that it can be extended in functionality. Here is what it looks like at the moment:
It's far from being usable (actually it's not so much more than a mockup), but for now it can write an Item Definition File for a condition type and a task type. As soon as there is something closer to a working proof of concept I'll create a repo for it.
Some credits: icons I use in the application are from icons8, and the screencast was made using silentcast.
This looks fantastic - a lot of people are going to find this really useful. And it's a great idea to create two separate When applications. Thanks for your time and all the work you've put in to this project.
Sure I hope that someone will find it useful... Thank you too, and let's see what we can squeeze out of it.