The Backpack Bundle

The first release of this bundle is out now, check it out!

By tomorrow I will be posting the pre-release of the Backpack bundle for TextMate. So far it has reminder and note capabilities. I don’t like the handling of items in the Backpack API very much, so I’m kind of holding off on doing the to-do list manager I was planning. Right now, the bundle only includes the tm-dialog versions. The text-only versions are really nice, it’s just that anything that requires a specific page needs a dialog anyway, and anything that needs a date has to be parsed and formatted (and if you screw it up it’ll break your Backpack page… trust me), so I’m working out the kinks on that.

It’s been a little time-consuming, but I really like the features that I’ve got built into it thus far. You can send selected text or an entire document as a note with a title to any of your pages, you can add and remove reminders (I even worked out a multiple select dialog for destroying reminders), and there’s a really good interface for notes. The notes interface is broken up into 3 panes, the first one lets you select a page, then the second one shows you all the notes on that page, and selecting one puts the contents of that note into the third pane. You can double click the title of the note to edit it and you can edit the content of the note in the third pane. If you hit the update button, your changes to that note will be saved when the dialog closes.

There’s a “View Reminders by Date” function that pops up a list of upcoming reminders sorted by “Today”, “This Week”, and “Future”. The algorithm is there, so if you wanted to break it down further it would be a relatively simple task. You could even build a local calendar using reminders if you wanted to.

My ultimate plan is to interface with the GTD bundles, but I want to talk to a few people first. I started using the GTDAlt bundle recently and I think it’s awesome. I love text. But I love the convenience and accessibility of my Backpack page. So what I’d like to do is create a parser that would allow me to maintain a TextMate GTD-like project file that could be synced with Backpack. Changes could be easily compared and updated through the API. I think it would be fun both to use and to build.

Oh yeah, I also got OSX Keychain support working with the Backpack bundle. Now there’s a dialog to enter your username and API token and it will store them for you so it won’t ask you again on that machine. If you ever want to change to a different Backpack user, there’s a command that will call the dialog back up and let you re-enter the information. Snazzy. The only pitfall is that it has a little trouble with changing the password for an existing user. I need to figure that part out.

Anyway, look for a post tomorrow with the bundle as it stands right now. I’m probably going to figure out my new Subversion account and post it using that so it’s easier to maintain. I’ll be looking for suggestions and additions and hoping to make this a full fledged addition to TextMate.