montage

Brian Hicks, August 21, 2023

I've liked the concept of the Pomodoro technique (basically 25 minute work and 5 minutes rest on a loop through the day) for a long time. I get a lot out of it! Problem is, I'd like to use an app for this but nothing I've tried has been "sticky" enough for me to use long-term… they all have some drawback or other I don't want to live with. So like any good software person, I made my own! Long story short, you can get it at git.bytes.zone/brian/montage. Here's what makes it different:

• Other apps I've used assume they can take over for your todo list or daily log. Montage only asks that I label my sessions for status and reporting.
• Other apps are "polite" with easily-ignorable chimes. Montage gets in my face by yelling at me with the system text-to-speech commands every two seconds when the timer is up. I showed this to a colleague, who described it as "dystopian", but it's the dystopia I chose!
• Most other apps I've used don't expose a nice API for session control or reporting, but Montage is built around a GraphQL API and uses that for everything—there's nothing the CLI does that you can't get out of it as JSON.

By exposing a proper API, I was also able to build an OmniFocus extension so that I can just click "start task" in the app to start something. I was also able to build an xbar extension that shows my current task (or break) in the status bar. I get reports with a purpose-made command in the CLI that produces Markdown for me to copy into Obsidian. But again, it's just talking to the API so I have the flexibility to produce information about my workdays in any format I want.

I'm pretty happy with Montage so far, and I also have plenty of ideas for more things it should do! For example, it doesn't have any opinion on how long you should work before being reminded to take a break. I'm planning to build that in as a configurable thing in "vex" (the subcommand that talks to me with TTS.) I'd also like Raycast and Obsidian extensions. At some point it may also make sense to build a GUI or an app, but for now I'm not too bothered by occasionally having to open up the SQLite database for some manual changes.

Anyway, like it says in the README, go ahead and give this a shot if it seems interesting to you and you're OK with being called "Brian" by a computer every 25 minutes!