Script Kit is amazing
I’d been meaning to try out Script Kit after I’d seen it mentioned by the likes of Kent C. Dodds AND Matt Pocock on Twitter.
I had been looking at Android and WearOS to allow me to quickly start and stop my productive.io timers without having to use the web interface (which is fine, but far from optimal!). But Java development 🤢. Then I realised this is exactly the kind of thing Script Kit is for! Only on my desktop PC still, not on my watch or phone, alas.
My Script Kit scripts
Script Kit can make web requests using fetch, has a nice env API, can let you choose from lists and show desktop notifications.
Env settings
Need an environment variable? Just call the env function with the name of the key and a prompt for the user to enter it if it isn’t there: const API_KEY = env('API_KEY', 'Please enter your Productive API key').
TBH it would have been nice to give some more help text here: I’d written down how to find this value - but I can’t see a way to add that extra text. The API is beautifully simple though.
Shortcuts
Because Script Kit monitors your scripts for changes, you can add an OS-wide shortcut key by just adding a comment to the top of your script like:
// Shortcut: ctrl+alt+shift+,
Notifications
I couldn’t find mention of notifications in the docs, but I asked on Twitter and was told it existed:
notify({title: 'Timer started'}, { body: `Timer started for ${project.name}`})
Productive OpenAPI
One issue I ran into was that productive.io don’t have a javascript client or even an OpenAPI spec document to allow me to build my own! So I had to muddle through writing fetches manually 😅 with no type safety.
Productivity++
So far the most useful scripts have been to stop the current timer and start the last active one with a keyboard shortcut - so useful when I want to go for a walk and lunch, and when I get back! 🚶
The next thing I’d like to be able to do is restart a timer on any recent project - and stop the current one if there is one. The problem is that you only want to restart the timer if its the same day - so I need to do a bit of work to create new time entries based on the selected project if it was last run yesterday or before.
I’ve put my scripts in an open GitHub repo here.