Lately I am using Remember the Milk (RTM) more and more to keep track of all my tasks, and I am looking forward to writing a blog post about what I think is a great way of using it day to day – I will continue fine tuning the process first however.
For now I thought I would share how to set things up for rapid task entry. Remember the Milk has a nice stripped down entry page you can access to add tasks, the URL to this can be found here: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/addtask.rtm
It would be nice though to have this appear as a small popup in the middle of your screen, launched through a keyboard shortcut such as CTL-ALT-T to pop the following window up:
I found the best way to do this is to make use of the Chrome Application feature as I talked about in my last post, associate a keyboard shortcut to it through the windows shortcut and optionally do some trickery to get the window size right.
Just follow the steps below:
- Browse to http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/addtask.rtm in Chrome and create a Chrome application shortcut by clicking on the wrench->Tools-"Create application shortcuts".
- On the next screen, choose where you want the shortcuts to be placed.
- Find a new shortcut created, right click->Properties, assign a keyboard shortcut such as CTL-ALT-T as in the screen shot below:
And you are done.
Note that if on Vista, the keyboard shortcut key will not work if you set it on the quick launch bar shortcut.
Optional Window Size Adjustment
At the moment Chrome does not seem to remember window positions of chrome applications so I have opted to follow the approach of Eddie in his article here to size the window appropriately.
Essentially you are changing the –app part in your target field in the shortcut from:
C:\Users\HamishG\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --app="http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/addtask.rtm"
To something like this:
C:\Users\HamishG\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --app="C:\Users\HamishG\Desktop\Dropbox\RTMAdd.htm"
Where RTMAdd.htm is a file with the following contents - I have extended the javascript logic a bit however so the window will always centre on the screen no matter the resolution:
<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript">
var width=500;
var height=300;
window.resizeTo(width,height);
window.moveTo((window.screen.width/2)-(width/2),(window.screen.height/2)-(height/2));
window.location = "http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/addtask.rtm";
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Please enable javascript.</h1>
</body>
</html>
Hope this is useful,
Hamish