Date stamp

[Lance]

A feature I'd love to see in the user notes is the option of a date stamp added to each note. It may be a pipe dream, a mega-task or just plain unrealistic! But here it is for what it may be worth.

 

Rationale: User notes often flow out of a person's devotional life, even if their content is of an exegetical character. Hence they are a sort of personal journal, apart from their study or ministry value. Being able to date these notes would be a useful aid in tracking the flow of one's thoughts, insights and discoveries.

 

These are my practical thoughts:

 

[Joe Weaks]

Lance,

Here's a start. I just put this little script together for you to drop into your scripts menu. It puts a Date stamp in whatever current text field you are typing in.

http://stuwww.tcu.edu/~jweaks/files/T-DStamp.zip

 

You don't even have to have an edit screen open. Just put your cursor into the user tool where you want the stamp and then select the script from the script menu and it'll open up a new edit menu and put in the Date.

It works in any app, but probably only in OSX 10.3+, and you have to enable "Enable access for assistive devices" in the Keyboard panel of the Universal Access System Preference pane.

 

I'd put it into a sleeker Automater action or Widget except that I don't have Tiger.

[Lance]

Lance,

Here's a start. I just put this little script together for you to drop into your scripts menu. [snip]

 

 

Wow - thanks, Joe! As easy as that? I'll certainly try it out. A great start towards what I'd like anyway.

[Mick Matousek]

DateStamping is a common need inside and outside of documents (i.e. file names). One of the easiest and FREEware solutions is Textpander. It works everywhere. It will expand any text, special characters, including date and time chunks, and pictures. It does require at least 10.3.9

[Joe Weaks]

Textpander is a great utility. Lot's of folks live by it, as well as Peter's launcher utility Butler. There are a hundred ways to skin this cat of getting a quick and easy Date stamp into a text box. Textpander is a little overkill to always have running if that's all you're interested in. The nice thing about the script solution is it's just an easy menu option for only whenever you want it. The format can easily be changed.

Textpander is a great autocomplete utility for folks to look into though. Butler's superior, Quicksilver, can also accomplish this and more than you can possibly imagine as well.

[Mick Matousek]

Nice product review: Textpander Review

[Lance]

I'd like to revive this old topic of mine, where we are now in the development process.

 

Two thoughts now:

 

1. The earlier discussion focussed on using an external script or utility to add a date / time stamp when desired by the user. I now have Typinator running on my system. It's a similar kind of thing to TextPander. It's meant to be functional in any application, which I'm finding to be so - except ... I'm finding I can't apply Typinator's shortcuts in Accordance. (Not in user notes anyway - haven't tried anywhere else.) What I end up with if I try to drop the date into a user note with Typinator is the digit "2" on it's own! This is the only app I've discovered that doesn't play with Typinator. (So a bug perhaps ... ?)

 

2. A different approach to the timestamp might be for the timestamp to be attached by default to every note, but such that it's displayed by a mouseover somewhere.

 

Anyway - I would still like to see a date / timestamp for user notes somehow.