Well, I spent a lot of today putting together the application I mentioned in my recent rant.

The program is called “Hector’s Reminder Service”. Basically it’s a taskbar reminder app. You specify a random lists of messages and their approximate frequency. It gives a little notification message (not a popup window!) on the task bar showing one of those messages about that often. You can configure as many different groups of messages as you like and they’ll be scheduled independently.

The code is available here. It’s GPLed, mostly because it depends on QT and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out the ramifications. Anything I consider reusable will be factored out into a library and released under a more moderate license. I have a few more things to sort out with it (mainly packaging) and will then release a version 0.1 of it.

Currently there’s no packaging system set up. If you want to build this you’ll need QT Jambi installed – both for the user interface file compiler and for the native libraries. It’s currently untested on anything except windows, but now that I’ve given up on Swing and switched to QT I expect it should by and large work on OSX or any X-windows setup with a compliant toolbar. No doubt there will be problems, but they should be surmountable. Give me a shout if you do want to build it and discover it doesn’t work on your platform. I’ll do my best to help.

Edit: Actually, unless you’re feeling brave you probably don’t want to build this. It depends on having Scala 2.7 and jerbil installed as well as the QT Jambi libraries. You can download a prebuilt version from http://hectorreminder.googlecode.com/files/hector.zip , but you’ll still need the QT Jambi libraries installed.

Edit 2: I can confirm that Hector does work properly under linux. You need to replace the qtjambi.jar in the lib directory with the one from your jambi install (turns out that’s windows specific. Oops). Other than that he works perfectly.