hiveminder integration with jott
Jott is a really neat service that lets you Do Stuff via your cell phone. The default Stuff you can do is “send email and SMS” and “setup a reminder.” There’s also a very simple API for writing your own applications (called Jott Links). It works something like this:
- you call the toll-free Jott number
- you speak the name of the Jott Link you’ve set up
- you speak a message
- Jott issues a web request with data including your id and the message
- the service does something and replies to Jott
- Jott sends you a reply
There are Jott Links for Twitter and other things that I don’t care about. There isn’t one for Hiveminder. Zak Greant made a video demonstrating Hiveminder and Jott together, which has Jott send mail to the task-by-email interface of Hiveminder. This isn’t bad at all, but it puts all kinds of crap into your task, because Jott sends pretty chatty email.
I wrote a Jott Link service in about ten minutes (much of which was test time, waiting for Jott to transcribe my messages). It uses CGI.pm and Net::Hiveminder to create a very concise task. I need to add more features to it, but I’m in no rush. I am secretly hoping that the guys at Best Practical will write a much better version, complete with a user setup link, so that everyone can use their link, rather than running his own, each on a different server.
Here’s my code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
BEGIN { $ENV{HOME} = '/home/rjbs' }
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Net::Hiveminder;
my ($pw, $key) = `cat /home/rjbs/.hiveminder`;
chomp($pw, $key);
my $hm = Net::Hiveminder->new(
email => 'user@example.com',
password => $pw,
);
my $user_key = url_param('userKey');
my $message = url_param('message');
die unless lc $user_key eq lc $key;
$hm->create_task("$message\n via Jott.com");
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\nCreated.";
Obviously, this is a horrible hack. Still, it means I can open my phone, hold down 5, and dictate todo items right into Hiveminder.
There are a lot of little problems with Jott, some of which strike me as significant usability issues, but they’re all very fixable, and I look forward to seeing them fixed. I’ll write more about them later. Here’s the one that irked me the most last night: Jott says that to write a Jott Link, you should expect an HTTP POST. You do, in fact, get a POST, but all of the data is in the URL query string, not in the content of the request. Huh?
Well, whatever. All their problems are fixable, and the service looks like it will be great.