MyChores
My claim to fame, if ever it could be considered as such, is conceiving and creating www.mychores.co.uk! It emails you with a list of your tasks to do each day, and when you tick them off it will calculate when they are next due. It is highly configurable.
MyChores grew out of a PHP web application that i made for myself and my partner, to keep track of our cleaning tasks. It was simply for our own use; there was no concept of teams. Scheduling tasks was very simplistic, and there was a basic activity log of what had been done. This is how the original application looked:
It crossed my mind that other people might benefit from using a web application like this. Around the same time i started hearing about Ruby on Rails and thinking i'd like to do something with it. Even so, it took several months of thinking and procrastinating before i got round to putting together the site that has now become MyChores.
MyChores has developed into the application it is today largely thanks to suggestions by the people who use it. I am very grateful for the input given by several users. It gives me such joy to see people making use of the site, and giving their feedback and ideas for improvements.
MyChores is now open source: mychores on github. Anyone can fork the repository, submit patches, or take the code and use it for their own purposes.
Acknowledgements
By no means have i developed MyChores on my own. I would like acknowledge the following people for many ideas and assistance:
- Tam for suggesting the 'forgotten password' feature.
- Aster for helping me improve the process for inviting people into teams, and suggesting the possibility of moving tasks between lists.
- Maz for suggesting rotating assignments, bulk assignments and bulk re-schedule. Maz also suggested the inclusion of task descriptions in emails.
- Jamie for suggesting customisable workload lists.
- Scott for introducing me to Twitter and suggesting the Twitter integration.
- Alexa for one-off tasks, inactive tasks, and the ability to skip tasks.
- Nat (and others) for suggesting HTML emails, and the ability to tick straight from your email.
- Nat for suggesting the ability to undo task completions, the choosing of the time of day for your emails to arrive, task importance and escalation, plus a lot of brainstorming which eventually produced the Hot map.
- Lola for suggesting the printable views and giving me a lot of feedback whilst i was developing them. Lola also suggested the Nudge feature.
- Kenneth for the idea of using Twitter for direct messaging.
- Thomas for a whole bunch of ideas for MyChores for Kids.
- Noi for suggesting iCalendar integration.
- Cheryl and Lola for encouragement with the Tips feature.
- Nye for 'delete task' in the hover menu, and for generally being a great ambassador for MyChores!
- Bill, and others, for suggesting the task template.
- Jerry for the 'Only today's tasks' filter, and for advising me on MyChores for Kids.
- Ali and Mary for drag and drop re-scheduling on the calendar page. I always intended to do it, but without their encouragement it would never have been done.
- Mat for being the first person to make an open source contribution to MyChores – for cleaning up the post-to-Twitter code!
- Derek for suggesting and implementing the option to filter the workload list to a particular team member.
This list makes me feel so happy that all these people have contributed and helped develop and shape MyChores. I couldn't have done it without all your help – thank you so much!
In addition, i should like to credit:
- Chris P, James H and Tris H for all they have taught me about Rails programming, encouraging me to become a really good programmer rather than just a mediocre Rails dabbler.
- Touchpaper Software for lots of inspiration, including coloured workload lists, task assignments, a mobile site, an email queue.
- Google Calendar for the idea for the Quick-create feature.
- Dopplr.com for inspiring me to enable OpenID authentication.
- OpenID just for being the most awesome authentication system around!