May 13, 2006
This is a program for Mac users of Life Balance, a cool, sophisticated "To Do" list manager from Llamagraphics.
As much as I've come to appreciate this program, there are still some things I wish it did differently/better. One of them, as first pointed out to be my a two-year old post in one of their support forums, is "AutoSave." If you just leave it open and use it, you accumulate unsaved changes, and if the system crashes or freezes, then you lose them. Horrible!
Life Balance AutoAssist is a little application that I wrote that provides automatic periodic saves to Life Balance. It does some other things as well:
Life Balance for the Macintosh, of course. LBAA was developed with Life Balance 3.2.6, but it should work with some of the earlier versions as well.
Once you've placed a copy of Life Balance AutoAssist somewhere on your hard drive, you can launch it, click the "Install" button, pick the features you want to have, hit "Done", and forget about it.
You don't have to click Install. If you don't, then it will only do its tricks until you log out or shut down your computer. In order for it to auto-save or auto-anything, it has to be running. If you install it, then it will always start up when you start up your computer.
The current version of Life Balance has very limited AppleScript support. However, one of the commands it does understand is "close," which causes it to close a Life Balance document. The Close command also allows for "with save," "without save," or "ask the user."
LBAA (if/when you click its Install button) puts itself in your Startup Items list, so that whenever you log into your computer, it gets run automatically. If you've selected AutoLaunch, it in turn starts up Life Balance.
At the interval you select, it checks to see if LB is the frontmost application. If it is not, then it tells LB to save and close the current document(s). Then it tells LB to open those same documents right back up again. If LB supported a plain "Save" command, I'd use that, but it doesn't, so I have to do the close, then open sequence instead.
At logout/shutdown, LBAA sends another "save & close, then open" command to LB, then follows that immediately with a "Quit" command. Since the current LB document is already saved, LB doesn't ask if you want to save it, so it just quietly quits. LBAA itself then quits as well, which lets the system complete the shut down without hinderance. Why save, close, then open the doc again right before quitting? Because next time LB starts, it will automatically open whatever was open the last time it quit. If LBAA told LB to save&close, then quit, then next time LB started up, it would open with a new default To Do list, not the one you've been using all along.
You can download it as a disk image.
This application is an original work by Dave Howell, and is copyright 2006. I grant individuals the right to use this application at no charge and distribute this application without profit. Permission is expressly granted to Llamagraphics, Inc. (the creators of the Life Balance program) to distribute this file from their web site and/or with Life Balance. Other organizations (including but not limited to shareware web sites) must either distribute just a link to my site or contact me for permission to distribute the program itself.
The Life Balance program, "Life Balance," the Life Balance icon artwork, and other associated trade dress are trademark and/or copyright Llamagraphics, Inc.
If you find this script useful or handy, all I ask is that you take the time to drop me an email and say so. The more feedback I get (even negative feedback, to a certain degree) the more motivation I have to prepare some of my other scripts for posting, after all. Thanks.