Managing repeating events?

[Skids]

Hi,
Having just discovered that I failed to renew my home insurance last year I have decided that I need a method of managing repeating contracts such as repeating annual insurances and car inspections. My failings could be a sign of age or just of life getting more complex.

My initial thoughts are that I would like to be able to start my computer, run a script or application and have a list of items that require action in the next four weeks displayed. I would also like a second script that lists all those items that are live (paid for) along with their time before renewal.

I wonder if Bike can be used with AppleScript to take on the role of managing repeating events? Do dates have any special meaning in Bike or are they just text?

Should I use TaskPaper instead ?

I’m not looking for a complex solution just an idea of the capabilities of Bike.

best wishes
Simon

[Skids]

Having read a little more about Bike I think that a record type approach might work. The outline will have three top levels e.g. “Expired!”, “Current”, “Action Required”. An items are entered in a semi structured way e.g. :

Home Insurance

Valid From 01/03/2023
Valid To 01/03/2024
Cost £350
Notes

Price has risen by 10% again!

Is it possible for an Applescript in Bike to extract the date in the line “Valid To” compare it with the present date and move the complete record between the top most three levels; moving overdue items to Expired!!, items due in a month to “Action Required” e.t.c ?

best wishes
Simon

[complexpoint]

@Skids

take on the role of managing repeating events

Just a personal view:

Bike is clearly a good medium in which to read a report on events now due,
but I would tend to delegate the chronometry to an external engine.

Perhaps a date-triggered Keyboard Maestro macro which adds a “due now” report to a Bike file ?

---

Longer term, my understanding is that Bike may acquire style sheets – allowing formats dependent on attribute values.

That may enable a pattern which is currently possible in TaskPaper with date-valued tags and some help from Keyboard Maestro or Hazel – colors indicating how close a date is getting:

Change task style on due date

Rough sketch, using Keyboard Maestro to periodically trigger an update of a stylesheet called Dated.less Updated TaskPaper LESS (styling based on relative values of @due dates).kmmacros.zip (5.9 KB) Window > Stylesheet [Screenshot 2022-03-31 at 16.32.41] Every N seconds (or minutes or hours, depending on the macro settings) (Here – for testing – every 10 seconds, which is probably much too frequent) [Screenshot 2022-03-31 at 16.34.11] Dated.less is written out afresh at each timed update …

[jessegrosjean]

@Skids

I wonder if Bike can be used with AppleScript to take on the role of managing repeating events? Do dates have any special meaning in Bike or are they just text?

I think yes it could… but probably shouldn’t right now. You’ll spend a lot of time working on scripts to accomplish what comes for free with a Calendar app.

If were did want to see those tasks in Bike in addition to the Calendar/Reminder app an “import” script might be fun to try. That would:

1. You create your repeating tasks in Apple’s Reminders app
2. Create a sync script that imports those reminders into Bike.
3. Use ids to associate the Bike row with Reminder