DROE Tool 0.5 Alpha01
As promised, here is an update to the DROE Tool. I am calling this an alpha release since there may still be some rough edges, and this includes only about half the list of planned fixes and improvements. Here is the summary of what is included in 0.5 alpha 01:
- Hopefully fixed all compatibility issues with OneNote 2010 and Outlook 2010, including launching the DROE page, and using the “Quick Cat” hotkey to open categories dialog box. Users must specify the 2010 versions of these apps in the INI file.
- MAJOR NEW FEATURE: TEA encryption… Users can quickly encrypt & decrypt selected text in place in any edit window with WIN-SHIFT-e and WIN-SHIFT-d. Thank you to Laszlo and tic for their code in the AHK forums that became the basis of this version.
- MAJOR NEW FEATURE: Hotkey definitions can now be completely customized via the newly added DROE_Hotkeys.INI file
- MAJOR NEW FEATURE: The tool now has separate hotkeys for creating standard vs. PigPog Outlook tasks. Both are accessible from anywhere: CTRL-SHIFT-k for a standard/blank task, and CTRL-SHIFT-p for a PigPog/Project task. Users can also modify PigPogTemplate.TXT to customize what goes into the PigPog task.
- Renamed the INI files to clearly separate the Settings and Hotkeys. Since there are some format changes to the Settings INI, users should start with the new INI file versions and customize as needed.
- DROE Capture window (for Text and Evernote modes) now has customizable width/height and can be made non-modal via the INI file.
- Overhauled the Bullets feature to allow for customizable bullet text, bullet count, and indent level. Added option to use a numbered list instead of bullets.
- Hopefully fixed the timeout issues that a few users reported, and added the Base_Wait_Time parameter to the INI file which allows users to tweak the timing. Most users should not need to touch this setting.
- Fixed bug where CTRL+ENTER on the numeric keyboard did not submit the DROE capture window
Known Issues (add comments below if you find more):
- The Office clipboard seems to interfere with some of the DROE Tool functions. Recommend partially disabling it… Or leave it fully engaged and let me know what issues you have
- If the cursor ends up in the wrong field on the Outlook Task window, it can be messy when the PigPog template contents are sent. I have seen this happen a few times.
- The DROE Tool still assumes that Office 2010 is installed in English when checking for window titles. This may result in some false timeouts being reported.
The documentation is not yet updated, but much of the guidance in the previous README file still applies. Once the alpha releases are all done and the tool stabelizes again, I’ll update the documentation.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
DOWNLOAD HERE: DROE Tool 0.5 Alpha01
– Carl
Updated DROE Tool In the Works
November 27, 2010 - 9:04 am
Tags: DROE_Tool
Posted in Productivity | 2 comments
I am finally working on a major update to the DROE Tool (stealing time over the holiday weekend). I hope to have an alpha test version posted within the coming week. I have already fixed the compatibility issue with OneNote 2010, and am working on some other enhancements such as configurable hotkey definitions.
I have pulled [...]
DROE Tool now supports EverNote, and much more!
July 15, 2008 - 9:04 pm
Tags: DROE_Tool, EverNote, OneNote, Outlook, Productivity, Tools
Posted in Productivity | 74 comments
I just released a new version of the Daily Record of Events (DROE) note taking tool. This release adds support for EverNote and text-based DROE files, as well as enhancements for the OneNote DROE.
From the README file, here is a summary of what changed in v0.4 (Beta). For complete details, download the README [...]
DROE Tool Now Supports Outlook
January 21, 2008 - 1:41 am
Tags: AutoHotkey, DROE_Tool, OneNote, Outlook, Productivity, Tools
Posted in Productivity | 30 comments
I just posted an update to my Daily Record of Events (DROE) Tool, please check out the Downloads page. Version 0.3 adds some additional shortcuts for fast Outlook task and message creation, as well as easy creation of PigPog tasks. (Note that the Outlook shortcuts have only been tested on Outlook 2003). [...]
DROE Tool Update
December 28, 2007 - 10:18 pm
Tags: DROE_Tool, OneNote, Productivity, Tools
Posted in Productivity | 15 comments
I posted a minor update to the DROE Tool, now at version 0.2 (Beta). There are three changes in this release:
The download now includes a detailed README file with installation/upgrade instructions, screen shots, and troubleshooting tips.
The check to make sure that the OneNote DROE page successfully opened is now case insensitive, so it’s a [...]
OneNote DROE AutoHotkey Tool
December 12, 2007 - 1:33 am
Tags: AutoHotkey, DROE_Tool, Tools
Posted in Productivity | 69 comments
As promised in my previous post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“, here is the tool I use to drive my DROE (Daily Record of Events) in OneNote. This is a configurable tool built using AutoHotkey. Note that the tool is a compiled executable, so you do not need [...]
Comments are closed.
December 4, 2010 - 4:56 pm
thanks thanks thanks…
December 5, 2010 - 7:43 am
how do i turn off the clipboard. issues are it works for a bit then if i copy and paste anywhere from within the @DOING section it stops working and #n makes a new note again at the bottom of the doing section. i have to stop DROE process in taskmanager and restart for it to work again
December 5, 2010 - 12:23 pm
Hi Cito -
Thanks for trying this out… To adjust your Office 2010 Clipboard settings, open Excel, Word or PowerPoint and select the “Home” tab. You can also start a new message in Outlook and select the “Message” tab. In the “Clipboard” section, click the small arrow in the bottom right corner to open the Clipboard pane. Click the options button at the bottom of that pane. I left the last option checked, which is “Show status near task bar when copying”. I have all of the other options UN-checked. Please let me know if this solves your problem.
One additional question: Do you have “Clip_Mode” enabled in the DROE_Settings.INI file? Does it make any difference if you change this setting? If this setting is turned off, can you leave the Office Clipboard on?
Sorry for the last question, but I’m not able to reproduce this.
Thanks!
Carl
December 6, 2010 - 5:43 pm
Hey there. I tried it out with Clip_Mode disabled (0) and Office clipboard taskbar enabled and it crashed… it was different, it showed me that DROE tool had crashed as opposed to just crashing.
i am going to leave it with office clipboard disabled and Clip_Mode in DROE enabled… seems to work great.
December 6, 2010 - 10:55 pm
Cito – That’s strange, I’m not able to make it crash (yet). Can you tell me a little more? What were you doing when the app crashed? What message did you see?
Thanks,
Carl
December 7, 2010 - 6:26 am
Hi Carl.
running win7 64 bit, office 2010 64 bit and 32 bit (tried on both desktop and laptop)…I have office clipboard activated (both bottom boxes checked). If i try to copy something (image or text from a page in @DOING section (other than the DROE page) and paste it into DROE page a quick little office clipboard looking window pops up and goes away and DROE.exe disappears from processes in task manager and i have to restart all office programs and your program.
On 32 bit Win7, office 2010 32bit I tried enabling the office clipboard and put your setting of Clip_Mode to zero. When i tried the same thing I got the windows 7 warning that DROE.exe had quit working should I notify Windows, restart the program, etc… i just restarted droe.exe and it worked again until i try to copy as described before. All problems stop when i uncheck the two bottom boxes of the option in clipboard of word2010. I am also running synergy mouse/keyboard sharing on desktop and laptop and have onenote2010 running on three computers with the @DOING section on my laptop being the “home” page for all three instances of onenote. the third computer is a tablet in my work shop so i can access my notes and use DROE there as well. i just have to be careful not to draw images with tablet to close to top of page. everything is working for now. hope this helped. you can contact me directly through contactus at moonshineracers.com if you want screenshots. thanks for all.
December 7, 2010 - 6:32 am
oh yeah… on windows7 64bit, office2010 32 bit (my laptop) when the error happens, droe.exe remains in taks manager and i have to stop process and restart it. i think thats it.
December 7, 2010 - 7:13 am
Excellent information, thank you for the details! I’ll have to do some more investigation. I will let you know what I find out. There may be some impact from the new AutoHotkey compiler I am using, but I’m not sure yet.
Thanks,
Carl
December 6, 2010 - 4:49 am
Hi Carl. i did not have the third “show clipboard on taskbar” unchecked. i have unchecked it and it all seems to be working. i will try to break it and run all options regarding the clipboard and the Clip-Mode and let you know. i now have the DROE page open on my second monitor attached to the right and i can just drag from there to the correct place in onenote,outlook, web app, dreamweaver, whatever. thanks for keeping this tool alive. i was using a run command script to add a new page to @DOING section which works, but i just love having it all in one page! greetings.
December 9, 2010 - 3:42 pm
Hi there Carl. everything has been working great unless i have text selected in outlook message in preview mode. i was hoping it would just start a new DROE entry with that text in it, however it crashed DROE (not in task manager) and opened up a new blank onenote page in @DOING. I chose in message options not to give choice of paste method hoping it would disengage the clipboard somehow. after closing down onenote and outlook and restarting DROE tool, it worked just fine.
December 6, 2010 - 9:50 am
Does this still work with Outlook 2003? (Not my fault that that the powers-that-be haven’t updated yet…)
December 6, 2010 - 10:53 pm
Danny – This should still work just fine with Outlook 2003 and OneNote 2007. In most cases, the code that interfaces with those applications was not modified. Unfortunately I no longer have access to Outlook 2003 or OneNote 2007. If you run into any problems, please post a comment.
Thanks,
Carl
December 7, 2010 - 11:50 pm
Thank you very much. I have been waiting for your updating.
December 9, 2010 - 6:20 pm
Hey there again. i had a thought about my tablet that doesn’t have a keyboard. a shortcut button for the make new DROE entry would be helpful. i have used autohotkey before. is there a way to get a button to click on to open up the DROE note? let me know if i am going too crazy with this, i just really love your whole GTD implementation. it has turned my life around.
December 10, 2010 - 12:44 am
Cito –
If I understand your idea, I think you just want to have a small floating UI with one or two buttons on it. Clicking those buttons would transmit a WIN+N or WIN+SHIFT+N key combination (and trigger the DROE Tool). On the AutoHotkey Download page there is a tool called SmartGUI Creator that you could use to make this I think. Of course I have no idea how compatible your tablet is with AutoHotkey.
Did I understand your question correctly?
-Carl
December 10, 2010 - 2:10 am
i have autohotkey running on my laptop, not my tablet. i tried running the smartgui and it kept crashing on my win7 64bit laptop. plus its too late and i couldn’t really pay attention to it. i will try again this weekend. yes, i would love to just have a button that triggers win+N so i can hand write something in with the date stamped in the DROE page. thanks again.
January 2, 2011 - 2:07 am
Nice tool!
I test .05 alpha – and would be glad, if you can check if this is possible in OneNote 2010:
An option not to make always a new entry in the DROE-Note but always make an new page in a defined (per onenote-link) section. This would fit my gtd-routine more then making all entries in one page
I can’t use the pigpog. There is always opening a blank task with ^p. How do i have to set it up – or is this a known issue with outlook 2010 (german) version?!
Thanks for your great work so long!
January 17, 2011 - 9:54 pm
Hi Tobias –
You can have every new note appear as its own page in the same section in OneNote *without* the DROE Tool. This is what the “Side Note” feature does in OneNote. If you want to customize where those notes go (instead of the Unfiled notes section), there are some setup tips here.
If you still want to use some of the other DROE Tool features, you can disable the DROE note taking feature by setting DROE_Enable = 0 in the INI file. Then you can use the other DROE Tool hotkeys, but the WIN + N hotkey will revert to being the OneNote Side Note.
For the PigPog task, the issue is that your window titles are in a different language. The DROE Tool waits for the task window to appear before it sends the PigPog text. It is look for a window with a specific title (in English). Sorry, this is on the list of issues to fix.
Hope that helps.
-Carl
February 17, 2011 - 7:50 am
Hi Carl… I have installed DROE and am trying to get it to work with Evernote. I am a bit stumped with this comment in the .ini:
[EverNote_DROE_Settings]
;Update to match your exact path. Spaces are okay, but do not use quotes. Must end in a backslash.
EN_Path = C:\Users\Tom Murphy\Desktop\DROE\
I am not sure what path you are looking for. As above I tried the folder on my desktop that is set to Auto Import but it does not seem to work.
When I hit WIN -left arrow I get the DROW tool box… but when I hit WIN -n it just goes to a file on the desktop that starts with the letter N. Occasionally… and I am not sure how I caused this to happen, it opens a text box, but when I CNTL ENTER it just puts that text onto the desktop as a .txt file. But I can not get WIN -n to do this consistently.
Suggestions please.
February 18, 2011 - 12:14 am
Tom –
The path should be an Auto Import folder that you set up in Evernote. The DROE Tool will simply write text files into that folder and let Evernote pull them in.
What setting do you have for DROE_Enable? For Evernote, you should use DROE_Enable = 3.
Also, what version of the DROE Tool are you using, and what version of Evernote are you using? Does reverting back to DROE Tool version 0.4.1 fix the problem for you?
-Carl
September 8, 2011 - 10:06 pm
I used the Alpha version with Onenote 2007. When I use WIN+Shift+n I get the following message:
Cannot find c:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\DROE\DROE.txt
I can open OneNote manually and checked the path to the executable file using Start>run>Path and it works that way too.
What am I doing wrong?
December 23, 2011 - 6:54 pm
Hi Myra – Sorry for the extremely slow reply! It sounds like you have the DROE Tool set up to run in text mode instead of OneNote mode. You need to go into the INI file and change DROE_Enable to a value of 1 and also set up your parameters in the “OneNote_DROE_Settings” section.
-Carl
September 23, 2011 - 2:28 am
I’d love two things from this tool… the ability to paste screen shots using win+n without it being an attachment and also to reverse the order.
any chance of ini edits that would achieve this?
December 24, 2011 - 11:21 am
Hi Megan – By “reverse the order” I assume you mean appending new notes to the bottom of the page instead of placing them at the top? Unfortunately there is no way to do that with the current version of the tool. The pasting as attachment vs. embedded picture would also require tool changes. I can add these to the list for future enhancements.
-Carl
December 27, 2011 - 4:03 pm
Yep, that’s what I meant – would be awesome to have those in a future version. Thanks
November 15, 2011 - 7:10 am
Carl,
Thanks for this wonderful tool. Been experimenting this out for a while. Partner this with TOMBO (windows), dropbox + mininoteviewer (Android), I have a capture tool on the go.
However i have a small problem on the file encoding. By using your tool to capture, i find out the txt file will be encoded in ANSI.
All my txt notes are in UTF-8 encoding. I use this because I also type Chinese Characters in my notes and TOMBO supports UTF-8 which i find is perfect for chinese.
So, is it possible to use your tool and save as UTF-8 encoding? This will saves me headache of file conversion everytime i use DROE.
If you have any suggestions, I would really appreciate to hear them.
Thank you very much
regards,
MOK
December 24, 2011 - 11:33 am
Hi MOK –
Thanks for your comments! Right now the file encoding setting is null in the DROE tool, which should cause it to use the system default encoding. It looks like that is not happening for some reason. In a future version I can add a switch in the INI file to allow users to force a particular file encoding. Thanks for pointing this out.
-Carl
January 2, 2012 - 12:51 pm
Running on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
With UAC turned on the program crashes immediately on #N.
My guess is that it does not have access to the .ini file without admin permissions and crashes.
I moved the install outside of program files where admin permissions are not required and it works fine.
Perhaps you can add a check for file permissions and pop an error window instead of crashing.
January 2, 2012 - 12:52 pm
Also,
#
have meaning in Windows 7 and are pretty useful out of the box.. Perhaps you should change the default hotkeys to include shift.
January 2, 2012 - 12:54 pm
Hmm, busted by xml comment tags.
#Left and #Right have meaning in Windows 7. Perhaps the default for DROE should be changed.
January 2, 2012 - 1:19 pm
I am trying to add a linefeed to my date string (I want —- before my entry and after my entry).
The instructions for autohotkey suggest using a `n for a linefeed but that’s not working:
http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/commands/FormatTime.htm
Would you consider a new variable for text that should be placed at the end of an entry?
January 2, 2012 - 1:29 pm
New HotKey Suggestion:
#x – Cut selection to new DROE entry
May 25, 2012 - 8:36 am
Love the tool.