CherryTomato Beta

By Kristian | Published: September 29, 2012

I know, “beta” is kind of a strange tag as CherryTomato was already out and it was version 0.4. However, this version is a complete rewrite because I needed it for OS X. It still works on Windows though, but with a quite different user interface. The new UI is in its infancy so I recommend the beta only if you are curious. That said, I would love feedback.
Beta

This version uses different names for config and database files. This is to make sure you don’t loose your old data as the new version has a different model. It does have the ability to migrate it but I wanted that to be a manual process to make sure you only do that if you mean it.

Get it from www.beatpoints.com/cherrytomato

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CherryTomato in Mono

By Kristian | Published: July 12, 2012

I received an email a few days ago from the Pomodoro Technique® legal department, informing me that I was infringing on their trademarks. The icon looks too much like their logo and it’s not clear that CherryTomato is not an official Pomodoro Technique® tool.
Well it will be so even less now. 25 minutes might work really well for some things but time boxing can be more than that. For instance, John Cleese recommends you set aside 90 minutes for creative reflection now and then. You should watch this talk talk not just for the content which is great, but also for a demonstration of how to engage an audience with humour and insight:

John Cleese – a lecture on Creativity from janalleman on Vimeo.

I have been on OSX for about a year now. As CherryTomato is written in C#, I decided to take a look at Mono and try porting CherryTomato. I ran into a bunch of challenges and decided to start from scratch instead and as you might know, it has taken me much longer than I initially anticipated. I have been using CT myself for a while now and it seems to be close to ready for a beta that runs both on Windows and OSX.

Posted in CherryTomato, Mono, Productivity | 4 Comments

Runtime Assembler for C++

By Kristian | Published: April 26, 2012

rtasm is a project i made in 2005 for university. It’s a runtime assembler for C++ that allows you to write code that is assembled at the very last minute. This allows you to write generic code with conditions that still performs incredibly well because they can be evaluated before loops with deep context knowledge.

I haven’t been working on the project for a long time but I thought it was a waste to have the code just sitting on my drive so in spite of two failing unit tests, I have now uploaded the source code to GitHub. Maybe at some point I will look into it again.

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12months

By Kristian | Published: December 5, 2011

After a rather tedious approval process (of my company, not the app), 12months is live in the app store.

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It is Amma’s and my Project Getaway experiment. It’s an iPad calendar that shows you the entire year in way that makes planning easy, inspired by David Seah’s Compact Calendar.

This is my first experiment with mobile (tablet apps count as “mobile”, right?) and though I have many ideas for features, I wanted to get a simple version out just to run through the process and to see if there is any interest. It has been out for three days now and has sold around 20 copies. I am really curious to see what the trend will look like in a couple of months.

Posted in 12months, Entrepreneurship, Productivity | 2 Comments

Project Getaway 2011

By Kristian | Published: September 25, 2011

I am currently in Bali, at Project Getaway 2011. It’s three days in and I am very excited. Everybody here is awesome and I can already feel entrepreneurship and inspiration in the air.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Sun, Sand and Startups, Travel | 4 Comments

The Story of a Bootstrapped Startup..

By Kristian | Published: September 5, 2011

This is my talk about Minimum Noise at Sun, Sand and Startups in Barcelona 2011.

Some people have asked me about the restructuring we did of the landing page.
One of the articles that were inspirational in that regard was this one: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/ — I highly recommend it.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Sun, Sand and Startups | 1 Comment

Shower Whiteboard

By Kristian | Published: August 15, 2011

If there is one thing we’ve learned from stock photography, it’s that windows make good white boards — especially for flow charts.

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..well that, and that thinking big means planting a tiny tree in a very big pot and while customer support might sound like some middle-aged Indian guy it is, in fact, a hot chick with a headset. But I digress..

I was rereading the Paul Graham essay The Top Idea in Your Mind the other day. PG asserts that the one thing that occupies you the most is the thing you are going to think of in the shower which I generally find to be true. This spawns all kinds of little ideas and I realized that I tend to forget these, like dreams. You know there was something, but it’s just not very clear what is was. As I just moved into a new flat where there is a large glass wall in the shower, I decided to buy whiteboard markers for it. It’s geeky, yes, but I am quite excited about it.

There is a risk, I guess, that this is too structured and can have a negative impact on the free flowing kind of thought but that doesn’t seem to be happening. You get one “file” per shower. You can erase something with the water but then the wall is wet and useless. This limitation seems perfect for keeping you in brainstorming mode.

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Portable Safe

By Kristian | Published: May 1, 2011


I purchased a portable safe, the Pacsafe Travelsafe 12L.

It is a canvas bag with an integrated steel mesh. This makes it light while still protecting it from knives and simple tools. Yes, it can be broken into if someone really wants to but it provides good protection against the thief who is quickly scanning for something to pick up.

When traveling I mostly stay in hotels that have in-room deposit boxes but sometimes they don’t and sometimes they do but they are not big enough to contain my laptop. It’s really, really annoying to have to carry my laptop around with me all the time so I thought this might make a good solution. It seems very rugged and yet not too heavy. I am comfortable locking this thing up in a hotel room. It comes even more in handy as the I have the MacBook Air which doesn’t have a Kensington lock port. The 12 liter version has plenty of space for my laptop and other items such an SLR but it still fits into a backpack.
I am very happy with this gadget. I think it has just become a part of my permanent traveling kit – something very few products do.

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CherryTomato 0.5 Is Out

By Kristian | Published: February 15, 2011

CherryTomato version 0.5 is now out.

In terms of features, this is a small release. But in terms of internal architecture, lots have changed. This is the first release after it was open sourced. Most of this release was contributed by Kore Sar – many thanks!
Some of the changes that you will notice are in the evaluation dialog – you can select the tasks that you consider productive and have a suggested rating from that (along with an indication of when during the 25 minutes this took place).
The reminders system has been developed quite a bit – you can now add an “after pomodoro reminder” that will always remind you after x minutes. Though there aren’t many other features yet, the system is quite extendable so you can expect more reminder types and features in the future.

Also, included in this version is a plugin for this USB lamp that will go red when you are in pomodoro. Works great if the person next to you doesn’t have you on Skype and doesn’t know if it’s safe to disturb you :-)

Posted in CherryTomato, Productivity | 3 Comments

CherryTomato is Open Source

By Kristian | Published: October 31, 2010
CherryTomato is open source. I put it on Google Code a while ago but I didn’t want to make too much fuzz about it because I hadn’t tried to build it on another machine and generally wasn’t too happy with the state of the code. That hasn’t changed :-)
However, I decided to announce it now and let you try it out if you want. Many people have asked me to make it open source – it will be fun to see if anybody actually wants to contribute. I have a number of plans for it as I have stated here from time to time, but as it is not my highest priority I only put in a few batches of work every now and then.
So if you are interested, go to code.google.com/p/cherrytomato and get the source.
Posted in CherryTomato, Productivity | 6 Comments