MindReader Syntax Updates
Jose Miguel has made several great off-line syntax and code suggestions for MindReader that have led to several changes over the past few weeks. The morning’s new version of mindreaderNLP.mmbas has several new features:
- You can now specify any @context, ^area, resource@, or ~category using the syntax in this sentence. MindReader can usually set these automatically based on the grammar of your task and the customization of your MindReader.mmap file, but with these additions and the availability of the “m” tag for corrective mark-up, trips to the GyroQ “mra” configuration tag and the ResultsManager “edit activity” dialog may become few and far between.
- Multi-word resources, categories, contexts, and areas can be entered with a dot between the words. For example “Waiting for John.Smith†leads to Resource=â€John Smithâ€. Full names are a recommended best practice for ResultsManager, so this is a useful addition.
- The original capitalization of the resources are retained.
- If the resource is referenced as an email address, the program has the additional feature of removing the trailing domain address, so “Email John.Smith@domain.com” gets a resource of “John Smith@”.
You can follow development of the program on the Revision History page. You can quickly install the latest versions of the tags and macros using AO-Pack. If you have previously customized GyroQ or MindReader, you will need to repeat those customizations.
Entries 
Trevor said,
September 25, 2007 @ 8:17 pm
Hey AO,
Was playing with the new syntax– great stuff.
Quick question, I added an area ^Foo.Bar to a task and saw that it got a Category tag on the map for “^Foo Bar” In the Edit activity box it is listed correctly in the Areas section as Foo Bar.
My guess is that this is in place for Outlook sync (which I don’t use and have turned off in RM), but that’s just my guess.
ActivityOwner said,
September 25, 2007 @ 9:02 pm
Good observation Trevor — MindReader can’t set ResultsManager’s hidden “area” and “context” topic attributes directly, but if it puts the area and context info into the category field — coded with symbols as ^area and @context — then ResultsManager will recognize them for dashboards and it will transfer the data into the proper fields when it gets its hands on the task (e.g. with “edit activity”).
You will notice that if you save your task in “edit activity”, the ^Foo Bar disappears from the category field.
While I believe this backdoor into the hidden fields was put there for Outlook sync purposes, we are just exploiting it for our own needs.
Tom Hodgers said,
September 27, 2007 @ 7:54 pm
Hi AO,
After downloading AO-pack and installing files to MyMaps, I found that GyroQ would not start up and my MindManager 6 Pro started acting funny. I ran a corrective install from addremove programs for MindManager and it is now running more or less correctly but I receive some add-in error messages.
When trying to start GyroQ, I get the following message:
Line 0 (File “C:\ProgramFiles\Gyronix\GyroQ\GyroQ.exe”):
$s_sqNames [si_2] = $a_1 [$i_1] [1]
^ERROR
Error: Array variable has incorrect number of subscripts or subscript dimension range exceeded
I suppose I should re-install GyroQ.
Should I change any of the files downloaded with the AO-Pack?
I’m not sure these problems are to do with the AO-Pack, I haven’t used either MM or GyroQ in a week or so and did have problems with Office 2007 that I had to run a corrective install on. Could this be the problem?
Cheers,
Tom
ActivityOwner said,
September 27, 2007 @ 9:07 pm
Are you running GyroQ 1.9.4? 1.9.4 allows more tag entries than 1.9.3, so the gyroq.ini in AO-Pack.zip file is not backwardly compatible.
Tom Hodgers said,
September 28, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Thanks AO,
That was the problem. Everything working perfectly now. Don’t know how I missed the update to GyroQ 1.9.4.
I didn’t notice it on any of the RSS feeds from ActivityOwner.com.
Thanks again,
Tom
ActivityOwner said,
September 29, 2007 @ 7:06 am
Gyronix mentioned it in one of their recent Webinar announcements, but it probably should have gotten more play. It has a number of improvements with the biggest being the additional tag space. I was going to point it out in a new “Top 30 uses of GyroQ” blog post, but it only on my “someday/maybe” list at this point :-).
Rennie Schmid said,
October 2, 2007 @ 2:53 am
Thanks for a great program! It will help me improve my productivity and organisation!
I notice I can define both resource and resourceverbs with same key word. For example, I can define Counselling with to “Somebody Else” in resource, and also define it to “partner” in resourceverbs. Please explain the difference. Can I define a resourceverb to something other than “partner”.
Thanks,
Rennie
Rennie Schmid said,
October 2, 2007 @ 2:56 am
Hi again,
Could you also explain how to use the options section of the MindReader configuration map? I managed to successfully use the datedelimiter but do not know how to use the listtoggle, addstart, addblog. Example syntax will help.
Thanks,
Rennie
ActivityOwner said,
October 2, 2007 @ 11:49 pm
Hi Rennie — The “Resources” branch is somewhat obsolete with the advent of the “ResourceVerb” and “ResourceList” branches, at least in the way that I used the program. The “resources†branch was set up to look for explicit combinations of “resource verbs†and resources (e.g. “Waiting for Rennieâ€, “Talk to Rennieâ€, etc). It would default to “Somebody Else†if “Waiting for†was present without an identified resource.
Now the program is smart enough to look for the word after the “resource verb†and assign it either as either a “partner”, “waiting”, or “owe” type depending on the resourceverb. “Waiting for X” would be assigned as “X” as the resource. “I owe X” would be “X, %me%”. “Talk to X” would be “X@”.
The “options” branch is relatively new and provides a way for users to customize some of the items previously hard-coded into the program. “listtoggle” is used by some users using the “m” tag to toggle the “list” status of a task. You can change the text string used to do this in the options. “Addstart” determines if MIndReader adds a start-date of today by default to new tasks. “Addblob” 0/1 determines if MindReader should add a “blob” icon to tasks it hasn’t been able to infer the context or resource for
Chris Dixon said,
January 7, 2009 @ 6:25 am
Hi AO,
Is there a syntax for setting the Commited selection in an activity? I’ve been searching the site and the Wiki but can’t spot anything.
regards
Chris
ActivityOwner said,
January 7, 2009 @ 9:44 am
“someday” will set the icon to someday. Going the other way on a project or task is so rare I wasn’t sure there was a keyword for it :-).
The way to do it is to use the word “commitment”.
You can see other icon keywords by opening mindreader.mmap and looking at the icon main branch. You can get a list of the icon keywords from the gyroq prompt by using the lkw tag (lkw icons).
Chris Dixon said,
January 7, 2009 @ 11:33 am
Yep, thats what I needed, thanks. I’m following the route from another thread where I have an ‘Explicity Committed Next Actions’ branch. So I wanted to be able to specify that via MindReader