At the heart of FlexTime's functionality is a cueing mechanism that allows arbitrary actions to take place over the course of your routine. FlexTime gives you flexibility in determining not only when cues will be triggered, but what kind of action the cue should perform. The possible cue actions can be viewed by clicking the first popup menu for any of the starting, finishing, or interval cues of a given activity:
The following paragraphs give a brief description of each action type.
FlexTime is good at actions, but it's also good at doing nothing. This action is selected as the default for finishing and interval cues. Whenever you want to disable a particular cue, set the value to this.
One of the the simplest cue actions, this plays a selected sound from your "system beep" sounds collection. To add a custom sound to this list, simply copy an audio file to the "Sounds" folder inside the "Library" folder of your home in the Finder.
Sounds are played until they finish, until the time for the designated activity elapses, or until another cue is reached. For example if a long song is started as a starting cue for an activity, then a recurring intervals cue of a short beep would cause the long song to stop playing.
This is the power-user's action type. For everything that FlexTime doesn't support "out of the box," here's your opportunity to make a custom cue type that behaves exactly as you desire. Scripted cues can be used to do everything from emptying the trash to opening a web page in Safari. See the Scripting Support help section for more information on scripting and FlexTime.
A somewhat hidden feature of the "Run Script" action is that it can accept almost any type of file as a parameter. Use the Run Script action to open applications, run automator workflows, or execute shell scripts. It also opens documents!
FlexTime features a built-in system-wide text display mechanism, allowing an attractive yet unignorable message to present itself in the center of the screen:
Text displays remain visible until they are clicked, until the current cue changes, or in the special case of finishing cues, until a few seconds after they are presented. For scripted cues, FlexTime exposes a command which can be used to show text at a variety of screen locations, and with a configurable auto-dismissal time.
FlexTime's speech actions behave essentially like "Play Sound" cues, but allow the sound to be generated by Apple's built-in text-to-speech generator. To change the sound of the voice, edit your default settings in the Speech panel of System Preferences.