Aggressive Personal Assistant (APA)

Inspiration

Working from home has introduced many disadvantages to our lives. For one, we are less productive with the virtual setting place. Therefore, we have provided a solution inspired by the famous Desktop Goose (https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose). Introducing, Aggressive Personal Assistant (APA).

What it does

This “friendly” reminder program provides aggressive notifications for user inputted tasks. It will only go away when the user confirms they have completed the task. Otherwise the snooze button will continuously cycle through random desktop popups accompanied by an adorable cherry.

How we built it

The primary language for this project is Python. We also included database querying options to go through reminders in SQLite.

Challenges we ran into

The original intention was to use a much simpler scripting language known as AutoHotKey. However it had proved to contain many limitations, such as the GUI was nearly uncustomizable and difficult to position. Secondly, the asynchronous functions and threading was difficult to implement as rather than being able to do everything on the main thread, the GUI had to take over the main thread while the Reminder class occupied a separate worker thread.

Accomplishments

The GUI turned out better than expected. We were able to include our own mascot as well as provide intractable forms.

What we learned

This entire project was a huge learning curve for us because the only tool we’ve ever had experience with is Python. Asynchronous functions, threading, SQLite, and Tkinter were all very new to us that we had to slave over many youtube videos for.

What’s next for Aggressive Personal Assistant (APA)

We’re connecting the local database as well as making the notifications more aggressive by tracking what windows the computer has opened to ensure that the user is on the right task. Though it may seem excessive to have a cute little cherry threaten you every 10 minutes, this is all in the name of productivity for work from home.