Edit, Explore, Report!
Today i decided to give another stab to the whole reporting pain.
You see, hamster kind of knows how to count hours, but as with many things in the 21st century we are living, it doesn’t really make any sense out of it.
So after some lengthy contemplation (hamster says 01:27) i figured following:
Overview is fine for editing and reviewing activities, and a quick grasp on totals.
Instead of adding anything more to it, we could split out the rest of needed functionality into two tabs. Together i’ll call them “Edit, Explore, Report” (but that’s just codename).
“Edit” part is the overview – you check, you edit, you don’t look at it.
“Report” part will be all the nuts and bolts of filtering by date, activity, category, picking columns, and finally getting a HTML PDF of your liking. Or something close to it.
“Explore” part would be to get a general feeling on how are you doing and is the topic of this blog post.
Now, hold your pants – here comes the mockup:
Figure 1. “The mockup”
Now, before you start – we are talking functionality – what info to put in this “Explore” tab.
First is statistical average hours worked per day, then comes the same thing only in month view (might exclude days that are weakly populated, like sundays to avoid holes).
Then there is that graph which could show what type of bird are you – early or late one. And then i have idea of some human readable slur which could be nice to read.
It would be possible to drill data down by year and category, but no more.
Generally i’m looking for something in direction of dopplr anual report – something that would make you go “ooh, i see” and “aah, how insightful” or something like that.
I would love to go with a 3×3 grid to make it look smarter (or, alternatively, give more useful info) but i forgot what i would like to put in there.
So, errm, what did i wanted to ask… oh yes!
- Any ideas for interesting totals / averages or other figures?
- Any suggestions?
If you would like to stab my mockup, here cometh SVG: mockup.svg
Love it!
Awesome!!
I have a practical need for that “Picking columns for a report” feature! I have to turn off the ‘Category’ column for the reports I generate for my employer (as just a single category called “Work” repeats in every row).
Thanks!
Looks great. Light year is a distance unit though, not a time unit
I like the mockup and the idea with the 3 tabs.
Speaking of reports, wouldn’t be nice if those could be saved as CSV, too? Another good format would be ODS (OpenDocument spreadsheet), since it has a bit of text formatting.
P.S.: I’m still using hamster-applet-2.24.2-1.fc10.i386.rpm.
In reports, I would like to see a gantt-alike chart: At the end of the day (literally
) I review the time tracked that day.
A gantt-alike chart would be perfect. That way you can see overlaps and gaps.
———————–12:20———-12:25—13:25—————————17:50————18:20
[ reading slashdot ][ bugfixing ][ lunch ][reading digg and youtube][riding home]
Well, it sounds cool to me
Cool! Very COOL applet!! I’m loving it!
I’d like to be able to open the interface as “not an applet”, for when I’m being hassled for a weekly report, but am not in the office.
I can SSH into my box, but then have to dig directly into the sqllte dB if I want to find anything. Having the interface available as a standalone program would be rather useful I think…
The version in git (2.27+) allows you to start up overview in command line like this:
/usr/lib/hamster-applet/hamster-applet -s stats
I heard about your project quite recently, I started to use it just a few days ago and therefore so far I cannot think of any reasonable complaint
Honestly, I really like it.
If I could suggest anything, I would include (or maybe there already are such possiblities?):
- ability to choose location of the output file or files, so that it would be easier to put it together with the rest of the documents in a single directory
- ability to create more than one output file, so that one could use them alternatively, according to one’s needs
- quarterly/yearly reports
Thank you for this useful tool