2.30 is now slowly being picked up by all the major distributions and we sure hope to get some breeze of feedback. Tell us what you think of the new version of Project Hamster through your weblogs!
But the life goes on and there already are new things in the git master.
We’ve split hamster into client and back-end. All the communication is done via dbus.
The client part has a wrapper around all the dbus calls, so if anybody would like to access data from hamster in Python, in git master it is now as simple as
import hamster.client storage = hamster.client.Storage() storage.get_todays_facts() # or any other function for that matter
As all the communication goes through d-bus, that means that your script can do everything that the applet or the standalone can. I’ve made sure that the module has proper docstrings, so running help(hamster.client) will give you all the details. Read the code here
This now allows to have an external script generate something like this in almost 100 lines:
Ok, this one was a bug actually, but looks interesting, here are others
But the one below is something more realistic – it shows data from four years, colors representing categories, bands representing years. Click on image to read notes in flickr.
This is not even close to being final version of course, just a capture of work in progress. Colours will be replaced with better ones, interaction will come, and if it works out, it will get into hamster.
And this is where you come:
First – i’d like to see screenshots of your data in this visualisation. For that you will need hamster from git master. After that just clone hamster experiments and run “hamster-sun.py” script in root folder.
Second – I want your brain.
Now in git master data retrieval and manipulation for an external script has become a matter of few lines, and one does not have to change hamster to get things working, as the d-bus allows the separation.
I would like to set 2.32 target to be trend-finding – visualisations that expose trends of your habbits. How one project runs out out and the next is started, how you exercise more in January and work less in summer – those kind of things.
I bet you have some ideas. Let us know – be visual, make drawings, or even do some coding. Hamster experiments will lend you a hand with graphics.
One of the feature i wanted in hamster is to make it track my todo also. That is i enter few task with a sepecific key work something like TODO@task1 TODO@task2 they go as todos and later when i say TAS it should try to autocomplete from the TODO list. Also when entering next task if the current task is a todo entry give a check box asking mark todo as complete which should remove task1 from todo list. Also provide a tab for the showing the pending TODO list. That would make hamster track my todo and also my time
BTW great app
Aneesh: The excellent Getting Things Gnome (http://gtg.fritalk.com/pages/screenshots) integrates well with Hamster. GTG has a plugin which sends the currently selected task to Hamster and starts the timer.
This was you can use GTG to manage your TODO’s and Hamster to track your time spent – best of both worlds.
Hi,
I just recently upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 and it has the 2.30.0.1 version of hamster. One thing that I noticed is that I can no longer export save reports for specific categories and that it only gives me the option of saving a report with all my time tracking activity. Has this featured just been moved or has it been removed completely for some reason. This was one of the most useful features I found and it would be a shame if it has been removed. So far Hamster has been the best time tracking software I have used on Linux! Keep up the good work!
in 2.30 you have the free-text search field on top right of the overview window. use it to filter out results. you can filter by tags, categories, activities and comments.
so if you want to export activities from the work category, just type in “work” there and hit enter. use comma as an “or”. so “work, hacking” will filter out activities that are either work or hacking.
you don’t have to stick to single field filtering, so say, you have have activity “bananas” in work category and “oranges” in hacking category, you can do “work bananas, hacking oranges” and as there is the comma in between, it will translate to “either work bananas or hacking oranges”
it should be fairly intuitive, but i guess we could use more in-place documentation.
speaking of which – make sure to right-click on applet and select “help” – we have now some info there too.
Previously in Hamster I used to be able to view individual days and have the activity summary shown to me. Now, with 2.30, this appears to have disappeared and I only have the options of either Week/Month/Date Range. I can use the date range to achieve what I’m after, but this involves setting two separate input boxes and makes life very difficult to move backwards and forwards through individual days. Like in previous versions of Hamster, I need to see my time summary for different categories of tasks on a daily basis.
Essentially, I could do the summary of tasks myself in the Week View (but have to manually add up numbers) or otherwise use the Date Range, but be faced with it being cumbersome to see individual days.
Is there any chance of the Day view being added back in? It worked perfectly before with the left/right arrows in the Overview screen…
Cheers,
David
Or..if Day View is gone permanently, then maybe the ability to more easily advance or reverse the start/end date together (eg by the difference between the dates?) in the Date Range would probably be a useful feature.
Eg if looking in a quarterly/yearly view, it would allow people to easily view the next or previous period, without needing to calculate the new start/end dates.
David, i’m not sure what you are looking for in the day view, but it seems to me a rather ineffective way of browsing. What is it you are trying to accomplish there that you possibly can’t by picking the day view?
As for navigating in date range, that we might add in the 2.32 cycle.
Essentially, I’m looking to see the summaries that are on the ‘Totals’ tab in the ‘Overview’ for a selected, individual day. This is what previously existed in the “Day” view in the last version of Hamster that was in Ubuntu 9.10 (so version 2.28?). This view has seemingly since been removed as the only options I have are Week/Month/Date Range under the drop-down menu.
Hence, there’s no way that I can see to get a summary of how long I spent on certain categories/activities or tags for a given day.
my question was more about what are you doing with the data, or what insight does it give to you?
totals for the current day per category appear in the applet drop-down.
if you are looking for some specific activity and how much time you spent on that every day, you can use the search box to filter out the activities wanted.
Ah sure, gotcha. Essentially, I need a day-by-day breakdown of the hours I spend with each client (client = Hamster category) so I can document this, in order to bill them.
Having the totals for the current day visible is okay, but I don’t do my summation until the end of the week. Also, being able to search on specific activity is good, but I do many different activities for the same client in a day (keeping records for granularity/accountability).
Upon further testing just now, though, it looks like you can search on Category. This looks like it’ll do the job nicely, actually — cheers.
That said, for a task of “Coding@Example project”, the search works for something like “Example project” but not for “Example” — feature or bug?
you can search by all the textual aspects – activity name, category, tags and comments (for comments i think i set it to do wildcard search)
it is an exact keyword search – so you have to specify the project name in full.
also, see this comment for syntax:
http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/experimentation-with-real-data/#comment-1379
i guess the search box needs some contextual help!
With an on-topic comment, here is what my data looks like:
http://tinyurl.com/278238z
It’s not really that usefull since there is no difference between a category with one minute per day and another with 5 hours per day. So I messed a bit with the script and came up with:
http://tinyurl.com/24x4bwr
Thanks for the screen-shot Matias!
As for usefulness – although you see more data if the height is proportional to the hours spent in the day, one has to question if that brings any new insights or tells anything.
In order to highlight trends we have to simplify the information, generalize.
Yes, I guess they each show different information. One shows you the categories in which you have been working through out time. But I am more intrerested in the proportion of work I put in each category each day. Maybe there’s a different kind of graph that will show me that better.
Toms, that is cool and may be useful!
May you filter by tag or other attributes? Will be really useful to me to see only one tag, and to know how this thing is present in my life.
The filtered graphic may not hide the non selected blocks, may only reduce it’s opacity, to we compare the the quantities.
That view will be nice with the MRibecky’s idea!
yeah, filtering i think will be the easiest part. right now i’m trying to find how much data can i push in before it makes no sense, heh.
Is there any way of having a gantt chart to display my time trackings?
It would be extremely useful to have an overview over my sleep patterns.