Updated the HTML report so it starts making at least some sense. I am interested in feedback from freelancers or anybody who is actually using the HTML report to send it out to anybody else.
In other news, i’m starting to wonder where are we supposed to plug in for the next big releases of unity and gnome shell. There still seems to be no good place for a omni-present indicator which, i believe, hamster deserves. In the shell case i could just go and hack myself in the chrome and swap some bits around. In the unity case – well, have not looked at that yet. Comments welcome!
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In the gnome-shell case I guess you place to be is the message tray, but you should probably talk to William Jon McCann as he’s the gnome-shell main designer.
Isn’t it great that you have to support 2 different shells in the same desktop project?
Do you know how the Ubuntu Ayatana notification bubbles work? You could have a similar window for hamster which shows the activity and the time, and persists over the top of all windows. In order not to get in the way it should disappear (or become very nearly transparent) on mouseover. An indicator icon (notification area/appindicator icon) could then be used to to interact with the applet, changing activity and so forth. Having a user-configurable location for the window and allowing when it is shown to be costimised would be cool too.
Exploring what goes on in the Unity Dash or the Shell Activities view might work too.
I do freelance work and I have used hamster now for one week. So far I am generally happy and noticed that my productivity has significantly increased.
More detailed feedback probably later.
Thank you very much!
What always bugged me is that I tend to forget to enter activity details. I would love to have the dialogue pop up immediately after ending an activity…
Do you think you could look into that for a future version?
Concerning the new report: It looks sleek, but I still use my own template with everything setup to hand it to my employer.
I really love Hamster, the only thing I would like to see is that the report shows total in hours and minutes. Now when I have to write or report my time I have to transform 2.2 to 2 hours and ~12 minutes.
Report templates is a nice feature. The template shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 does not contain a grand total, which quite a blocker. But that will be fixed, I’ve heard.
It would be great to be able to import data from an (ical) report (could be an acceptable workaround for the lack of syncing with other computers)
with feedback i meant feedback on revamp.
as for “lack of synchronization” – just keep the db in dropbox and symlink it to the original folder. or sync it. that does the job.
I LOVE Hamster! I’ve been using it to track time spent on client work (In fact, I WISH it could be integrated into Vtiger, as that’s the CRM we’re working on using for everything else in the office). One thing I’ve noticed in the new version…Where is the ability to save out overviews with specific tags/categories only? I used to when I selected to save, check off only the client I wanted to output, save it as html, then when the page opened, cut and paste that into an OO doc, then send it along, or send it out to PDF. I can’t seem to find that now. BTW, speaking of output, it’d be nice if there was a way to output direct to PDF. Perhaps I’ve missed these items, and just need some guidance where to look. Otherwise, I really appreciate the app and all the effort! Thank you!
Nate
use the search box on top right to filter out what you need before saving the report.
printing out straight to pdf might require some effort. for now you can print it to a pdf from the browser perhaps.
and thanks for the kind words!
Toms,
Ah. The search option looks like it works. My only concern is that the search might turn up too many results that I don’t want, whereas the check boxes worked based on the categories. I’m sure I can figure a way to make it work…behold, the power of rolling your own!
Thanks again!
Labi, notulkošu, bet
Derētu tomēr ieviest arī hronometrāžas “darbus”, kas neapstājas uz idle, piemēram, priekšnieka sievas akta gleznošana, izbraukums ar jahtu 4 h garumā, sadzeršana ar klientiem un tml.
Es saprotu, ka, iespējams, tas nav projekta mērķis, bet arī tas ir laiks.
Mēģināšu piemēru.
Man iedeva fotoaparātu, ka jāuzlādē akumulators 3 – 4h.
Tai pat laika es daru darbus, bet esmu piesaistīts tam fotoaparātam, jo klients ta viens.
Šajā laika man būtu jāuzskaita 3 -4 h (precīzi nav zināms) + cits darbs.
Un tad man pēkšņi jāizkrauj man pievestā malka. idle? Man par katru idle malkas atvedēji prasīs maksu par stundu.
Es iešu skriet pie kompjūtera pakustināt peli?
The $duration_decimal template tag produces a number, but whatever it is, it’s not decimal hours. Is there a tag to produce decimal hours?
i’m afraid you will have to figure out what that whatever is
In version 2.31.92, the one you get with Ubuntu 10.10, the $duration_decimal and $duration_minutes tags give just the last fact of the day, not the total for the day. I think this is a bug. To fix, edit /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/reports.py find “def _finish” (last routine in the file) and change stuff.duration_minutes(fact["delta"]) to stuff.duration_minutes(duration) in four places then reopen the applet. Otherwise, a great program. (Adding daily totals to that version wasn’t hard, either. Hooray for Python source!)
I use hamster to track my working hours, here some things straight out of my mind:
* I would love to see more documentation about the report template – which variables are there anyway?
* I preferred the old non-js template. First thing I do is to open the report in a browser and generate a pdf out of it so the js is useless to me anyway. The old template also got a total on the bottom which is missing on the current default template
I am a freelancer and my situation is that I work part-time at clients offices, part time at home on various projects and part-time in my other company. I use hamster to track time for all situations and end-up copypasting my reports into various other tools/systems.
I don’t see any good method, other then an official “tasks” protocol being adopted in all mayor managment tools to avoid this duplication. (in other words: nothing soon
)
As for hamster *reporting* I see some valuable additions or changes:
– Exporting could be pluggable. That way, writing “export it into format Foo” or “place it on Site Bar” becomes a community effort.
– Storage could be either pluggable or layered. Last time I tried to get my database into couchDB, it require a lot of core-hacking (and lacking any python skills, it failed). That way, too, others can write export and synching tools. If it were in couchdb, e.g. synching is a no-brainer. Writing reporting-apps requires couchdb knowledge, but would not be too hard either. It becomes a community effort then too.
One other “feature” comes from the fact that my billing/administration goes trough several stages, something I tried to achieve with tags, but:
– it requires me to edit every recorded session manually to add and remove tags. E.g. when something is “hours inserted in clients unfuddle” and later “billed to client” and later “payed” and again later “archived for tax”, it requires me to manually edit hundreds of sessions in order to add/remove these tags.
– tagging does not include/exclude tasks from reports. Sure, with some searching, one can achieve something close. But I miss a way to “file sessions that were payed, for my end-of-year tax-report, and not have them clutter the dropdowns and stats pages and so on”.
Right now, my yearly reports have /so/ many entries and projects that my statistics become unusable. Part of the problem is myself, not using hamster in the “intended” way, I simply did not know how to use it exactly previously
But a large part could be achieved with a “archive” feature, a reporting or exporting thing that saves items in a backuped, yet accessible database for future reference (but no longer for daily use) See here for an (slightly anonymised) example http://gallery.webschuur.com/gallery/Screens/Statistics_001.png
a bulk edit is missing indeed. as for pluggable reporting – the datastore is now separated from client and you can get all data either straight from D-Bus or by using python like this:
from hamster.client import Storage
storage = Storage()
now run
help(storage)
and you will get all the info. for the facts (which are recorded activities) check out the get_facts function.
to get today’s facts you can do something like the lines below after that
import datetime
facts = storage.get_facts(datetime.date(2010,12,8))
in the 2.32 version it will return a list of dictionaries. that is changing in git master now and is returning a class instead.
anyway – even with limited knowledge in python one should be able to find his way around.
thanks for the screenshot.
Off-Topic: You don’t actually use your bugtracker do you?
Just saw that adding graphs to html report is also there but not resolved. Would’ve marked it resolved by myself but I’m not allowed to.
thanks for not making me doing the legwork and finding the bug then
I appreciate hamster software very much. It is very helpful in my law and tax practice.
As already mentioned above, it would be nice the report shows total time spent on all things listed in particular report.
Kind regards
MH
Thanks a lot for this, it is a huge improvement. This is something that I would love to send to my clients with a bit of spit and polish.
Some feedback:
- The descriptions are missing. This keeps me from using this report at the moment. I always put in a short description alongside with a ticket id, so the client can reference how much time I put into implementing a certain request.
- The “show activity log” – link shows an empty page with the text “false”.
- The timeline at the top could use a legend.
- Only show the dates for which data exists. If there are no empty days with 0 hours worked visible in the list it’s easier to pretend you have worked hard on the project.
- Don’t show the dashes for data that is not entered. For example, if you don’t enter a tag for a certain activity it shows up as “activity – category -”, which has a trailing dash.
- Activities that are not tagged are summed up in the tag chart, but do not have a label. This could for example be labeled “untagged”.
thanks – this is the most useful comment so far!
Hey, new report looks shiny
One more minor detail is that IMHO we should specify we are talking about hours, not minutes, somewhere in general or specifically next to each number.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that HTML wrapping(BR’s) on new lines at descriptions would be great!
Awesome program – used it on a few accounts to justify systems support fee’s – amazing how many “little” details one forgets at the end of the day. This little ditty catches all of them if you use it correctly.
One problem – in the report Overview from last years entries, the days are off by 1 – meaning the date will show Sunday, Dec 26th – when I open the task the date shows 12/27/2010. If I choose Tuesday the 28th, it will show up in the Overview as Monday, Dec 27???
I have been using Hamster for two years now. As a freelancer I like to make my live as easy as possible and with hamster its easy to track my time and account for my hours spent to my customers.
I have made an easy administration work flow around this applet and I “worked” for me.
BUT! I get paid to do work for customers. I don’t get paid to hack some new template. The old report worked fine for me and now I have to spent time to figure-out how to make a new template which show the totals or make the report fit into my administration work-flow. Yes, yes its nice and shiny but please consider the simple working man who does not want to change his work flow every time someone comes-up with a new and better way to do things. Its the burden of open source I guess but I’m frustrated right now since my packet-manager has updated the hamster and I need to get this report to my customer ASAP.
Oh well, just a simple request from a long term user than: please consider backwards compatibility. Let me choose the time and place to switch to a new feature (e.g. report).
Thanks for your efforts.
the grand total was brought back in 2.30.1.
I would not suggest depending on an HTML report in your workflow though. Instead please use saner formats, like CSV, XML, iCal or even the d-bus export to generate the reports for your customers.
Really? I use Time Tracker 2.31.92 (ubuntu 10.10 maverick) but I don’ t see a grand total when I do a “save report”. Am I missing anything?
BTW Excellent suggestion about the HTML. But how do I get a CSV file from the applet? Filtered on date and customer/project of course. And preferably without an additional tool/script/program or whatever
Thanks.
humm, the most recent stable version is 2.32.xx – ubuntu seems to be lagging with the releases, so i’d suggest installing from sources.
as for report – open overview and filter out the records, then select overview -> save report and choose appropriate format.
perhaps not exactly straight forward, the other, quicker option would be to use bit of python or the d-bus interface
OK, sorry for that….. Just use the report save as… option. Totally missed that one.
Now I am curious, python or the d-bus interface????
I’m not a full-blown Linux hacker but I need to ask: how easy is it? Is there a tutorial?
Thanks anyway I’ll update from source next week, need to get my report out now.
http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/experimentation-with-real-data/