Wanted to give a quick heads up about the recent events – i’ve resumed hacking on hamster. Poked a few bugs here and there, freshened up the shell extension, which is now in a more usable state (note: latest hamster from sources is required to run it), and think i’ve finally gotten over the whole pain that is that officially we are now as integrated as a notification area. The applet was the very heart of hamster to me, and it will be missed.
But i wanted to share another exciting bit – the edit activity form has always felt uneasy for me as it is tedious for both editing and adding things. Also you can always do just one thing at a time.
So it’s time to ramp up the game.
Here’s an early prototype (meaning that everything *will* change). Right now it’s very plain and supports just viewing, but i think it brings over the idea. I’m envisioning in-place edits. Haven’t figured out the specifics just yet. Don’t get attached to the colors either – picked those at random for now.
Try it out for yourself in hamster experiments: https://github.com/tbaugis/hamster_experiments/blob/master/hamster_day.py
Hi, I’m glad that you continue working on this awesome project!
I hope the Gnome 3 developers adopt your approach to usability (Gnome 3 is such a huge misstep that I’m running fallback mode.)
That sounds great, thanks
I used hamster a while ago and am just getting back to it… it was always plain and simple and still amazingly useful, but the one thing that bothered me was that you could only do one activity at a time!
Keep up the great work!
K
Hi, is there any chance that you recycle the hamster applet for the Xfce panel?
I think there are quite a few people out there who moved from Gnome 2 to Xfce, because they neither like Gnome 3 nor Unity.
I myself moved from Ubuntu to Xubuntu for this very reason and I’m longing for a Xfce-version of hamster. For me as a user xfce panel looks very gnome panel alike. So maybe you don’t have to change a lot codewise?
I definitely would appreciate any work into this direction. Thank you very much for all the work you’ve done so far with this amazing project.
Greetings from Germany,
Jörg
An android version would be awesome.
Hello,
After trying unity and gnome I have also switched to xfce (4.8.1). I would love if you could provide a suitable version of the applet.
–
George
Very nice work with the new viewer. I’ve just tried it out and it’s a pleasure to see the data this way. I trust more refinement and idea will come that will make this visualizer quite powerful.
I’m with the ‘hate Unity, hate Gnome 3, can’t figure out KDE, so being forced into XFCE’ crowd as well. I’ve fixed a few annoying defaults, like installing a PDF reader (Gimp for reading PDFs? Gah), and the crappy file manager. Etc, etc,. Making Hamster run under XFCE is the final piece of the puzzle.
What is acutally involved in getting it to run — what’s the 10,000 foot view? Maybe with enough keywords and an understanding of the concepts I can figure it out. I see articles like this, but they don’t seem relevant 4 years on
http://tuxtweaks.com/2008/11/how-to-run-gnome-panel-applets-in-xfce/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=118173
i spent a little time trying to find that answer, and it seems that xfce has a plugin system (http://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins). It is however C, which means that i won’t be the guy for the job.
What’s involved – the storage backend is separate and works through dbus. The various dialog windows can now be called through dbus as well. So what’s missing is the frontend applet/plugin/extension bit, which ideally would feature the autocomplete as it was implemented in the applet. What’s involved is a lengthier session of hacking and poking but it should be doable. I won’t be your man for the job though.
The other alternative is running standalone, which should be supported by xfce out of the box anyway. It’s getting better now when you run from sources as gnome3 demands me to plug in the notification area anyway, but it’ll never be as fun as the applet was. It should be usable though.
What exactly do you mean with “running standalone”? Will there be a standalone hamster executable in the future without any Gnome dependencies?
Right now I can only find the package “hamster-applet” in my ubuntu repository.
forget about your ubuntu repository. hamster hasn’t been released for 2 years now until we find way back in gnome. please use sources instead (it’s fast, safe and dead simple; there might be some bugs though;).
the standalone has been around for a good while and is hiding under “gnome-time-tracker” – it’s pretty much the applet without the applet.
Hey Tom,
I’ve read the instructions on http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/building-and-running/.
Is there a way to install hamster locally in my home directory without having to use “sudo”? How would I specify an install directory different from “/usr/bin”?
I’ve tried by doing a “./waf configure build –prefix=/home/joerg/local” to install it into “~/local/bin”, but that didn’t work.
I just want to be able to easilly uninstall the programs that I installed manually outside the package management. That’s why I want to keep them locally.
i haven’t tried out the non-sudo bits, but you can always uninstall it afterwards by running ./waf uninstall
Hi,
I also moved out from ubuntu/unity and migrated to linux mint with MATE… works great!… even though MATE is suppossed to be very unstable still, I haven’t experienced any issues (ok, my webcam’s mic isn’t working, but that’s it)
So I’ve been testing mint+MATE (with the “tridex” repos) for 3 weeks already and I can only say it’s more stable and faster as any ubuntu-version since 10.10. So I’m very happy with Mint + MATE, and I’m staying with them.
I’ve installed Hamster and runs well, but I can’t get the applet to work. The “old” version on the ubuntu repository is just too old and uses of course gnome2 libraries, and the newest versions from git are getting in the shell-extension-world and away from the panel. So I’m stuck in the middle. Is there any chance to have a branch for MATE-Compatibility (i.e. with the panel-applet)?? I know it would mean a lot of extra work, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who liked things the way they were and who will stick to MATE.
I’m also a noob in python, but I would be glad to help, if I can. I had a branch, with some small changes for the report (blending out all empty-dates on the report) so I’m a little familiar with the code. I actually even started to migrate the whole gnome to mate libs on the last git-version I had to try to makt it compile, but after a while I had to give up
… but I could post/upload my patch somewhere with the changes I had so far.
So what do you think? Would it be possible to open such a branch?
Regards,
Andrea
P.S. and if that new branch becomes true… there is something I always missed to make hamster perfect for my freelancer-needs: I wanted to make a billing-extension for it, in order to be able to tag events as “billed” and be able to make billing-queries: bill-number, date, etc. Show unbilled tasks… I supposed it could be based on tags. I was planning on doing it as an extension to hamster. But if there is enough people interested… well, it would be great if I could get some help
the repository is not going the gnome-shell-extension way – extension is separate and in my github. the repository has pretty much the good old stuff, still using gtk2, not any of the new fancy stuff. but i’ve been doing more work to get the standalone feel more natural to the desktop. so i suggest you install hamster from sources and use the `hamster-time-tracker`
Yes, before all this, I was using the sources-last-version (there I had my customized branch)… but it only works for gnome. So that’s where I’m stuck and why I want to make a mate-branch. The time-tracker standalone from the ubuntu repository, as mentioned in my first comment, works fine. But I would of course prefere to use the latest ones (from the gnome-git sources and my custom branch) … and well, I would love beeing able to use the applet again. This all “only” would need to port everything from gnome to mate
Most of the mate-applets (already ported) are written in C, so I still haven’t figured out, what’s missing to make everything compile again.
I have uploaded my mate-branch to github, so you can see which changes I’ve made so far. The master-branch is equal to the latest master-branch on gnome-git.
https://github.com/adlh/hamster-mate/compare/master…mate-branch
It still needs some work. It’s far away from compiling. But I’ll give it a try again soon.
Sorry, the compare link got messed up after posting.
The branche is named mate-branch, and comparing it to the master branch shows the “renaming” changes I’ve made. Here the link to the repos:
https://github.com/adlh/hamster-mate/
I’m also using xfce now. Would be nice to get a icon in the panel. I setup a keyboard shortcut as an workaround. I definied the shortcut Ctrl+T e.g. in “Settings Manager” > “Keyboard” > “Application Shortcuts”. At least in can work comfortably in that way.
Just an heads up about building/installing from source on Precise Pangolin: it doesn’t work and throws the following message:
“Package gnome-keybindings was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gnome-keybindings.pc’ to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package ‘gnome-keybindings’ found”
However, here’s some info on the disappeared package: http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/ApplicationDefinedKeybindings