The official integration will go through the notification area.

Objections?

P.S. This is not mockup, heh.

Update: Ok, thanks everyone! I think i now got the general feeling. By default hamster will go into the right side and i’ll think about somehow exposing the ability to swap places with the clock.

In current git master you will find a really rudimentary shell extension. This is how it looks:

There is the current activity and duration and you can stop it and call out the standalone.

To install it simply follow the usual installation steps and then restart the shell by pressing Alt+F2 and then “r” for the command.

It’s work in progress of course.

Oh, and if something breaks you can always remove the extension from /usr/local/gnome-shell/extensions/

I’ve been short in time these last 6 month, busy moving between jobs and countries and trying to understand what’s the current trend of 3.0 is was the last of my concerns. So I say, we better wait a moment until the dust settles, than release a half-assed-last-minute hack.

It’s all python, so the current stand-alone version will run without problems on the 3.0. There is no place for applets yet though, but i’m sure we’ll find a way as soon as i’m running that thing on my desktop.

There are a few bugs out there that could use a hand, so if you are prolific in python and have some time – jump in and write some patches!

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!

Not there yet, obviously – it’s missing bling, polish and refinement. We’ve already asked for trophy icons from the design team and Lapo Calamandrei (the icon machine) stepped up, so that’s in progress.

The gnome-achievements project has a single goal and that is to enable users to discover application features. Fun is a side effect of that.

For example in hamster – it is hard to expose some specific features in the UI – like entering negative minutes to start activity in past, or the fact that you can override the default report. It is documented in help and linked as contextually as possible (in the delta times case you see the help icon in the input box now) – but often one won’t even realize that there is a better way to do things.
And so enter trophies. If you know negative deltas, then after doing it a number of times you will get a trophy. Maybe you will say “hey – what was that about” and go into trophies and stumble upon more interesting ones. Or maybe, if you don’t know negative deltas – you will stumble upon them via some other trophy or by deliberately opening the trophy browser.

We have come up with 67 trophy ideas for hamster so far, out of which 34 seem to be viable right now.

The current progress is that the service is there, there is a rudimentary browser and now i’m working on putting the trophies in hamster. The plan is to gain insight while doing that and write a first draft of guidelines. There are many questions to be answered and the whole system, being so different from video games, has to be rethought. Do ranks make sense on desktop? Should hidden trophies be included in the interface if there is such a large proportion of them. And so on.
After that the plan would be to approach developers of some other project and with them try bring trophies into their app and see what bits are missing.
And after a few more trials then we go public. It shouldn’t take too long – a month or two perhaps.

Apart from coming up with guidelines, which i think are crucial to be relevant, the trophy system itself will try and offload as much of trophy related state-tracking, as possible.

Anyway, it’s not a release yet, and there are things coming and going, so this is not the point where you plugin in yet. There will be a proper announcement when we are there.

Finally, we do plan to get into GNOME eventually. And there is such intent because i firmly believe that this makes sense.

If interested, head on to the wiki to find more details and check out the code.

Slides are here

And all about the graphics lib you can find here. There is tutorial, reference, and of course code itself – try out the demos, read the code, have fun (pretty please)!

Hamster enhanced by a little helper showing current duration. Mouse over for activity name and category

Update: now hamster is hosting the helper itself so all you have to do is update and install hamster from sources and restart docky.

Grab the helper from here. Due to a bug in current stable docky, it is dying when trying to install a helper. So your best bet is to go into ~/.local/share/docky/helpers, copy the .py file from scripts folder of archive in there and the .info from metadata folder copy into the metadata. Restart docky and the helper should be there now (settings -> helpers -> enable).

In order to work properly it will require hamster from sources.

Once ready – launch the standalone hamster and the helper will pick it up. Maybe pin it to the docky so it doesn’t go anywhere.
The circular badge thing will appear whenever something’s being tracked.

I moved the template out to external file for the HTML report in git master.
Check it out here

Template can be overridden from $HOME/.local/share/hamster-applet/
So now it is possible to customize the report if you have been using to generate invoices and such.

Default template using the hosted jQuery UI lib. Interaction elements get hidden when printing.

Apart from human readable format, durations can be represented in minutes or decimal hours, and start and end times have their ISO aliases.
So, i think, with a little bit of HTML and JavaScript, you should be able to turn this into whatever there is you need.

Simple python string.Template substitution is used. And additionally, where nesting is required, an xml-style tag has been introduced.

I did consider grabbing something more proper, like mako, but the implications of having it implemented properly did not weight against the gains.

As you can see in the screenshot, the report could use some (major) love. So if you would like to get your hands a bit dirty and make it better, your effort will be appreciated!