:to use
GNOME 2.26 is almost out of the door, and my coding spree returned something like week before string freeze.
So… i’m thinking pastels!
First let’s check out what is new in 2.26 and then we will jump 6 month ahead and talk a little about 2.28.
2.26
2.26 is the “under the hood” type of version, with almost no visual changes but some behavioral ones.
- “The non-discoverable hacky obscure UI” – well, thanks Havoc for honesty, hahaha. So we have some magic in hamster – now you can add descriptions to activities, and create categories on the fly. Syntax is quite simple: you type in something like “activity@category, some description”. Category and description are optional. Let’s give you an example: “coding@hamster” will start activity “coding” in category “hamster”. But typing “hamster, writing something in blog” will start activity hamster and add description “writing something in blog”. I think it’s not too bad. Descriptions show up in the interface and reports, and it is possible to edit them
- Categories – now they appear in drop down menu, so you don’t have to guess which category that “coding” entry belongs to. I’d suggest to keep numbers of categories low though.
- HTML Report – it has been touched, check it out. Oh, there are some totals in it, yay!
- Bugs and bugfixes – don’t know which one was your favorite bug, but we fixed couple of things. Most notably i hope we’ve solved Python 2.6 and UTF8 trouble
2.28
Some things are already in trunk. Like better graphs (can check them out in motion here). Now i’m looking on the “edit activity” window – the dates are all hacky. Thinking (and have already partially implemented) about something like what google calendar does. Also, we will work some more on the non-discoverable hacky obscure UI, so you would be able to specify also the start time in UI. We’ve been talking about generating PDF reports instead of HTML ones. That would allow to put in those “nice graphics” and other stuff.
This would be the right time to throw in your ideas – give your voice, let us know what is that you want. Just keep it simple, please 
Bugfix release and official repository for ubuntu
Going for vacation next week so thought that should wrap up all the small bugfixes we have gathered so far.
Also I’m excited to report that we have two new translations – Russian and Dutch!
All the ubuntuers out there can save the trouble updating manually and add hamster’s support official repository to their sources list. Just follow the instructions over here.
But in short, here are the source lines:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hamster.support/ubuntu gutsy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hamster.support/ubuntu gutsy main
We use gutsy lines because they work both for Gutsy and Hardy.
Update: Project Hamster is now official part of GNOME and you should be able to find most recent stable version in the repository of your distro.
Catch-up
100 commits since previous post and no news, eh?
Here is a little something: simple reporting from the overview window:
Now you can print it out, copy to a spreadsheet, or even send to your best friend to brag about the long hours you have spent working this month!
The news feed has been somewhat silent, because describing the new additions sometimes can take much more time, than actually coding them – so, in order to stay informed about the most recent release – maybe subscribe to the release log – at least that one is updated on regular basis
Hamster get’s identity
I’m extremely happy to report that we got some icon love from Kalle Persson:
You will see the blue flavour in the “Add to panel” menu, window icons, and naturally in the Help-About.
He also did translation to Swedish, so hamster is now featured in 3 languages.
Updated debians can be found in the downloads section repository of your distro!
Dee for debians
Update: If you are looking for hamster packages – they must be already in the software repository of your distribution. Other alternative is to install from sources, which is quite simple and described here.
Managed to come up with some debians, so future stable releases will be available in this format. After installation adding/removing Hamster from panel is still required.
Click to download, and let me know how does it work for you!
If you know somebody who knows somebody who is good in packaging – oh, please, please – help Hamster!
Oh, and evolution support is disable in this build, because of the crasher with MS Exchange.
Hamster at your fingertips
As of today, Hamster sports a global hotkey so you can summon it without your hands leaving keyboard! Hotkey preference is stored in a GConf key. Currently the only means of changing it is via gconf-editor, the key is located in /apps/hamster-applet/general. Default hotkey is Super+H.
Under Debian based systems, like Ubuntu, to get Hamster’s GConf schema correctly installed, you need to specify --with-gconf-schema-file-dir parameter when running autogen.sh, so the command looks something like his:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/ --with-gconf-schema-file-dir=/usr/share/gconf/schemas/
Hooray for translations!
So the translation support has been brought in now and surprisingly first translation is in some language not used by many – Latvian!
Translation to your own language should take not more than some ten minutes, because currently there are only 36 strings to translate!
I’m quite new to all this localization stuff, but here is how you could contribute with translation to your language in case you’ve never done that:
- Update hamster: svn up
- Change to /po folder and generate template file there: cd po && intltool-update -p -g hamster-applet
- Rename the newly created hamster-applet.pot to <your locale>.po and do the translation
- Whenever you want to check the result, just run “sudo make install” and then add/remove hamster from panel.
Changes will be visible if you have set your language as the default one.
Tip: while translating, adding/removing hamster from panel could be quite a drag. Instead you can open projecthamster/hamster folder in terminal and run
./hamster-applet.py -w
The -w switch tells hamster to run in a stand-alone window – so somewhere on the screen a tiny hamster window should appear. Just don’t forget to remove the applet from panel – there can be only one hamster.
You can kill the app by hitting Ctrl+c in the terminal.
Whenever done, please file a ticket in Hamster’s issue list and attach the translated .po file to it. I’ll add the translation as soon as i get the message!
Graphs in action
Just in case if you are hesitant to do the update, here’s a sneak peek before you do that!
Treat your hamster – give it an update!
So, the initial graphing stuff is now in, and i thought a news update would be in order.
First and foremost, Hamster is now happily featuring graphs:
This is how the overview looks now
Matplotlib was an overkill for poor hamster, and didn’t had the graphic appeal he was looking for. Luckily, Cairo saved the day.
Next bit, maybe not so new to some, is the initial categorizing functionality, which right now looks something like this:
Right click on applet -> Edit Activities
Idea behind categories is to expand a little on the work / not work topic and have something that possibly could be used for exporting purposes in future.
Next, together with the new type-ahead style fact updates, Hamster lost the add custom fact window for a while, which is now brought back to life with some extra bits added
And last but not least, if there are no records for today, hamster will tell you that. A small knit, i know
Ok, now off you go and update your hamster – i will love to know what you think about graphs, and maybe this would be the perfect time for feature requests.
Also, don’t forget – if the hamster is misbehaving – there is always the “issues” list!
Lastly, shout for artists – if there are any around (wink, wink) – me and hamster, we’d love to get some icon love!
Some graphs comming soon
Update: Matplotlib has been dropped in favor to Cairo, so python-matplotlib is not needed anymore!
Started to add graphs, using matplotlib. You can check the progress by updating from SVN.
Just make sure you have python-matplotlib installed!
