Project Hamster

Screenshots

Hamster applet clicked – showing today

main

Overview

See your totals for the day, week or month, edit records and export data

overview

Adding previous fact

Forgot to tell hamster what you were doing? – No problem!

earlier_activity

Categorizing activities and tweaking preferences

Although you can live without categories, if you do overview graphs could tell you more.

Unsorted category is for all those activities entered by hand

prefs

Where with all this data?

After having used a while, the statistics tab might give you an insight in your everyday!

statistics

48 Responses

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  1. oslo said, on June 15, 2008 at 11:56 pm

    Hi!

    This is a great tool!
    What would work really well is using keyboard shortcuts per project, so you can switch between projects really fast. Maybe it will be displayed in the bar above so you can check the kb-shortcut?

    I hope the gnome team will get this tool in their upcoming release!

    Good luck!

    PS: i like the smiley at the bottom of your site :)

    Reply
  2. Alex said, on August 8, 2008 at 11:57 am

    can is automatically log the captions of the opened windows ?

    Alex

    Reply
  3. tm said, on August 9, 2008 at 8:16 pm

    Alex – hamster does not track captions of opened windows.

    Reply
  4. andy fitzsimon said, on August 30, 2008 at 5:27 am

    wow this looks exactly like what im looking for.
    can you make it forcefully ask you what you are doing ever 30 minutes say?

    eg: lawyers need to know what they are doing each 6 minutes

    Reply
  5. Philippe said, on September 5, 2008 at 7:58 pm

    Hello !

    I stumbled upon hamster while looking for timetrackers before hacking my own.

    This is greate indeed (way better than what I would hack myself).

    While I used kde I hade a sweet appelet for this task wich tracked Desktop switching. This was really usefull as I assinned desktops to tasks I needed to track. This way I didn’t need to think about the timetracker while working or answering the phone or takeing a personnal breack for chat or mail.

    Are you planning to add desktop tracking like that to the software ?
    (maybe It does it already, didn’t have a close look yet.)

    Reply
  6. Mir Nazim said, on September 16, 2008 at 6:43 am

    Thanks for the great app.

    What if I want to export the stuff??

    Reply
  7. Mir Nazim said, on September 16, 2008 at 6:44 am

    Thanks for the great app.

    What if I want to export the stuff?? Is there any way to do it??

    It would be great to setup things like project based time

    Reply
  8. tm said, on September 16, 2008 at 10:57 am

    Currently you do the HTML report and then copy/paste to your spreadsheet and do whatever you would like to.
    Alternatively, you can use the sqlite database directly.

    A DBUS API is coming up and with it also export improvements, which we should hopefully see somewhere in next quarter :)

    Reply
  9. John said, on September 18, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Nice app. I’ve just started using it.

    It would be nice if it had a small text field for each activity.

    jji

    Reply
  10. Michael said, on November 1, 2008 at 7:56 pm

    Hi.
    I just started using Hamster. Very nice project!
    I was wondering, whether there is some way to synchronize Hamsters over different PCs (i.e.: my laptop and my desktop), because I work equally on both.
    This would be killer, but of course probably hard to implement.
    Thanks for this nice program,
    Michael

    Reply
  11. tm said, on November 2, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Michael – currently we do not support sync out of box, but you could use conduit (http://www.conduit-project.org/) to copy ~/.gnome2/hamster-applet/hamster.db, because that’s the only file data-wise

    Reply
  12. Michael said, on November 5, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    Hi.
    Ok. So that should solve my needs thanks.
    Another question would be if there is a possibility to have Hamster run on older GNOME desktops, i.e. whether there’s a way to copy over the binary, because at work we only have GNOME 2.18 and I would like to be able to use this great app there too…
    Thanks,
    Michael

    Reply
  13. legion1978 said, on November 20, 2008 at 8:10 am

    Hi.. i believe this is one of those great little so very useful thingies we come across.. and im sure itll evolve with more options and capabilities.
    great job and thnx

    Reply
  14. Qadir said, on December 13, 2008 at 12:12 am

    Hi guys, thanks a lot for a great program! I am an Xfce user, but it works fine for me via XfApplet.

    Question: is there any way to export the data for further analysis to OO spreadsheet/Gnumeric?

    Reply
  15. Toms said, on December 13, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    you can generate HTML report from overview and then copy/paste it

    Reply
  16. The Power of Mind | Hamster: controla tu tiempo en Gnome said, on January 8, 2009 at 12:29 am

    [...] para saber cuántas horas le estás dedicando a un proyecto o cuántas horas pasas procrastinando. Aquí puedes ver algunas capturas de [...]

    Reply
  17. Gary Trakhman said, on January 23, 2009 at 1:13 am

    Can I request some features? Timed alerts that force me to categorize what I’m doing at the moment, and maybe custom fields where I can enter data to measure stuff like my awareness during lectures, etc.?

    Or… is there any other solution for what I’m looking for already existing?

    Reply
  18. Manfred Pürro said, on February 22, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    Hi Guys

    Thanks a lot for that tiny applet. Easy to use and just perfect to track my time i spend on different projects… I lofe the new activity@category feature,. very handy

    Unfortunately i have no more overview over the total hours per week like i had in version 2.24 … The day overview is gone to for me after my switch from 2.24 to 2.27

    Probably the db has changed and is no more compatible to my “old” entries?

    If you ned more help on that app please mail me. Becaus e i know i will use it heavyli

    THX

    Reply
  19. Toms said, on February 23, 2009 at 12:12 am

    In 2.27 the day view is gone because it didn’t make much sense really, and now you can see per day-category in the graph.
    You can see all totals per category in the label on bottom right, totals per day in the list on the left, and totals per activity in the graph itself.

    Reply
  20. Manfred Pürro said, on February 23, 2009 at 8:34 am

    Yeah, you are right. it’s more slim like this. But the overview was better before…

    It would be nice to have the total hours in the graph (Total per day/week). So i have a nice overview over how much hours i already have in a week….

    thx for a great product…

    Reply
  21. Manfred Pürro said, on February 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Thinking again, the day view was good for me. I have to write down my hours spend on different projects each evening, so day view was nice…

    Reply
  22. Toms said, on February 23, 2009 at 3:46 pm

    Well, each evening you can just click on applet and read the label between list and buttons. It takes into account also current activity :)

    Reply
  23. Manfred Pürro said, on February 23, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    Oh ok these numers are per day? good, add a total and i’m satisfied :-D
    (only screwed if i miss to write down one evening….)

    Keep up with the good work!

    Reply
  24. Manfred Pürro said, on February 23, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    probably you want to have a quick look on slimtimer.com an online timetracking tool.
    They have a very good reporting mechanism there…

    probably an inspiration?

    Reply
  25. Toms said, on February 23, 2009 at 5:57 pm

    Just to not get confused here – the totals per category for current day are in the main applet. In the overview window you see totals per category for the interval you are viewing – be it month or week.

    Thanks for pointing to slimtimer. As for inspiration – it comes from everywhere, most notably from personal experience :)

    Reply
  26. Gary B said, on March 10, 2009 at 6:25 pm

    Pleasepleaseplease the following:
    – a simple log file format
    – a simple way (API?) to integrate with other apps such as project managers (dotproject etc.)
    – easy to fix errors in the log
    – easy way to move items from one category to another (ie. subtasks from one task to another)

    I would dearly love to have a time tracker that is easy to use on the screen, whose log can be easily used to filter into my timesheets, and that can also be fed into our project management system. I just spent an hour trying to figure out how to collect summaries from the Evolution Tasks window and put them in an email to my boss (turned out I could grep the file in .evolution/tasks/local/system/tasks.ics)

    A nice thing to have someday:
    – automatic tracking of the active window, that can be used to filter items into different tasks. I’ve been running a simple shell script for testing, that collects data from xprop to do that every minute. The output looks like this:
    Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:10:01 -0400 0×1efddae “Firefox” “Screenshots \253 Project Hamster – Mozilla Firefox”

    Reply
  27. Gary B said, on March 10, 2009 at 6:35 pm

    One more bit – long ago (late 1990’s) I used a tracker called (IIRC) “Watch-IT” for the Mac – I have looked around more recently and have not been able to find anything like it. There is something called Watch-IT now but I don’t think it’s the same thing – it doesn’t look anything like it. the new one is at http://www.coldpizzasoftware.com/watchit/

    The original had great support for multiple projects, including the window watching feature. The times could be edited in the display panel.

    I would also argue that all project tracking systems should use ‘infinite’ nesting – to me a project, a task, a sub-task are all the same thing and should be handled that way.

    As a _real_ challenge, I run synergy to share my mouse and keyboard across three machines. xprop doesn’t know about that. :)

    Reply
  28. John Laker said, on April 18, 2009 at 7:09 pm

    Wonder full app. Just love it.

    Reply
  29. Toms said, on April 18, 2009 at 7:25 pm

    oooh, thanks! :)

    Reply
  30. JonUK said, on May 4, 2009 at 3:59 pm

    Great App!

    How do you reach the “Edit Activities” screen?

    Reply
  31. Toms said, on May 4, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    it’s in preferences, JonUK – rightclick on applet

    Reply
  32. JonUK said, on May 4, 2009 at 4:03 pm

    Oops – found it (via toolbar preferences)!

    Reply
  33. JonUK said, on May 4, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    thanks

    Reply
  34. 10 بريمجات panel-applets لشريط جنوم « ubuntu in arabic said, on May 10, 2009 at 2:46 am

    [...] بريمج project hamster (الموقع – لقطات شاشة) [...]

    Reply
  35. Gratitude Journal 20090624 « Charles H Baker’s Weblog said, on June 25, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    [...] Hamster time tracking software. [...]

    Reply
  36. Svenn said, on July 14, 2009 at 10:15 am

    I’ve been using gtimer for a while because it has a built-in idle detect. When there has been no activity for a defined period of time (but the computer does not idle) a dialog is posted to let the user either: continue, revert or jump back to when the idle started. Is it possible to implement something like this in Hamster?

    Reply
    • Toms said, on July 14, 2009 at 10:42 am

      Hamster uses reminders. In 2.27 cycle we added also reminder for the idle cycle.
      Reminder is not connected to actions. I’m sure we will revisit the world of forgotten activities at some point.

      Reply
  37. John said, on August 24, 2009 at 9:59 pm

    This looks great, and is something I would like to try out on Ubuntu. Is the time tracking data exportable in any format? XML would be ideal.

    Reply
  38. Toms said, on August 25, 2009 at 10:48 pm

    Data export has been introduced in 2.28, which is now also available in Karmic Koala alpha 4.

    Reply
  39. Yotam said, on October 10, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    I use karmic and cannot find the export function (only the html generator). How can I activate it?

    Reply
    • Toms said, on October 10, 2009 at 10:51 pm

      the save button in overview allows you to specify the format too

      Reply
      • Yotam said, on October 10, 2009 at 11:10 pm

        That’s great, thanks!

  40. Ivo Jimenez said, on November 4, 2009 at 6:48 am

    Hi,

    Thanks so much for developing this nice app. I love it. It is very useful to know where your time is going to.

    One thing I think it would improve the usabilty of the applet (at least for me) is sub-categories or tags or both XD Do you plan to add something alike?

    Thanks!

    Reply
  41. Richard Moore said, on November 4, 2009 at 4:29 pm

    Hi Toms,

    I’ve been using Hamster for well over a year now, and it’s the core of my working life – everything goes here! I just upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.10 and with this received the new version of Hamster as per your screen shots. The only thing is that the bars on the charts don’t show – the numbers are there, nicely scattered among unseen bars, but …

    Could I be missing some dependencies or is there another problem? I like this more informative version though.

    Thanks Toms.

    Reply
  42. Brie said, on November 18, 2009 at 10:38 am

    Can’t wait to get started with this! :-) !

    Reply
  43. james said, on November 19, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    Wow. People are really writing some great open source apps these days. I love the UI for Hamster, simple and to the point.

    This program and Specto has really changed my workflow for the better.

    Reply

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