Screenshots

Hamster applet clicked – showing today

Overview

Navigate through records, add or remove them, and see totals of single day, week or a month.

Adding elder fact

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

Editing and sorting activities

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

35 comments

Comments feed for this article

June 15, 2008 at 11:56 pm

oslo

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

August 8, 2008 at 11:57 am

Alex

can is automatically log the captions of the opened windows ?

Alex

August 9, 2008 at 8:16 pm

Alex – hamster does not track captions of opened windows.

August 30, 2008 at 5:27 am

andy fitzsimon

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

September 5, 2008 at 7:58 pm

Philippe

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.)

September 16, 2008 at 6:43 am

Mir Nazim

Thanks for the great app.

What if I want to export the stuff??

September 16, 2008 at 6:44 am

Mir Nazim

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

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

September 18, 2008 at 5:05 pm

John

Nice app. I’ve just started using it.

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

jji

November 1, 2008 at 7:56 pm

Michael

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

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

November 5, 2008 at 8:00 pm

Michael

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

November 20, 2008 at 8:10 am

legion1978

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

December 13, 2008 at 12:12 am

Qadir

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?

December 13, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Toms

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

January 8, 2009 at 12:29 am

The Power of Mind | Hamster: controla tu tiempo en Gnome

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

January 23, 2009 at 1:13 am

Gary Trakhman

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?

February 22, 2009 at 10:42 pm

Manfred Pürro

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

February 23, 2009 at 12:12 am

Toms

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.

February 23, 2009 at 8:34 am

Manfred Pürro

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…

February 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm

Manfred Pürro

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…

February 23, 2009 at 3:46 pm

Toms

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

February 23, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Manfred Pürro

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

Keep up with the good work!

February 23, 2009 at 4:58 pm

Manfred Pürro

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?

February 23, 2009 at 5:57 pm

Toms

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

March 10, 2009 at 6:25 pm

Gary B

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”

March 10, 2009 at 6:35 pm

Gary B

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.

April 18, 2009 at 7:09 pm

John Laker