PTimeTracker

Contents

• What is PTimeTracker?
• Features
• Screen Shots
• Documentation
• Download
• Changes
• Credits

What is PTimeTracker?

As graduate students time is of vital importance to us. Some of the questions about time that are daily of interest are : How long do we spend staring out of the window? and How long do we take for our lunch breaks? It was with this in mind that work on PTimeTracker began in earnest.

PTimeTracker is a small Qt-based program that helps you keep track of the time spent on projects. The time in minutes spent on the active project is displayed on the icon and title bar and therefore viewable even when the program is minimised. A detailed report is available on total hours worked on different projects. This report displays the amount of time spent on each of the projects per day.

Upon completion of the project the answer to the above questions were discovered. Of course, now that we had written the program we spent no time staring out the window or at lunch because we were too busy with PTimeTracker. (: Have fun ...

Disclaimer:We would just like to say that PTimeTracker will not make you organised or more disciplined.

Features

• Main widget shows total time worked on project today.
• Report widget shows time spent on each project for the week.
• Projects can be grouped into categories so you can see how much time you spent on particular sorts of activities (such as stuffing around).
• Autostop function allows auto stopping of clock at a specified time. Perfect for those who tend to forget turning PTimeTracker off when leaving work.
• Current project and time spent shown on both title and icon, which means time spent is be visible in most window managers even when PTimeTracker is minimised.
• Configurable options include auto save frequency and what's shown on the title and icon.
• Remembers the size of the main window and the project selected when you last run PTimeTracker.
• There's a Edit Project Dialog so you can adjust time spent on projects to your heart's content.
• The report information can be printed to a printer to enable documentary evidence of what you have been doing.
• The program is actually used by the authors everyday, so it is really usable.

Screenshots

Below are four screenshots illustrating the program in operation. They can be clicked on to enlarge them. The main window shows the interface that is presented to the user upon running the program. The report widget shows the status for a week in december 2000. (Our diligence is graphically illustrated and during xmas too). The last two show how the current project and time spent are shown in the minimised icons in KDE and WindowMaker.

Main Window	Report Widget	Toolbar in KDE	Miniwindow in WindowMaker

Documentation

Have a look at the man page.

Download

PTimeTracker is normally available as source tarballs. But sometimes there are binary packages available. You'll need Qt 3.0 to compile it. It is developed on Linux. We have not tested it on any other unices, but it has been reported that it works fine if compiled with gcc and gmake.

• Latest version: ptimetracker-1.7.3.tar.gz
• Version 1.7.2, with binaries available
  • ptimetracker-1.7.2.tar.gz
  • ptimetracker-1.7.2-1.i586.rpm: Binary rpm. Build on a Mandrake 9.2 linux box.
  • ptimetracker-1.7.2-1.src.rpm: Source rpm. Set the environment variable QTDIR (instruction here) before rpm --rebuild or --recompile.
• ptimetracker-1.6.0.tar.gz : older version that uses Qt 2.0

Changes

Here are a list of the major changes since the last version of the program. They are in no way exhaustive but may be of use if you are interested in code archeology. Incidentally if by examination of this record you can predict where this code will be in 2 years then tell us now (: A more detailed version of this information can be found in the actual ChangeLog file.

• Version 1.7.3 (11 July 2004)
  • Added basic text export of report data.
• Version 1.7.2 (18 Feb 2004)
  • Corrected erratic info in the About box.
• Version 1.7.1 (13 Feb 2004)
  • Fixed problem with printing reports with long project and/or category names.
  • Multiple fixes and changes to report widget.
• Version 1.7 (28 July 2003)
  • Interface change in main window
  • Minor code change for Qt3.0 and gcc3.2
• Version 1.6 (13 July 2000)
  • Printing from report widget.
  • Sort projects into categories a la palmpilots.
  • Stop timer at a user defined time each day (solved the left it running through the night problem).
  • Improved most widget handling by use of layout managers.
• Version 1.5 (11 March 2000)
  • Initial public release.

Credits

PTimeTracker was written by :

• Sylvia Wong (sylviaw (at) gmail.com)
• lee middleton (ljm (at) ecs.soton.ac.uk)

It was inspired by the program TimeTracker by Harald Tveit Alvestrand. We completely rewrote it as we didn't like the Athena widget set and some of the functionality and we thought that we may as well reinvent the wheel.