Content-type: text/html Man page of ptimetracker

ptimetracker

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: July 2003
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NAME

PTimeTrakcer - A Time Tracking Program

SYNOPSIS

ptimetracker

DESCRIPTION

ptimetracker is a small Qt-based program that helps you keep track of number of hours spent on different projects each day. The time spent on the active project is displayed on the icon and title bar and therefore viewable even when the program is minimized. A detailed report is available on total hours worked on different projects for this and previous weeks.

OPTIONS

No command line options are available.

BASIC OPERATION

There are three main regions in the main window: the menu and tool bar on the top, the project viewing area in the middle and a status bar at the bottom. To add a new project, use either the new project button or File->New. Spaces and latin 1 characters are allowed in project names. (I have never tried latin 1 characters myself, but Qt supports it.) To delete a project, select it and choose File->Delete. To start timing, select a project in the project viewing area and use the start button on the tool bar or Clock->Start. The play button should be greyed out and "Working hard" displayed on the status bar. If you want to change project while working, just select the new project. To pause the timer, use the pause button or Clock->Pause. The status bar should now say "Taking a break". Notice that only one of the start or pause button is active at any given time.

The project viewing area only shows time spent today. A new day starts at 12 midnight, so if you are a night person, you may see the clock roll over and all the time spent cleared. To see time spent on projects in previous weeks, start the report widget using File->Report, or the report button on the tool bar. Use of the report widget will be explained in detail later.

Time spent on the projects today can be adjusted. In the Clock menu, there are two items for adding and subtracting five minutes to and from the current project. For finer adjustment, use Edit->Project. To change the time worked on any other day, edit the dayfiles (see below) by hand.

PROJECT CATEGORIES

Projects can be grouped into categories. A project that does not belong to any category is Unfiled. You can set a project's category when it's first created. You can also change the category of an existing project using Edit->Project. New categories can be created using File->New Category. To delete a category, use File->Delete Category. A dialog box showing all existing categories will be displayed for you to select a category to delete. All projects belonging to the deleted category will be moved to Unfiled. Use the View menu, to show only projects in a single category in the project viewing area.

REPORT WIDGET

The report widget displays summary information about the time spent on various projects over a weekly period. By default the report displays the current weeks activities. The date menu allows the user to change the week the report refers to. There is a choice of this week, last week, or an arbitrary day. For the last option the program will generate a week about the selected date. The view menu allows the user to select what projects are displayed in the window. A toggle button allows selection of categories or individual projects. Finally, the other menu allows the user to print the current report to a printer, or export to a text file.

PREFERENCES

There are a few preferences that can be changed through Edit->Preferences.

Autosave Frequency: How often does the program save its data on disk. The default is every 30 minutes.
Autostop: Enable/Disable auto stopping of clock at specified time (in 24 hr clock). 0 hr 0 min is 12 midnight. If you are the type that tends to forget turning PTimeTracker off when you leave work, enable this option and set the time to when you usually leave.
Caption Text: What is displayed on the title bar. The options should be self-explanatory. For example, PTimeTracker: project time means the word PTimeTracker will be shown on the title bar followed by the name of the current project and then the time spent on it today.
Icon Text: What text is displayed on the icon. Setting the icon text does not have any effect in some window managers, for example, kwm (KDE) and fvwm. In WindowMaker, this sets the text on the minimized icon; in icewm, the task bar.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

PTIMETRACKERDIR Directory where files used in this program are stored. The default is $HOME/.ptimetracker.

FILES

Files related to ptimetracker are all stored in PTIMETRACKERDIR. Files with names YYYY-MM-DD are dayfiles that store times on that day. The list of active projects are stored in projectlist. Categories defined are stored in categorylist. Preferences set through Edit->Preferences are stored in preference. The session file is used for session management. At present, only the size of the window and selected project is stored.

AUTHORS

Sylvia Wong s.wong at auckland.ac.nz

happy ljm at ecs.soton.ac.uk

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 16:19:36 GMT, July 11, 2004