dahamwirdensalat

I wanted to quickly finish a new version (0.6.2) of Timesheet before going to Portugal for a one-week holliday. The changes would do away with the darn lag when editing a time entries notes (or other attributes) when an entry is currently running.

This was quickly implemented, but some tests showed that the time savings where not significant unless I implemented a full cache for all dates in the database (something I wanted to do a long time ago), so I started to do that. And of course, this is more work than expected, and although it’s more or less done, I cannot release the code because it is practically untested.

So, instead of a 0.6.2 today, I offer you a 0.7 at the end of august. And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy a holliday in Lisbon and won’t feel a bit bad about not giving you a new version before I leave.

Timesheet 0.6.1 is available.
As the version number suggests, this is a quick maintenance release.

I fixed two problems in the localization strings (one language mixup and one missing string), and a bug in the search function that would generate an error if the search term matches the name of a project.

Mr. Schönswetter asked me to include a confirmation dialogue when deleting a time entry, and of course I did.
If you don’t like confirmation dialogues (like me), you can turn it off in the configuration settings, but it is turned on by default.

As always, get the latest version at the download page.

Version 0.6 of Timesheet finally arrived.
I’ve added some reporting functionality that generates charts and tables for your data.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

It’s been three months since the last Timesheet release, and I think you’ve waited long enough for a new version (I like to let you wait a little so you don’t get too demanding).

You can get Timesheet 0.5 at the download page, as usual, or through the update checker.

Version 0.5 contains a couple of bug fixes and two new features: Data can be exported into the iCal format, and I’ve added a simple search function.

Have fun!

It’s been a while since I last wrote something about Timesheet. Sometimes, silence is a sign of work. The reporting and iCal code was thrown out. Relunctantly, I’ve taken up work on a caching mechanism that will make the startup of Timesheet much faster.
The user interface will present a cached version of the last state of the interface, while the actual data from the database is loaded in the background. It’s a bit tricky, because I’ll have to handle user-input in a queue, while keeping the fact that you’re not actually working on your data completely transparent. I hope I’ll be able to finish this in this week.

Or: Why you should always branch from the trunk
One of the things that make software development interesting is that you always learn something new. This weekend I learned that you should always start a new branch when you’re about to work on new features, even in such a small project like Timesheet.
At the moment, I’m working on charts for reporting and integration with iCal files.
And then, there’s this small changeset that fixes a harmless, but annoying bug in 0.4.3. I can’t release it, because charts and iCal integration aren’t done yet.
The next time, I’ll branch. I swear.

Timesheet 0.4.3 is here.

This version has the ability to check for updates on the website. The functionality is avaible via the “help” menu (which does not make much sense, but seems to be the place de jour for this sort of stuff) or you can set it to automatically check for new versions on startup. Please note that this feature is disabled by default.

The felt startup time of 0.4.3 is lower than for 0.4.2, because the application connects to the HSQLDB database after the main window is created. No change on the total loading time.

I swear to god, if I make this thing start faster, I’ll call it a 0.5.

As promised, more frequent updates to Timesheet. Release 0.4.2 is an iterative release: It fixes one critical bug that would hinder it from starting when there was no configuration file present (only relevant for new users), but apart from that, there are very few new features.

As always, get it from the Download page.

I told you so, didn’t I?

Right on the heels of Timesheet 0.4 is version 0.4.1 with a few improvements.

From the changelog:

About that drag-thingy: The CSV-export always was a bit clumsy. It worked, but took too many steps to perform. I didn’t remove the old way (because it has date-filtering and gizmos like that), but added another one:
By dragging for example a project from the project overview into a texteditor, you get a comma-seperated list of all time entries for that project. The same for days, months and years from the date overview. Specific time entries can be exported the same way.
It makes exporting data just so much easier.

As always, get it from the download page.

Ok, nobody manged to spot the obscure movie reference I was making, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I just finished release 0.4 of Timesheet, which is an interative step from 0.3 without huge leaps or changes.

The overview now has three dimensions (years, months, days) as promised, and I did some housecleaning here and there. I also found out that the last version is now exactly four months old, so I’ll promise to spend more time on Timesheet, and more continously.

So grab your copy on the download page.

And whoever can tell what obscure movie reference I mangled into the title gets their accomplishment published here.

Anyway, I had found time to do some work on Timesheet again. I already changed the way the month list looks like; instead of a two-hierarchical view with months and days, it now has three levels: Years, months and days. This should make the overview nicer and cleaner.

There are some other issues and minor problems I’d like to fix in this release, especially the following annoying little things:

1. Automatically expand the current date on startup and when a time period is started or ended.
2. Manually changed entries do not trigger an update of the total time values. (Created or deleted entries do)

Two concerns remain, and I’m not sure how to fix them: First of all, startup time is too long. Timesheet is a small utility application, and should start up much faster. This is mostly dependant on the initialization of the HSQLDB, so I’m not sure if I can fix this (not loading the complete data at startup might help though, it should save us one or two seconds).

Secondly, memory consumption. Same rationale as with the startup time: Timesheet uses too much memory for a small helper. Currently data is cached in memory for speed (so we don’t have to requery the database everytime a little thing changes), so I will have to see if I can speed up dataquerying a bit in order to cache less.

Both issues will definitely not be solved in the next release, but I think the update will bring some enhancements nonetheless.

The trac workspace for Timesheet on svn.subnet.at has been disabled as announced.

Please refer to this site for downloads.
Thank you.