I have been tangled up with PHP work for the past while but have managed to get some things done with j2Cal in the meantime. The big deal, for me anyway, is the addition of time tracking to the app. Jump the break if you are interested in what’s coming.
As a freelance nerd, time tracking has been the bane of my existence for, well, forever. I have tried most every time tracking thing that has come along and they are all either too much or too little. Mostly too much. The only one I have found that actually works for me in any OS is Hamster. Trouble is I jump OS’s a lot and I travel, so… enter Android. It seemed like a no brainer to add time tracking to j2Cal, I have the phone with me most everywhere anyway. So here is what I’ve come up with so far.
 main screen |
This is the main screen for time tracking. Tasks or projects are shown in the list with the cumulative time for today. The top item in the list is the active task being tracked. You touch the list item and the timer starts and touch again to stop or switch. Long press allows editing of the task.
This whole thing has been kept deliberately simple because my needs are simple. There are no sub tasks and all that rot. Basically I need to know who to bill and how much at the end of any given period. |
 report screen |
This is the report screen. You can pick a custom date range with the top buttons or a predefined range with the bottom button, this week, last week, this month, last month. The summary checkbox just shows a list with the totals.
You can export from here to CSV or plain text and email or save to the SD card. |
 events |
This is the events screen showing each individual chunk of time recorded. You can change, add or delete events for any given day |
So far I am pretty happy with how this is coming together. The real seller for me is I am actually using this, something I have been unable to keep up with in other trackers, save Hamster.
In other news, connectivity is starting to become an issue. j2Cal’s main lure, I think, is that is requires no network access, something important when you live in Canada where the cellular companies take their mantra from the Huns, raping and pillaging people’s wallets. They’re savages so data use is a factor at all times in the Great White North, but that’s for another rant. Perhaps it’s time to split the project into regular and pro versions with syncing and that that stuff in the pro and bare bones in the regular version. Not sure how handle that yet but I can see with the time tracking, how it would be handy to be able integrate with other services.
Speak, if you’ve a mind.
