I will think of a simple yet flexible way to rollover to the next day; that function is quite poor right now and apparently it's something people would like to see improved.

PS I am in the UK , and its 0:24 and the times have not reset from yesterday ??

-stevenhealey (January 05, 2007, 06:25 PM)

That's correct, right now the application just logs for the date that was detected at startup. So in this case you would have to restart WorkCoach to roll over to the next day. Also see what I wrote in an earlier post:

In principle, the day is simply defined as the (local) date on the machine WorkCoach is running on, so midnight local time is the "roll over time". However, the program determines the date on startup and keeps using that date until shutdown, so in practice we have a "dynamic roll over time" that works fine for those overnight activities, as long as you don't restart WorkCoach. :-}

-Arjen

The ability to reset the project times at any time of the day would make the program more flexible ,
morning sessions , afternoon session and evening session would then be possible.

-stevenhealey

I am considering implementing logging exact times in a future version, as opposed to just logging the time spent as it is now. So then this problem would also be solved...

If I understood you correctly the program currently keeps a much simpler counter of time used per window and simply increments this and saves it in a file.

-gottadoit (January 04, 2007, 09:28 PM)

Yes, that is correct. Recording exact times instead of time spent would indeed require a different approach of the program. I will definitely keep it in mind, but I'd want to think of a good way to do it, and would like to implement some other features first. Also, it would be a departure from the philosophy I had in mind with this application: keep track of what you've done, and help you do what you want to do - but not by imposing when you do it, just by coaching you into spending the time you had planned to spend on your projects. (The time budgets is something that still has to be implemented.)

Can you think of a way I could adjust the program so it'll be useful for you, but without logging exact times? Do you really need exact times for your timesheet? I can imagine merging the XML files is possible without creating overlap if you keep in mind that when you are working on a remote computer, your RDP client is logged on the local machine. If you're working on the local machine, idle time is logged on the remote machine.

I've also used WorkPace and I agree it's a shame you can't make your own reports. I have tried WorkRave once but can't remember it had any (decent) reporting or statistics, but that might have changed since I've used it...

Seeing as you are resetting the timer each "day" it would be useful if a "day" could be defined, in some cases it might be useful to run the day so that it finishes after midnight.

In principle, the day is simply defined as the (local) date on the machine WorkCoach is running on, so midnight local time is the "roll over time". However, the program determines the date on startup and keeps using that date until shutdown, so in practice we have a "dynamic roll over time" that works fine for those overnight activities, as long as you don't restart WorkCoach. :-} So you'll probably agree with me that something better might be needed here... Your suggestion of a user definable rollover time sounds like a good idea.

Thanks again for your comments!

Hi Seriema,

Glad to hear you like it!

Your suggestion of adding the option "count idle time as project time" to projects sounds very usefull, so I I'll add it. That would mean if a project that has this option checked is active, and the user becomes idle, the program will keep counting time towards that project instead of starting to count idle time. Do we agree? :-)

Right now WorkCoach starts counting idle time after one minute of user inactivity. I plan to make this time user configurable, so that might also help a little bit towards your problem.

I agree that it's inconvenient that you have to switch between the Project and Rules tabs, and that these two had better be combined or integrated somehow. I did it this way because I was afraid to make the GUI too complicated. You're suggestion to put the Add/Modify/Remove buttons under the Projects list in the Rules tab sounds like the best option right now. If you have any other ideas on this, let me know.

With regard to resetting the timer: the timer is now reset every day. The idea is that the program records the time spent on each project per day. I plan to save the project log to XML files (see my previous post) so you will have an XML file for each day containing time spent per project. Since they are XML files you can make HTML or even PDF reports (or other formats) from them with XSLT or XSL-FO. I might add a report function to the program later that can call these transformations.

I just noticed WorkCoach prioritizes projects without a window title rule over projects with one. Example, I had 2 projects:
Working in Visual Studio (a default rule)
My specific Visual Studio project (a rule for "devenv" with my title)

While working on my project, it counts towards the "Working in Visual Studio" project instead of my specific one. If I remove "Working in Visual Studio" then the time goes correctly to "My specific Visual Studio project". It should be the other way around..?

-Seriema (January 02, 2007, 06:18 PM)

If you have a project containing a "wildcard rule", i.e. the window title rule is empty, that project overrules another project containing a rule for the same application, but only if that other project is lower in the list than the project with the wildcard rule. (In other words: WorkCoach cycles through the projects and rules, starting at the top, and just takes the first one that matches.)

This is a known issue and described in the first post of this thread. I will definitely fix this since this is not desirable behaviour.

A workaround now is to make sure that the project with the wildcard rule is lower in the list than the project with the specific rule. Since you can't move projects up and down in the list, you'll have to do this by deleting and adding the project. We apologize for the inconvenience. :-)

Thanks for your feedback, and I'd be happy to hear about your further experiences.

Arjen.