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Looking for a very flexible timer
Edvard:
Tomos, have you found what you need yet? If not, I'm working on a few ideas in Pascal/Lazarus.
Questions:
1- Would you want to always track time from 0? or should the beginning time be settable, maybe even from actual time?
2- Would you want to have the tasks/notes be running timestamped? or starting a new task starts from 0?
3- Should a list of tasks/notes be hidden until exported, or should there be a running list showing?
I'm having trouble getting everything to sync up close-to-perfect with real time, so:
4- What kind of time tolerance would be acceptable? Say, +/- 1 or 2 minutes per hour?
5- Hotkeys?
If you could, sketch out how you'd like the UI to look. The Trout example is good, but a slider would only be possible if there were a definite 'quitting time', like say you only want to spend 5 hours doing what you're needing done. A slider would be rather inaccurate as well. In the code I'm playing with, I have buttons for forward/reversing seconds, minutes and hours. No direct text entry yet.
Let me know, I'd love to stretch my coding muscles even further...
TaoPhoenix:
I'm having trouble getting everything to sync up close-to-perfect with real time, so:
4- What kind of time tolerance would be acceptable? Say, +/- 1 or 2 minutes per hour?
...
Let me know, I'd love to stretch my coding muscles even further...
-Edvard (April 14, 2015, 01:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
I'm fascinated with what could cause that big of a time gap! I thought computers were pretty good at keeping time! I could see off by a few seconds, but then maybe do "leap adjustments".
What doesn't work with some kind of "triple timekeep" system something like:
Pre: Start time such as starting with a real clock time as desired. If not, this is 0.
A1: Task 1
A2: Task 2
(Various toggles of increment one or both)
B1: Idle1 - when the tasks are paused, increment this perhaps 1-7 times per second - In some senses this is the "Master Idle" that acts like a checksum or such
B2: Custom Idle - User Toggle-able Idle where you know you're not doing a task but you want to know a chunk of time more specific than just the "balancing idle timer". I keep a lot of time notes, and so for ex if reading a portion of a book is the task, I'll wanna know just how long it takes me to stop and go put my laundry into the laundry service. But I don't care about the total idle time such as reading the Complete Collected Posts of Edvard. So you'll end up with a total Idle1 of an hour and a half, and 17 minutes visiting the laundry service.
C: "Emergency Checksum" - With brutally simple math perhaps 3x a minute, the computer simply looks at the computer clock and its various timestamps and accumulates here if something goes wrong and the timed values go off. It could add these back into one of the other categories to keep them on track. Could involve a user dialog if it gets really out of whack. This could also cover the case of the time program closed and re-opened. This part would notice "hey, I'm missing 8 minutes, where do you want to put them?" (Cases include both reboots and "Gaaah I have too many open apps" RageQuitting! Hehe)
tomos:
Tomos, have you found what you need yet? If not, I'm working on a few ideas in Pascal/Lazarus.
Questions:
1- Would you want to always track time from 0? or should the beginning time be settable, maybe even from actual time?
2- Would you want to have the tasks/notes be running timestamped? or starting a new task starts from 0?
3- Should a list of tasks/notes be hidden until exported, or should there be a running list showing?
I'm having trouble getting everything to sync up close-to-perfect with real time, so:
4- What kind of time tolerance would be acceptable? Say, +/- 1 or 2 minutes per hour?
5- Hotkeys?
If you could, sketch out how you'd like the UI to look. The Trout example is good, but a slider would only be possible if there were a definite 'quitting time', like say you only want to spend 5 hours doing what you're needing done. A slider would be rather inaccurate as well. In the code I'm playing with, I have buttons for forward/reversing seconds, minutes and hours. No direct text entry yet.
Let me know, I'd love to stretch my coding muscles even further...
-Edvard (April 14, 2015, 01:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
Great :)
1) No / Yes / Yes - i.e. ideally would be startable from say 1 hour or 15 mins - starting from real time would be a bonus but not necessary to me.
2) this question overlaps with #1 (?) Timestamped would be a bonus, but again, not necessary to me.
3) I'd prefer a running list shown
4) a couple of minutes wouldnt bother me
5) Hotkeys are always good - but for what exactly :-/
Its difficult to find universal hotkeys that will suit every system, so probably better to either have customisable hotkeys - or no universal ones.
I imagine it running in the tray, when I think about it, mouse is fine really.
Wow, it's difficult to imagine an app completely from scratch.
I'm good at being critical of UIs that already exist - I can try them out and see their weaknesses. But I will give this a go and post some sort of a sketch shortly.
tomos:
some method of selection on the left there
Looking for a very flexible timer
It's starting to seem a bit more like a PIM/IM - I wonder are we trying to reinvent the wheel :-\
what do you/ye think?
Edvard:
I'm fascinated with what could cause that big of a time gap! I thought computers were pretty good at keeping time! I could see off by a few seconds, but then maybe do "leap adjustments".
-TaoPhoenix (April 14, 2015, 01:48 AM)
--- End quote ---
Exactly. There's quite a span of difference between lower-level tracking along with system time, and throwing a sleep(1000) and calling it more or less one second. If the system is reliable, that's good enough. But if any significant load occurs in the larger time period, the discrepancies can add up. I planned to do some testing to indeed see if real-time tracking is needed, or if 1000-millisecond timers can do "good enough".
It's starting to seem a bit more like a PIM/IM - I wonder are we trying to reinvent the wheel :-\
-tomos (April 14, 2015, 04:14 AM)
--- End quote ---
Well, I don't know of any PIMs that track time spent on multiple tasks down to the second, so there is a wheel to be invented yet! :P
Like I said, this would be a programming exercise for me, and hopefully something you can make use of. For now, here's a teaser screenshot until I can get back at it tomorrow. Sleep time now. I still haven't implemented a few things (obviously), and the spacing of the UI elements need work, but I'm getting there...
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