I'm going a little off road here, but I think one of Anand's tools could be useful here. I think he's got one that tags notes to titlebars of some apps, so then you can jam other notes there, and use it in combo with all this stuff.

THat would be Stick A Note from Anandcoral.
Haven't used it myself.

I know I tend to be a bit of a left foot around here, but here's a couple thoughts.

Depending on which side of "three digits" you mean, it starts to drift away from "donations" to bargaining on a full sale for custom software. Leaving the "who has what role" stuff for elsewhere, just being pragmatic, if you have most of the pieces of a custom tool you want, what about going to a "programmer for hire" site like oDesk and just commissioning it?

I have done that a few times, to generally decent results. They're best at what seems like this kind of "raw level" tool creating, and "three digits" could get you really close to what you want. I did something similar, which I then gave to NANY - a bunch of partial tool components when then you think about because I kept finding you keep wanting "one more feature".

I'm a Humanities fella, so this is a guess, but this feels like a pretty simple concept, just requiring a bit of work that I have begun calling "Coding Lunches", to differentiate from the "Coding Snacks" here. But the coding itself doesn't feel that hard, just that it has a lot of little wrinkles to look at. It's not some kind of (insert Star Trek technobabble here) "Multi-threaded real time visual space scanner and interpreter" or whatever.

If you want something that will tremendously improve your life, more than a quick thingie that just does something cute, sometimes the price jump to really get a/some dev partners compensated can really work.

So I suppose this is the solution for the time being -- or is anyone aware of a tool that combines the features of Anuran ("nag me for descriptive text regularly") and a Titlebar tracker ("record the time spent in your projects' files") into ONE application?

This is most certainly possible.  However, if I were to do it, I'd rewrite it from scratch as I wouldn't want to modify Anuran too much from its current functionality.  It was written for a DC member based upon a very specific set of requirements.

At its core, something like this is not too hard to write.  The problem with apps like these is the amount of options and reporting that is to be expected of them.  That's where the headaches come into play.

Anuran actually is like "magically useful" for me.

I haven't worked on it in quite some time, so that's good to hear.  It's definitely a unique application.

here's a tool I wrote sometime ago to nag me about tracking my time.  It might or might not suit your purposes but feel free to do with it what you will

FWIW I used it for quite a while until I the nagging got too much for me (and I realised that I was really good at ignoring the thing (ie it's called nagging for a reason)

I would suggest rather a better time tracking software from Replicon as it has helped in better time management for our business activities. It got great usability and at the same time can be accessed from any location using a web browser and can be quickly implemented in any office environment.

Try it and you would definitely like it for sure!!

I would suggest rather a better time tracking software from Replicon as it has helped in better time management for our business activities. It got great usability and at the same time can be accessed from any location using a web browser and can be quickly implemented in any office environment.

Try it and you would definitely like it for sure!!

One thing about this product and company that I find particularly annoying is the complete absence of pricing information available on their website. I know some folks still like to follow the old 50's era "sell the sizzle, not the steak" mantra by being overly coy about pricing. Apparently with the belief that, if you can demonstrate the usefulness of your product to a potential buyer, they will somehow magically come up with the money to buy it, no matter what.

Guess what? This isn't the go-go 90s any more. Businesses are more budget conscious than ever. If the product doesn't fall within their budget, it's a non-starter no matter how perfect a fit. So stop wasting everybody's time.

I recently had a client spend a dozen or so hours evaluating a product only to discover it was priced several orders of magnitude higher than the highest amount they could even consider. And they didn't find this out until they spoke to something called a "solution specialist" who reluctantly gave them the pricing schedule. Talk about a total waste of time.

In my view, useless for anybody who does not have the resources to hire additional people who look over the actual worker's shoulder and click on "Start Tracking Project" and "Stop Tracking Project" buttons all day long according to what the actual workers are currently doing.

Sorry about that.

Thanks. Had a look at it. Hated the website because it:

a) only shows flashy Apple hardware
b) does not even scroll properly because all of the bling-bling, almost crashed my browser
c) does not have any information about how the product actually works
d) forces you to sign up

To me, this service or whatever it is, seems to be targeted towards the typical mooncalfs in Controlling. Could be otherwise, but for the moment, I'll stick with Anuran.

It's of course not meant personally.

Cheers
David