I was asked to report on the time I was spending on different tasks each day. As quick as a flash, I was reminded of Dick’s Excel tool for doing this.
Not too shabby for sure, but these days I’m not always in Excel, and although I could extend Dick’s code, it doesn’t do everything out of the box. So I took a look around, I didn’t look very far to be fair, but I quickly found Rachota. It’s a light weight Java app, its not too bad, but I found it slightly awkward to use. For example to change the tasks you have to jump around the dialog a bit. The dialogs a little ugly, and there’s not much in the way of reporting. Overall a step up from Dicks addin, but still not something I could use meaningfully.
My next, and I’m happy to say final, stop was the mighty; Grindstone. Firstly a bonus point for the name. It’s a .Net app (looking at the grid control 2+). Itlooks nice and is well layout -not perfect mind. I would have liked to see the bottom controls at the top or in the middle of the dialog – better still, if I could place them where I wanted, but no big deal.
At least you can work down the dialog logically. Reporting is available out of the app, it will fill out a grid control which, inexplicably, you can’t copy out of, but you can export to XML. It also has the ability to calculate invoices, based on a rate table, but I have not used this myself.
Over all a lovely little application!
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If I had to do this, I’d certainly consider paying $25-ish for http://timesnapper.com/ – there’s also the “Classic” version, which is free but less capable. Fortunately, my boss is a grown-up… ;-)
Blimey, timesnapper, I can the IT department having a field day running that in a silent mode!!
>>Fortunately, my boss is a grown-up… ;-)
Don’t rub it in Mike! :-)
Hello Ross,
thanks a lot for your mention of my Rachota Timetracker – I am author of this program :-). I take your comments as a constructive criticism so don’t worry. :-) Although I don’t understand what difficult you find about editing tasks but as for the reporting features it’s going to improve in Rachota 2.3 that is being developed right now. If you are interested please take a look at the concept [1] or even join our design or Beta testing team!
[1] https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rachota/index.php?title=Rachota_2.3_Concept
Merry Christmas and a successful year 2010!
-Jirka
Hi Jirka,
Thanks for your comments, working with tasks is not too odours, but because I’m going to be using this a lot, its important that it feels really easy and smooth.
Specifically what I found a bit awkward was the fact that you have to pick the task in the list box, then go down the page to click the select button (did I not just do that when I picked it in the list box) and then back up the form to click the work button. It’s a bit up and down you see – not the end of the world.
Good luck with developing your application, and thanks for sharing them with us all!
Ross
Ross,
Even though the Invoice and Timesheet reports in Grindstone don’t have copy buttons, you can still select all the rows in them and hit Ctrl+C on the keyboard and then paste anywhere. We’re looking at ways to optimize the screen real estate to include the Copy button there as well.
Thanks for the review, by the way. =)
Daniel Henry
Epiforge Software
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the comment. I did try the ctrl+C option, but it did not work, which is odd, as it’s default functionality right! Maybe I was fat figured!
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Ross
I tried Grindstone and was immediately surprised that I cannot add ad hoc comments to each task (which can be done in Dick’s). I find ad hoc comments quite valuable (necessary) to further explain or track time details. A report would have two columns: “Time Category” and “Notes”.
If we don’t have notes, we could end up with one task per timed event.