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Time tracking is not fun but has often to be done. Therefore it should be as quick and easy as possible. SimpleTimeTracker tries to provide exactly this: time tracking with as little overhead as possible.
SimpleTimeTracker is for you if you
- are a freelancer working on different projects for different customers and have to track time you spend on each project
- are working at a company where your boss wants nice numbers to report to customers or to his boss
- work on a private project and want to track how long you worked on feature X
- want to keep time tracking records safe on your harddisk (instead of storing it in the cloud)
Some people like graphical UIs where they can just click on "start task x now" while others like CLI software because can be scripted or they just have no X server. Therefore, SimpleTimeTracker provides both, an easy to use graphical UI and a CLI interface.
If your system is configured to handle .jar files by just (double) clicking them, this is what you get by (double) clicking SimpleTimeTrack.jar after downloading:
and here is a screenshot of the CLI (Bash on Xubuntu 14.04) showing how to track two items and the report of those:
If this does not work for one reason or another, see "Running SimpleTimeTrack" below.
When you start working on a task, fire up the GUI and enter the description what you are working on in the big input field below the table. To save the entry and close the window, hit CTRL+ENTER or click on "Done". A new entry is created with the current time as start time. If you work on something else, just open the GUI again, enter the new description and save the entry by clicking "Done" or hitting CTRL+ENTER. The new entry is saved using the current time as start and the old entry gets the current time as end time.
If you want to take a break, open the GUI again and enter "fin" (without the quotes) as comment. The last item you worked on will get the current time as end time.
The reporting window currently looks like this:
It can be opened by clicking on "Show report" in the main window. Clicking on a field in the reporting table, its contents will be copied to the system clipboard for easy pasting into other time tracking applications or where ever you like.
If (double) clicking SimpleTimeTrack.jar does not work for you, there are other options.
- Creating a shortcut on Windows: FIXME: SCREENSHOT of shortcut "java -jar path/to/jar"
- Creating a shortcut in Gnome: FIXME: SCREENSHOT of shortcut "java -jar path/to/jar"
- In a command line enter
java -jar path/to/SimpleTimeTrack.jarand hit ENTER
java -cp path/to/SimpleTimeTrack.jar org.stt.cli.Main will output a short help text which commands are available
To avoid typing the command above, create a script, make it executable (chmod +x) and put it in your $PATH (e.g. $HOME/bin):
#!/bin/bash
java -cp path/to/SimpleTimeTrack.jar org.stt.cli.Main $*See CLI for details about available commands and their syntax.
When SimpleTimeTrack is started for the first time, it automatically writes its config directory into your home directory ($HOME/.stt on Linux and Cygwin, %HOMEPATH%.stt on Windows). Each config option is commented in the config file and the default values are shown.
Simply download the new SimpleTimeTrack.jar and replace the old one with it.
Currently there is no possibility to edit tracked times directly in SimpleTimeTrack but you can edit $HOME/.stt yourself. Just open it in your favorite text editor. The syntax of .stt should be self-explanatory.
Last but not least, there will be more features, but there currently is no roadmap. If you want/need a feature: create an issue describing your wishes/needs or even better: clone the repository, implement the feature and send a pull request.
- Integration of Bugtrackers like Atlassian Jira or Bugzilla: Using issue titles as comments and pushing tracked times if the Bugtracker used allows it.
- Editing tracked times from GUI and/or CLI
- Integration of other time tracking software
- Maybe more reporting options