If you’re like me, you frequently need to be able to tell people how long a project took, how much time some bug fixes ate out of the day, or what you worked on the past day. I’ve looked around for a quick & simple app to track my time usage and hadn’t come up with a good match until I recently found Project Hamster. My previous main barrier to usage was laziness and wanting a lightweight program to do this simple task. Hamster makes it dead easy to enter time, add new categories / activities and view simple reports.
The main window where you enter your time sits in your app bar which you can access with either a single click, or a hot key combination. Here you see a breakdown of the current days activities so far, as well as a drop box to choose any previously entered activities, or to add a new one. You can also edit any of the day’s entries from this quick list as well.
Hitting the ’show overview’ button will take you to a nice pretty graph of your past week / month. This can be quite handy to see how long you’ve worked on a project or contact in the current month. You’re also able to categorize related activities so that they group together in a graph.
If you think this would be handy for you, grab the .deb or the source from the Google Project page (you are using linux right?). It’s under active development, so be sure to check the Project Hamster news section every now and then to see if there’s some new feature you’ve been waiting for.
Tags: apps, contracting tools, linux