Hamster Time Tracking Applet

A tweak of the Hamster GNOME applet.

Opening the Overview dialog shows the daily summary, rather than the weekly summary.

Thus you can see the current day's activities without having to scroll.

The Totals screen shows two decimal places for each Activity, rather than just one decimal place.

A tenth of an hour is a full 6 minutes, but a hundredth of an hour is just 36 seconds.

If you're tracking project time on a ticket-by-ticket basic, using more precision makes your task accounting more accurate, especially if you switch between the same handful of tasks multiple times per day.

Select one of more Categories to see two decimal places; if no categories are selected, the display still just shows one decimal place.

Using this fork

Install hamster 2.9 packages from Ubuntu and replace a few files.

(I'm lazy and didn't package this as a standalone project.)

pkill -f hamster-service
pkill -f hamster-windows-service

sudo apt-get install -y hamster-applet hamster-indicator

cd path/to/somewhere
git clone https://github.com/landonb/hamster-applet

sudo /bin/cp -a \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview.py \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview.py.ORIG
sudo /bin/cp -a \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview_totals.py \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview_totals.py.ORIG

sudo /bin/cp -af \
    hamster-applet/src/hamster/overview.py \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview.py
sudo /bin/cp -af \
    hamster-applet/src/hamster/overview_totals.py \
    /usr/share/pyshared/hamster/overview_totals.py

hamster-indicator &

Regarding Hamster 3.x

I tried the newer (3.x) hamster from https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster, but I didn't like it.

I installed it by adding the ppa:dylanmccall/hamster-time-tracker-git-daily aptitude repository and installing hamster-time-tracker.

Some reactions:

The Overview dialog is less useful in 3.x — it only shows weekly activity, with no option to show daily or monthly activity.
The Statistics display is no longer its own tab but a drawer that slides up from the bottom of the dialog, and there's no longer a summary time displayed for each task! (So I can't use the Statistics display to fill out my daily time sheet for work.)
I'm not sure why these features were removed, but it feels like a step backward for the project.

I also tried installing the new applet from https://github.com/projecthamster/shell-extension, but I could not get it to run in MATE (which I love; I'm not a fan of GNOME 3).

Whatever; I'm more happy with the built-in packages that come with Ubuntu 14.04 and that work well in MATE.