Comment 15 for bug 686062

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JHSaunders (james-h-saunders) wrote : Re: hamster-applet should have appindicator support

To put my 2 cents worth into this discussion. I use hamster a lot. I do a lot of contract work and have to time my hours reasonably precisely in order to bill, so I have some experience with it. In this case I disagree with the powers that be (Mark and Jamie). I don't think integration into the clock applet is a good idea, my main reasons are:

  * It is important to be able to see what task you are currently working on and how long you have been working on it. I know that you get notifications every X minutes, but in practice I find it extremely useful to just be able to glance up and see what your work status is.
  * Telling the time and knowing how long you have been working on a task are conceptually different, however they look very similar in that they are both in the form of hh:mm, I feel that putting them in one unit would create confusion. If you concur with my first point, then having two very different concepts of time sharing an indicator will end up being very confusing.

I have forked Alberto's code on github (by the way, fantastic work Alberto) and packaged it as a proper python setup-tools package. I have also made a few changes and integrated a few from other forks. I would love to turn it into a PPA but am still figuring out the system ( a link to a good tutorial would be greatly appreciated).

My vision is to extend Alberto's indicator to completely eliminate the need for the hamster front end. The project-hamster backend is very powerful and well though out, but the front end does not fit into unity well. The only major feature that the current indicator lacks is the ability to enter a new task. Already project-hamster has an advanced text parser to allow you to add a task,with tags and description and other things in a single text entry. I would like to add a text entry to Alberto's indicator, much like the me menu. And then that could be used to add a new tasks. Perhaps you could click on the menu item for the currently running task and it would be replaced by a text entry with focus, you then type in your task and hit enter and it changes. I think this would be elegant and efficient.

I have been trying to implement this, but I cannot figure out how to add a text entry as a menu item (in pygtk). Once that problem is solved all thats needed is a little glue code and some ppa packaging, then we have a great and elegant unity version of the hamster time tracker.