Tip of the day: Clearing the History

July 19th, 2009

TimeTracker saves each and every invocation of a task. This list is always accessibly through the history. As mentioned previously it is easy to remove single tasks, e.g. if you have started a task accidentally. However, it is also possible to clear the whole history of a task or project at once. When you tap the “Clean” button in the toolbar you are asked for confirmation before TimeTracker actually removes all invocations from the current task or project.

Additionally, it is also possible to remove only invocations which have been recorded in a certain period of time. This can be done by employing the Time Filter feature. For example, if you active the Time Filter to show only the tasks which have been active for the current day and you tap the “Clean” button all invocations in this time frame are removed. All other time entries are untouched. This gives you a more fine grained control about what you remove from the history.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us by writing a comment or sending an email to feedback at mobileapps.de. Check out the other posts in the “Tip of the day” section.

Tip of the day: Time Filter

July 18th, 2009

When you have tracked the time while working on your tasks you soon will get long lists of time entries in the history. If you need to know how much time you have spent in a certain period of time you would have to scroll through the list and sum up the individual times manually. This process would be very cumbersome of course. We thought that we can do better than that.

When we started working on TimeTracker 2 we came up with the concept of a “Time Filter”. With this feature you can easily narrow the list of tracked time entries down to the ones which have been recorded in a certain period of time. The Time Filter can always be activated by tapping the rightmost button in the toolbar which depicts a calendar icon. You can see that the Time Filter is activated when a shiny grey bar moves into the view which contains information about the currently selected time frame.

With the activated Time Filter the list of tasks or time entries only contains the items which have records from the selected period of time. Additionally, the duration for tasks or the total duration for all shown items is updated according to the Time Filter settings, too. Now it is very easy to see how much time was spent on a project during the past week for example.

The “Time Filter” bar at the top of the screen contains left and right arrows. Use these arrows to switch to the previous or next time frame, for example last week or the week before last week. When you tap on the label in the center of the “Time Filter” bar a settings dialog appears which lets you choose from the time period you like to work with. At the moment it is possible to filter the list by days, weeks and months.

If you want to switch back to the full view of items simply tap the “Time Filter” button in the toolbar again and the “Time Filter” bar disappears from the view smoothly.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us by writing a comment or sending an email to feedback at mobileapps.de. Check out the other posts in the “Tip of the day” section.

Tip of the day: Edit Projects & Tasks

July 17th, 2009

TimeTracker manages the tasks you are working on. Additionally, the tasks can be organized in projects. Adding projects and tasks is straight forward: Just tap the “+” button in the toolbar to either add a project or task depending on the type of the current view. Set the name of the project or task and – in case of a task – select the project. That’s it!

Of course it is also possible to edit the properties of a project or task later if you which to do so. Just hit the “Edit” button in the top right corner of the screen. The view switches to the edit mode and you are now able to delete items from the list and rearrage them. If you tab a project or task item a dialog appears which lets you change the name of the item. In case of the task you are also able to switch the project.

Once you are finished with the modifications simply hit the “Done” button in the top right corner and the view switches back to normal mode.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us by writing a comment or sending an email to feedback at mobileapps.de. Check out the other posts in the “Tip of the day” section.

Tip of the day: Deleting single invocations

July 16th, 2009

Recently, we got some questions from users asking if and how it is possible to remove single invocations from the history. First of all, removing single invocations is possible since the first version of TimeTracker which supported a history. However, I have to admit that it might not have been this obvious so far.

Deleting an invocation from the history is as simple as deleting an email from the Mail app. Just swipe your finger over a cell in the history which represents an invocation. The familiar “Delete” button will appear at the right side of the table cell. When you tap this button the invocation is removed from the history.

To make this more obvious in the future we will be providing an “Edit” button on the top right corner in the next version of TimeTracker. Tapping this button will show the familiar “Delete” control at the right side of each invocation cell.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us by writing a comment or sending an email to feedback at mobileapps.de. Check out the other posts in the “Tip of the day” section.

TimeTracker 2.0 finally out

April 30th, 2009

Yesterday, TimeTracker 2.0 hit the iTunes App Store. It is available as a free update for all existing users. The introductory price for the application is just 2.99$ (2.39€). After the introduction time we will raise it to 4.99$ (3.99€).

TimeTracker 2.0 delivers a whole bunch of exciting new features:

  • Tasks can be organized in projects
  • Multiple tasks can be tracked at the same time
  • Tasks can be filtered by time frames, for example all tasks that you worked on during the last week
  • The total time is always visible in the toolbar and depends on the Time Filter settings
  • Tracked data can be exported as a CSV file via email and depends on the Time Filter settings

Due to the fact that the new version is almost a complete rewrite of the application we have decided to skip backwards compatibility. Therefore, the existing data is unfortunately lost if you upgrade to TimeTracker 2.0. However, we think that the extended feature set can compensate for that.

Make sure to visit the TimeTracker website to learn more about the application and its set of features. You can also follow us on Twitter.

We would like to hear what you think about the application. Please drop us a note by email (feedback at mobileapps.de), leave a comment or post on Twitter. If you find any issues please send a report to issue at mobileapps.de.

Preview of TimeTracker 2.0 website

April 16th, 2009

We are pleased to announce that a preview of the TimeTracker 2.0 website is now available. Visit it to learn more about the new features of the next major version of TimeTracker. Additionally, you can get a first impression of the revised user interface.

TimeTracker 2.0 submitted for review

April 15th, 2009

TimeTracker 2.0 Icon

TimeTracker 2.0 Icon

After a long time of development and a public beta testing phase we are proud to announce that TimeTracker 2.0 is finished at last. We have submitted it for review and are waiting for the approval by Apple. The new version delivers many improvements and new features. The most obvious change compared to the old version is a new application icon which was designed by Péter Fankhauser. Read the rest of this entry »

TimeTracker 2.0 Beta Test

March 19th, 2009

After a long time of development with lots of design studies and prototypes we are happy to announce that the development of the next major revision of TimeTracker, version 2.0, has come to an end. Therefore we are now looking for participants for a private beta test program. Read the rest of this entry »

Downloading and uncompressing ZIP files

February 7th, 2009

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about working with gzip compressed files on iPhone. Interestingly, it is one of the most frequently viewed posts on this blog according to the stats. Recently, one of my readers send me an email asking to post an example how to download a ZIP file from the web, uncompressing it and saving the result to the local file system. I decided to go through the code of one of my iPhone app prototypes which does exactly this task. In this blog post I briefly outline the steps to accomplish the goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Increasing tapable area of accessory view

February 7th, 2009

The history view of TimeTracker which was introduced in version 1.1 and is accesible through the so-called detail disclosure button. Unfortunately, the default size of the tapable area which causes the history view to be shown is very small. This lead to complaints by our users because timers are started and stopped accidently if the user intended to view the history. One goal for version 2.0 is to circumvent this limitation. In this post I’ll describe a way how to increase the tapable area of the accessory view. Read the rest of this entry »