Fedora 23 can't drag time to select interval

jplorier commented 8 years ago

Since upgrade to Fedora 23 I can't drag a time interval to fix start and end time of a task.

t-nelis commented 8 years ago

Hitting this, in fact I'm not quite sure how to change the date. https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/blob/master/help/C/input.page doesn't mention anything about that.

Work-around for those stuck with this:

$ sqlite3 $HOME/.local/share/hamster-applet/hamster.db

Determine relevant activity and fact ID by issuing SELECT statements against activities and facts.

Then, for example:

update facts set start_time=datetime(start_time, '-3 days') where id=15;

(Which moves the start time to three days prior without touching the time. Use end_time for activity end time.)

PS: "hamster-applet" might not be the most appropriate name for that directory.

elbenfreund commented 8 years ago

Thank you for your feedback, it is much appreciated.

Project hamster and its various sub-components is currently undergoing some major changes. We prepare the introduction of a rewritten codebase for most of the underlying functionality. A direct consequence of this is that it is unlikely that any open/new bugs within the current/old codebase will be fixed (unless someone steps up and offers to do so) as most resources currently available will be invested in making the rewrite prime time ready.

t-nelis commented 8 years ago

@elbenfreund Thanks for your quick response and your involvement (I did read about the transition). Looking forward to it (truly), the work is necessary and appreciated.

elbenfreund commented 8 years ago

Thank you for the encouragement :) hope to have you beta testing the new version once it gets there ...

t-nelis commented 8 years ago

Sure thing, I should still be around.

(Our team uses Toggl and so I'm relatively annoyed by it on a daily basis, which is a good way of keeping up my interest in Hamster. In fact I'd like to attempt an integration between the two with Hamster pushing data to Toggl's HTTP API if I get too annoyed. The recent activity in the project would make it all the more worthwhile.)

elbenfreund commented 8 years ago

That is exactly one of the two mid term perspectives and actually my original starting point working on hamster's core ages ago. I wanted to write a new storage backend that could map a REST API to hamsters own ontology.. well here we are now still working on a solid foundation so this can actually be done in a clean maintainable way.

Btw: It would be great if you could maintain a informal list of things that bother you with toggl so it may provide usefull insights on what to get right.

t-nelis commented 8 years ago

Early feedback

I'll do that. Honestly I think it's mostly the integration, I'm annoyed that I have to switch context to manage my activities so the gnome-shell extension is the critical point for me.

Thinking about it some more, I can come up with the following:

Very oddly I don't like to use their auto-incrementing timer. It's likely just me, but I think it's maybe because I subconsciously find it to "pressure" me (like starting a chronometer at the beginning of a race). I end up writing the activity without starting anything and leaving it open as-is, then just manually input the end time and register it when I start the next thing. It's actually closer to what hamster offers, except hamster does auto-merging very well (which is a problem in Toggl), doesn't require me to input the end-time manually (which is cumbersome) and has all the "little things" that streamline the whole process.
For example, the "-10 ..." syntax of Hamster is invaluable to me, I always forget to switch tasks before actually starting them (though that might be a side-effect of not having it integrated in my environment properly).
The inline category and tag syntax of Hamster is really good. I find selecting something in a dropdown inefficient (even via keyboard); optional autocomplete dropdowns are the way to go. I'm tempted to suggest simplifying it to just tags, though I understand why categories exist (mostly to provide a simple way to visualize the proportions of time spent in each I reckon). I'm probably just new to it and need to get used to it (I don't use hamster regularly yet, just started whenever I'm on a specific side-project).
Inserting an activity inside another and have it split the larger one automatically is a great feature of Hamster too. A classic scenario is a colleague "quickly" asking for something which ends up lasting quite a bit of time, then going back to the initial task at hand, forgetting to switch activities "live".
The Toggl Linux desktop client is, AFAICT, neglected. I tried to use it but I don't stick to it when I do.

Note regarding the auto-increment timer: Maybe it's also my OCD kicking in after I saw that their timer code somehow makes Firefox flush something to disk on every increment, i.e. each second, which is very bad for battery life. Didn't check what it was exactly, but it was writing to the FX places sqlite database AFAIR. Maybe Firefox is to blame, but I can't imagine why the application would need anything that incurs such a side-effect. So I guess what I'm saying is that good engineering is something I care about too, but that doesn't represent a lot of users.

Integrations

Well now I'm even more enthusiastic about it. Toggl's data model seems very similar (they do use "projects" instead of "categories" but functionally they seem completely equivalent, so I say they map pretty well). Tags, titles, start/end times are all similar. Hamster however does differentiate between activity name and description. Again I'm quite new so I'd consider simplifying it, but I imagine it's there for a reason and I'll find it useful once I get used to it. When it comes to integrating that in Toggl, I suppose the strings will have to be concatenated somehow. Toggl also supports a "billable activity" feature; that can be mapped using a specially configured tag in Hamster.

My personal use-case isn't too complicated as I would merely need to push the data to Toggl once a day (even once a week would be enough, before the weekly report). Hence, stamping the last sync somewhere and pushing the recent activity to their API simply by reading the sqlite database of Hamster would be enough. I'd even prefer such an asynchronous process to a more "realtime" process that would require closer integration with Hamster, but I realize many people will want that as well.

Conversation

"Sorry, I lacked the time to make it short."

Feel free to ask me to repost on a mailing list or wherever, I realize I just derailed this issue (not intentionally, I promise).

ederag commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the detailed feedback !

In v2.1.1, there is no way to modify date by mouse. This will probably have to wait for the rewrite (hamster-gtk).

To modify the date, double-click the activity in the main window, which opens "update activity", where the date can be modified in the text line.

ederag commented 5 years ago

In v2.2.2, the date can be modified by clicking on the arrows at left and right of the timeline (above the entry).

ederag commented 4 years ago

With #461 date and time can be modified by mouse only using dropdown completions. But it is still not possible to use the Timeline to drag times, as no easy fix was found. It will have to wait a while longer, unless someone else finds the solution.

mwilck commented 4 years ago

This feature seems to have been deliberately dropped in hamster 2.0:

commit d00d534bb78cf1342a45f1b3e4a7e950fe634cd0
Author: Toms Bauģis <toms.baugis@gmail.com>
Date:   Sun Feb 9 17:36:17 2014 -0500

    fix presentation, drop interactivity

Unfortunately this doesn't tell much.

projecthamster / hamster