Rainers Blog

This is just a quick note to let you know that I will be taking over the maintainership of the TimeTracker for mac since Aaron will not have enough time available to move the app forwards in the next year or so.

So thats quite exciting news. At the moment, I have most of the functionality that I want for the next release but there are still a few bugs here and there. Also I will need to work some more on backporting some of the features of the official TimeTracker (sparkle update for once) so that I can make new versions available to people via auto updates rather than needing to work with the website.

All my code is on the google code page and I intend to use this as a repository (I know that Aarons stuff is on GitHub but I am more used to SVN).

However, I encourage participation in the project as I neither have tons of time available nor am I the absolute uber-expert on Mac OS programming. So if you know some Sparkle details, feel free to contribute.

The upcoming version will mainly feature more flexible filtering, along with being able to combine queries such as show me all entries of last thursday, or all records happened on a monday in the past 6 weeks (you get the idea, otherwise look at the screenshot in the previous post).

I will NOT yet include customers as a new grouping hierarchy mainly because I want to get the current version stable and going before I move on.

Future versions will focus on the following features

• ability to define and save custom filters (smart filters)
• adding “customers” as a new grouping hierarchy
• coredata support (could use some help there)
• nicer and better export tools (Numbers, etc. – Long way out)

Regarding a release I need to figure out how to do it properly. As I said I want to eventually make it available through sparkle so that existing users will be notified about the update. I am fairly confident that the application is reasonably stable and I haven’t lost any data in years (not even during my migration from the older timetracker version which is required since the newer version adds support for comments, etc). However, I am not really comfortable with pushing the current version out just yet. So probably I will make a “beta” available here.

Once I have added sparkle support, will then push it into the Beta channel through sparkle. Then after some fixes, I will push the main version.

Let me know your comments!

This is just a quick post so that you guys know what I am currently working on. As posted previously the main task is to make the filtering much smarter than it is today. I imagine this to work like smart playlists in itunes or smart albums in iphoto. See the screenshot for an example.

So the idea is to allow people to configure their own individual filters with elements such as

• start date
• end date
• weekday
• start date >= X days before today

If you have additional recommendations / wishes, let me know.

This is a minor upgrade to TimeTracker. Here is what has changed:

• updated version number to 1.3.1
• shortcut list in menubar also shows currently selected task for quick start
• CSV export can now export either the whole dataset or only the current selection (filter, indicated by the arrow, see screenshot above)

You can download the file here => Time Tracker-1.3.1.app

Some outlook for next versions: I have been toying around with the filtering concept which is currently not really nicely done. I think I will implement something like iTunes smart playlists where you can save your filters and have them easily accessible. Once this is done I will probably look at either merging the code with Aarons version or start implementing CoreData support (currently the whole database is loaded to RAM which will eventually accumulate lots of mem and affect startup/shutdown performance).

Let me know what you think.

I have been troubled by this problems for a couple of days. I have a MS USB keyboard that I use with a Mac (I had it before switching to the Mac and still like it, believe it or not). Anyway, after I reconnected it one day Mac OSX asked me to identify the keyboard (even though I have been using it all along). Ever since then the keyboard behaved strange and the ^ and < keys were swapped, which is obviously quite annoying.

I asked our resident Mac expert and did a bit of googling but I could not find a solution. A couple of days later I could not stand it anymore and did some intense web research and I finally stumbled over this article.

You need to delete the following file in order to make Mac OS forget the keyboard type.

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

I disconnected the keyboard first, deleted the file, reconnected it and Mac OS asked me again to identify the keyboard. After that, everything worked like normal again.

Thanks to Riccardo Raneri, he saved my day.

If you are developing Java on a Mac, chances are pretty high that you are using Eclipse for development. In addition you probably (or at least you better) have lots of RAM too, however, Eclipse is a bit conservative when allocating RAM. If you have tons of plugins installed, or the plugins are quite heavy (Android SDK, I am looking at you), then you can easily get in low memory situations.

The way to change the max amount of memory reserved for eclipse is somewhat buried and not trivial to find (unless you ask Google). The way to do it is to go into the eclipse folder, right click on Eclipse.app and then select “Show Package Contents”. Inside look for the eclipse.ini file (if you are running windows you can skip this step).

Here is my version of the eclipse.ini

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar
–launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.0.0.v20090519
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
512m
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx812m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

The sections in bold are the ones that I have changed. Then just save the file and relaunch Eclipse. That should give you a bit more RAM and you should hopefully get better performance.

It seems that my previous script to make omnifocus tasks out of entourage stopped working, either due to OF 1.7.x or Snow Leopard.

Anyway I have updated the script now and it should work on all versions.

Entourage2Omnifocus

Update 7.1.2010

While this mail rule is currently the latest one, please take a look at the newest posts tagged with “Omnifocus“, to find if there is a newer version.

Are you also annoyed that on Mac OS while its super easy to install / uninstall applications, they often leave some trash behind (~/Library/ApplicationSupport …). With AppTrap you can automatically get rid of those files too once you delete an app.
It monitors your trashcan. As soon as you move an app to the trash it tries to find associated files and asks you if you want to get rid off them too.
And best of all, its free!

http://konstochvanligasaker.se/apptrap/

I have stumbled across a quite nice introductory course on iphone programming on iTunesU. Its from the university of Utah and they got a nice video podcast along with slides and some sample code. Definitely a good way to start developing for the iPhone.

http://uofuiphone.com/

Update:

Another course can be found at

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

However, I havent had time to check that one out yet.

If you are an audiobook fan like I am, then you probably often wondered how to create nice audiobooks with chapters and all. I am such a guy and have been using Audiobook Maker for a while since its open source and free. However, it has a few shortcomings that made me want some modifications. Unfortunately, it seems that the author has stopped maintaining the app and thus I went to work and made the changes I needed.

Changelog

• added warning when file > 350MB or > 14h since usually then ChapterTool bombs out
• added support to process m4a and mp4 files (however, no bitrate transcoding yet)
• fixed issues with files containing special characters like spaces, quotes, …

I will ask the developer to integrate the changes, if not, I will post the sources here.

A big thanks to the guys at

http://www.tkn.tu-berlin.de/research/evalvid/

and

http://gpac.sourceforge.net/

which tools I have used in order to process mp4 files.

Audiobook Maker beta0.2.app.zip

Audiobook Maker beta0.2.src.zip

larger time fields

This is a tiny update to b12. It now features larger time edit fields for people with locale settings where previously the whole date time did not fit (@Manu, I am looking at you .

Also the list of the recorded times will refresh when you start a new time recording via the top menu bar (last recently used).

Have fun

time-tracker-b13.zip