A tweak of the Hamster GNOME applet.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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 &

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.