Time Tracking using Fanurio

Productivity is often a measure of the time spent to get the task done. However, often during our work, sometimes one might get busy with several other things . like preparing a meeting agenda, responding to personal emails – which distracts the person from the original work. The time tracking in this scenario becomes a bit complex as one did not work on the assigned task for the entire eight hours.

A time tracking tool, like Fanurio is very handy to tackle this situation. The user can start the timer, when starting the actual work, and pause / resume the timer when he/she is working on something else ( eg. responding to personal emails). The tracking lets the user know what is the exact number of hours he had spent for the primary task. This also lets the client know the actual time spent for the projects, and thereby provide transparency between the user and the client for hourly jobs.

When the user is idle for a considerable time, the tool can also let the user know using notifications – at times notifications might act as a reminder to start the main task. Fanurio also let user generate invoices for their client; the user can also configure the tool to directly email the invoice to the client. Both these features can be configured from the Options menu

I would like to have the below mentioned features, which according to me shall make the tool more productive.

Fixed Price Projects – The tool is very good for hourly billing projects , but would like to have a feature for fixed price projects as well. This feature if implemented shall help developers track down the number of hours spent for the fixed price project and might help them in providing themselves with a correct estimate.

Better UX – Fanurio is a very good tool, having a nice UI and several features to make one productive. But as a user, I felt there are several areas user experience could have been bettered on.

More details on Fanurio can be obtained at www.fanuriotimetracking.com.

Hiding the scroll bar in Checklistbox

Recently I was working on a checklist box control, which was disabled  but did not prevent the vertical scroll bar from appearing. As I had to to keep the checklist box disabled,  I added a panel  on to the checklist box, but still the horizontal scroll bar was visible. Please see the comparison in the picture.

The only resolution I could come was to hide the scroll bar of the checklist box from appearing. I wrote the following code and instantiated an object of it, and it did the trick.

Implementing Timeout feature in C#

The timeout feature is a handy tool in computer programming , when the user wants to execute some code  after a specific time period . Normally the timeout feature can be acheived by the Sleep command. The following code has a sleep for 2 seconds; also note that Sleep blocks the calling thread .

if (timeout > 0 )

  Threading.Sleep(2000);

Now, what if the user wants to do a polling - there are several options like Timers, WaitforSingleObject , and many others according to your needs . The code I am providing below , also implements the timeout feature using the StopWatch class .

     int timeoutValue = 10000 ; // in milliseconds.

    Stopwatch swTimeout = new Stopwatch();
    swTimeout.Start();

    do
    {           
      Thread.Sleep(2000);  // Wait for 2 seconds
      windowhandle = GetWindowHandle(caption, criteria);
 

      if (windowhandle != IsValidWindowHandle( ) )
        break;
 

    }while (swTimeout.ElapsedMilliseconds <= timeoutValue);

    // If the stopwatch is running, stop the stopwatch 

    if(swTimeout.IsRunning)
       swTimeout.Stop( );

Hope you found this useful.

Facebook web mail to take on GMail

The internet war is heating up with every passing day. Though Google still dominates the web , Yahoo and Microsoft continues to explore the space with new strategies . Not sure if they can really beat Google, as Microsoft is mostly into desktop applications and Yahoo looks for money "everywhere" - remember they removed the POP feature in the free Yahoo mail and made it available only to paid customers . Very recently Microsoft has started providing a new look and feel to Hotmail and slowly rising as a nice email provider; event the Window Live 2011 is cool with the ribbon interface .


On the other hand GMail which launched just a couple of years back , has been providing extremely useful features ( POP /IMAP ) along  with integration of other Google gadgets. It also come with a  free  a 7GB storage that increases every day . In fact I have stopped using email clients and rely only on the webmail.

DropMind : Product Review – Picture your Thoughts

Seavus has come out with a new mind mapping software DropMind . The product is available in different flavours – desktop ( Windows, Ubuntu, Mac ) , web based, mobiles and IPad. Making the product available for mobile devices looks very interesting and promising too.

The Desktop Version

The desktop version uses the ribbon style interface, which has probably become the standard for most of the new applications. I started off by creating a simple mind map ( see below )

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