My project tracking programs

I enjoy finding writing software to do things that are relatively personal – organizing my music or video libraries, for instance, or to help me move writing files back and forth on my Alphasmart. The first time I participated in NaNoEdMo I spent a lot of editing time on my little Tungsten Palm PDA, so that I could work on the bus, because this was before netbooks came out. And so I wrote my first version of ProjectTracker for that little PDA, with NS Basic for Palm.

(If you have problems reading the image text, then click on it for full size.)

I’ve improved on the idea over the years, and used it to keep track of the hours I’m spending on a few other things beyond EdMo. This year, I’ve only added a few little details to my main Project Tracking system, which runs on a SQLite database file, and has front-end user interfaces for windows, written with NS Basic for Desktop, and my Xubuntu EEE, which was coded with Gambas.

The general layout is the same, but the windows version has a few new options that I’ve added recently, includng the ability to enter in how many hours and minutes have been logged at the Nanoedmo site and tell me how many hours and minutes I need to enter to catch up.

I’ve also recently tweaked it so that if you’re in the middle of a work session, the ‘Total’ button tells you what your overall time total was before you began the session, and the ‘Running Clock’ that includes the session so far. That’s a very important little upgrade!

Tune in tomorrow to see if I’ve figured out a basic logline for my Script Frenzy project yet!