Work in progress...
To start up this project we need to figure out alot of stuff. To do this we will use the Discussions tab here at CodePlex. So please post your ideas and comments in the discussion tab.
The problem
TimeWarden is an application to help you keep track of your time at the office. Typical developers need to register how much time they spend on which projects during the day. This sound easy, and basically it is. The problem is that in many cases these hours needs to go into a "economic-system" (Axapta, Navision, C5 etc.). These are typical large and very "heavy" applications to have running on your working PC and further more they are typically "hard/complicated/slow" to use.
This typically results in people having their own personal way of keeping track of the hours during the day. This can be in OneNote, Excel, Notepad, a paper block etc.
So, a day at work we talked about what we could do about this "issue".
The solution
Sadly we can't do anything about these big/slow system, at the end of the day your hours need to go there anyway and there is not much we can do about that. What we can do, is to make the way you keep track of your hours, during the day, easier an simpler.
Our first idea were that the application needed to consists of two main windows. An "advanced" and "simple" one. The advanced window is to set up the applicationin general, export data, view history etc. The "simple" part of the application should be the actual window where you register your hours. "everything" in this window should be accessible through shortcuts, so it's fast an easy. Actually, you should be able to open this "simple" windows by a global shortcut. So no matter what application you are in, you can press a key combination/shortcut that will pop-up this "simple" window from tray. When this pops up you should, as stated before, be able to access everyting by tabbing and using shortcuts, so you don't even have to lift your hands of the keyboard to register hours and switch from project to project.
Sounds sweet, right? :)