Archives for April 2017

This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

When you click on an activity in Time Tortoise, the app displays the list of time segments associated with that activity. But you don’t normally want to see every time segment ever recorded for that activity. Instead, it makes more sense to show only the most recent ones, like the segments recorded for the current day. That’s the change I’m making this week.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Consider the basic Time Tortoise workflow:

• Select an activity
• Start the timer
• Do some work
• Stop the timer

This will result in a single time segment that has the appropriate start and end times and is associated with the selected activity. The duration will be calculated and displayed in the Time Segment list view, so you’ll know how much time you spent working. Everything looks good.

But there’s one problem: in order to see your elapsed time, you have to stop the timer. That’s inconvenient. When I’m timing an activity, I like to periodically glance at the timer to see how I’m doing, especially if I’m working towards a time goal.

So it would be nice if the active time segment would update dynamically while the timer was running. That’s the goal for this week.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Over the past few weeks, I have been implementing time segments. Last week was about editing time segments. This week, it’s adding and deleting, with some digressions on unit testing.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

The typical way to create a time segment in Time Tortoise is to select an activity, start the timer, work on the activity for a while, and then stop the timer. That causes the app to add a time segment to the selected activity, with the appropriate start and end times.

But sometimes you need more control over your time segments. If you’re working on activity A, and someone interrupts you to discuss activity B, you might forget to switch activities. In another instance, you might start timing the wrong activity, and not notice it for a while. Whatever the reason, if you care about timing accuracy (and if you don’t, why are you using a time tracker?) you need a way to manually create, edit, and delete time segments.

This week, I worked on the most basic of these operations, editing an existing time segment.

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