Warning: this is going to be a geeky post.

I spent a rainy and grey weekend hacking a small application to help me keep track of time at work. I tend to exceed the regular office hours more often than I should, and I’m not always disciplined enough to mark down all the extra hours I do (which I’m supposed to claim as free time at some point, though that moment never seems to arrive).

The idea is simple: I want to “punch in” when I arrive to work, be aware of how much time I have spent in the day and how much overtime I have collected. I can check out and check in again multiple times during the same day, for example if I go to lunch or continue working from home in the evening (which is sadly the case sometimes)

I mainly did it to learn a bit of Qt, the cross-platform application framework owned by Nokia. It was a pleasant experience, starting from scratch and with my rusty C++ skills it took me two afternoons to put it together. The next step is, of course, getting this to run on the N900.

(note: I lost the screenshots thanks to my sloppy webmastering)

I’m not publishing the code here because it’s, ahem, rather ugly, but I’ll do it at some point.

P.S.: after I started doing this, I realized that Stefan had created a somewhat similar application for the iPhone called FlexTool. Stefan, if you are reading this: I didn’t copy your idea! Although I did add the “checked in” and “checked out” texts after seeing a screenshot of FlexTool.