Flexo development journal

In spite of the recent news, I still intend to finish what I started with Flexo.

I’ve been toying with QML for a a couple of weeks, and tried to imagine what a “next generation UI” would mean for Flexo. Below is a mock-up, if you think it looks a bit like the iPhone stopwatch you are absolultely right The QML implementation is pretty much there (and boy, was it easy to make it!), I just have to figure out how to make it “talk” with the application logic.

Comments are welcome.

Flexo 0.3.1 is in extras-devel. Release notes:

• History can be shown by day, week or month. The choice is made from the option menu.

I’ve been thinking about what I still want to do with Flexo before I call it done. I received some rather exotic feature requests, but the truth is that the application pretty much does what I needed it to do and I start to get an urge to work on something else.

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Flexo 0.3.0 is in extras-devel. Release notes:

• A new “history” view (opened from the balance view) shows the check-ins, check-outs and balance for each day
• The user’s data is saved in XML format. The name of the savefile is .flexo.xml

After merging the history view with the rest of the code and doing some additional tweaking and fixing, I decided it was time for a new release. It’s still highly unoptimized and missing a lot of features, but it’s usable.

As I was implementing this feature, I decided to move to a more manageable savefile format, namely XML. So now the data is saved in .flexo.xml, a nice side effect of which is that it can be edited by hand.

For the next iteration of the history feature I played with item delegates and came up with the screenshot above. I think this is getting closer to the way I would like it to look.

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After weeks of procrastination, I finally started to work on the most requested feature so far, displaying a history of check-ins and check-outs. When I say most requested, I mean that two users asked for it As you see from the picture I’m not quite there yet, but read on to see what I found out.

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Flexo 0.2.13 is in extras-testing. Release notes:

• The balance calculation ignores days in which the user didn’t check in at all (this fixes a bug introduced  in 0.2.10)
• The day of the last check-in or check-out is displayed alongside the time

Until version 0.2.9 Flexo was only storing the current balance and the last check-in and check-out times, but since version 0.2.10 every check-in and check-out is remembered. This gives better support for the new “update last checkout time even if in the previous day” feature, but most importantly is in preparation of showing the history to the user, which is the main purpose of the next major release.

What I didn’t realize however is that the new way of calculating the balance iterates through all the days, even those with no check-in at all. This can be annoying if you e.g. don’t check in during the holidays and is different from the previous behavior where days with no check-in were ignored in the balance calculation.

Fixing this was easy enough, and I added a unit test to check for this case so that similar errors will be caught in the future.

Flexo 0.2.11 is in extras-testing. Relase notes:

• The “update checkin/checkout time” dialog allows to specify a date. This is especially useful if you forget to check out at the end of a day and need to do it the next day (it wasn’t possible earlier)
• To save battery, the timer is suspended whenever Flexo is minimized or the screen is off
• The savefile format is changed and the new savefile name is .flexo.data. At first startup, the old .flexo datafile will be imported and then deleted (to be sure, you may want to make a backup)

Known issues:

• Due to a bug, days with no check-in at all will affect the balance too. This will be fixed.