Based on some pretty awesome feedback that I've received from people who apparently find Time Tracker v1.0 very useful, I'm adding a few new features and improvements to the user interface.

(This post refers to Time Tracker v1.0 - Open Source Efficiency Tracking Utility for the Lotus Notes Client.)

Setup of your Time Tracker Sidebar Widget

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Managing your Time Tracker Preferences

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Time Management experts will tell you an individual only has 24 hours in a single day; proper time management isn't finding time in your day, but rather discovering and dealing with inefficiencies in your day. The best way to discover those inefficiencies - at least as recommended to me as part of the AMA Time Management Strategies seminar which I recently attended - is to document how you spend your day.

With that, I introduce Time Tracker, an Open Source Efficiency Tracking Utility for the Lotus Notes Client.

The idea is simple. At the start of your day - upon completion of your first task - create an entry highlighting what you did and whether you feel it was an efficient or inefficient use of your time. Based on several requests, you can also select the priority, apply categories, or even align your time against a project.

For Lotus Notes Client v8.0 and above, you can use the Time Tracker Widget to make this process even easier!

Our DVD collection - which consists mostly of kids DVDs - is marred by scratches that made each ~$20USD investment a complete waste of money. That was until someone (and sorry, I don't remember who it was...) recommended an open source video conversion utility named Handbrake! Handbrake is a slick little application that allows you to rip your DVDs or other digital video formats and either make simple digital backups or re-encode them for various digital media players (be it a computer, mobile device, or DMPs like the Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune, etc.

And - being a relative A/V n00b - this free, multi-OS supporting application makes it really easy!

Form the product website:

Supported Sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted--protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files
• Most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.

Outputs:

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
• Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 and DTS pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

I highly recommend this application for parents who don't want to see their DVD collection become a pile of scratched coasters and for those of you - like me - who want to take your DVDs with you on the road and playback on your Zune (or hopefully iPod Touch after my birthday)!

Based on the feedback I got from here, on Twitter, and on Facebook regarding my upcoming Time Tracker application, I've made a few simple changes:

Priorities, Categories, and Projects

So you not only want to know how efficient your time is, but also what it's spent on?! Yeah -- that actually makes sense. So I've added Priorities, Categories, and Projects to not only the Lotus Notes Client UI document Form Design Element, but also the widget Form Design Element which can be loaded in the Lotus Notes Client Sidebar and allow for always-on, quick entries in the Time Tracker.

After all - and speaking for myself here - if it's not easy, it won't get used.

Configuration-based widget

Not wanting to have form-bloat should you not want to track Priorities, Categories, or Projects -- I've given you the ability to disable/enable those fields from the application Preferences.

So, if you don't want to track anything but the description, timestamps, and the status (efficient/inefficient), you can "remove" everything else at will.

More Views...

This was kind of a given: adding more categorization options (Priority, Category, and Project), I needed to add more views.

... upcoming changes and publication!

There are a few things that I want to add in here, at least for version 1.0.

The biggest one is adding Readers fields to the entries and having them defined by the application Preferences. Nothing major, but this will allow you to deploy a single instance in a project team, group, business unit, etc. and allow everyone to track their time against a common instance of the Lotus Notes Application.

Eventually, I'd like to create a mobile device client - which I'm thinking will be a version 2.0 feature - and am shooting for a Blackberry device Java client.

I'm shooting for a Monday - October 12th, 2009 - release of version 1.0, so if you have any suggestions for features and functionality that you'd like to see in this release, please let me know ASAP!