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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    [Kde-pim] Re: KArm & iCalendar
From:       Bo Thorsen <bo () sonofthor ! dk>
Date:       2003-08-06 6:11:52
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On Wednesday 06 August 2003 19:55, Mark Bucciarelli wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 August 2003 7:08 am, Bo Thorsen wrote:
>
> [snip stuff I already replied to]
>
> > KArm is getting swamped with features I don't need and
> > doesn't fit in my workflow.
>
> Some questions:
>
> (1) Do you see any value in the auto-save feature?  Compared to just
> having your changes automatically saved?

I don't know which one is the old 3.1 behaviour and which is the new, but 
I can tell you what I would prefer.

I want all data to be stored all the time, so if my workstation crashes, 
my timesheets won't be gone. That means it must keep saving it a lot of 
times.

> (2) How do you store your time history?

I have a quite annoying way of doing this:

2003
+- Week 1
 +- task 1
 +- task 2

and so on. The reason this is annoying is that KArm doesn't remember which 
tasks were folded in and which were not. So now that we're at week 32, it 
takes quite a lot of scrolling each morning.

> (3) Is it important to you to be able to read legacy file formats to
> view your old data in KArm?

Yes. Never ever remove stuff like that.

> (4) Do you use the print function at all?

No.

I think almost all of us at Klarälvdalens Datakonsult is using KArm 
(Jesper was even the previous maintainer of KArm) to track the time we 
are using on different projects, and I can tell you what we (I) need from 
it.

I'm working on a weekly basis. It's irrelevant when I spend what time on a 
project, I just need to know how much I spent last week. We have no 
office hours, so if one of us prefers working from saturday at 8 to 
sunday midnight, that would be fine. Because of this, individual day 
tracking is useless to us. OTOH, individual week tracking isn't.

Every monday morning we send an email with the time sheet of the last 
week, and this part is very annoying. It would be *really* cool if I 
could rightclick on any item in the tree and say "mail the contents" and 
get it exported to kmail - perhaps even with a default TO: address.

One idea we have been playing with is to integrate KArm into 
kroupware/kontact so the info from our timesheets would be automatically 
available to our timesheet collector (there's a cool jobdescription for 
the business card :). I have thought a bit on this lately, and have come 
to the conclusion, that what I'd really like is to instead be able to 
export last weeks work and upload it to a server.

As you hopefully can see, what we need is a very simple timetracker, with 
a couple of added export goodies.

The problems we have with current KArm state (I think my cvs co is about 
three weeks old) are:

- - the new look with the more information on offers me nothing I need, but 
only clutters up the view

- - the autosaving isn't as reliable as it used to be

- - the new features isn't helping the way we work

- - why on earth doesn't KArm track user activity anymore? I loved that 
feature

- - I would really like to be able to mail parts of my tree

- - I would really like to be able to export parts of my tree

- - I'm missing a template like feature for setting up a new week

As you can see, the problems I have with KArm fall in two categories: 
Regressions from KDE 3.1 and a couple of missing features that aren't 
related to the features people are working on. This is the reason I'm 
feeling KArm is moving in another direction than what I need.

I know this mail is *very* subjective, but you asked for it :-)

Bo.

- -- 

     Bo Thorsen                 |   Praestevejen 4
     Senior Software Engineer   |   5290 Marslev
     Klarälvdalens Datakonsult  |   Denmark
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