Date Thu 21 July 2016

Just a few seconds ago the initial release of Hamster-GTK , version 0.10.0, has been uploaded to the cheese shop. That means that after the rewritten backend codebase hamster-lib has been out in the wild for a few days by now you can now have a first look at a reimplementation of the original hamster 2.0 GUI. It will come as no surprise that this current early version is rather unpolished and leaves a lot to be desired. However, if you are familiar with legacy hamster 2.0 aka hamster-time-tracker you will surely see some major resemblance.

I personally think that one of the most striking improvements with this release is actually the ease with which you can give it a try. No buildchain, no arcane dependencies, simply get some GTK bindings, setup a virtual env and pip install and you are good to go. This is something I personally find highly attractive. For details please refer to the readme.

This first version already allows for realtime tracking of activities as well as editing and listing of existing entries. Furthermore a basic dialog to adjust config settings as well as export data as tsv is present as well.

Once caveat is that any changes to the preferences will only take effect after the application is restarted, which is due to some limitations of hamster-lib . While developing this first prototype some additional lessons could be learned with regards to hamster-lib and whilst I am eager to continue working on hamster-gtk I feel that it would be best to apply those lessons to our backend code first.

In the meantime I hope you read this release more as a vivid sign of Project Hamsters revived activity rather than the definitive final product it is not. Please be sure to file bug reports and feature requests as you see fit with the issue tracker.