Timesheet - a freeware program

In 1999 Stuart Nicholson released the Palmpilot Timesheet application, a really brilliant little (36K) Palm Pilot application for keeping tabs on how you spend your time at work. It has a simple, intuitive interface which allows you to separate billable and other time allocation, and to describe the client, project and task accurately. Project names &c are customisable. Timing is quite adequate (to the nearest five minutes) and you can set a timer for a particular task. There's a weekly summary. This was version 1.5.3, and a lot of people thought very highly of it.

Version 1.5.4

(Note: newer version available below)

You can still get copies of version 1.5.3 off the Internet, but unfortunately when I tried it out, it wouldn't work on my Palm, nor would it function on the PalmOS emulator with ROM versions above 3. The good news is that Stuart (in the spirit of the Internet) released the source code under the GNU Public Licence. The code needed a little work to make it run on current versions of PalmOS, but over the course of a few days I've rather brutally modified it to do just that. So here you have:

Most people will simply wish to install the Palmos PRC file on their Palm PDA.

To run the converter, hotsynch your Palm PDA, and then locate the file TimesheetDB.PDB. It's easiest to simply put a copy of the CSV converter (Timesheet2CSV.exe) in the same directory as the PDB file, and then in that directory within DOS type in: 

            Timesheet2CSV TimesheetDB.PDB Outfile.CSV

... where Outfile.CSV is the file you wish to write to. You can then open the CSV file using Excel --- it works like a charm!

If you have GCC, PilRC and PRC-tools, and know how to use them, then you'll be able to view, modify and recompile the hacks I made to get Stuart's original program working. GDB is useful for debugging. By the way, here's the C source for TimeSheet2CSV.

Version 1.5.5

Grégoire Barbier has pointed out that on newer PDAs there are still several problems:

Grégoire has fixed these problems and released v 1.5.5. Here's the complete program with source. His change log is as follows:

  1. bugfix: the scroll buttons always remained greyed on palmos 4.5 (this bug did not appear on palmos 3.5, and occurs with both timesheet 1.5.3 and 1.5.4);
  2. UI minor enhancement: changed pageup/pagedown effects: now pageup and pagedown scroll instead of going earlier or later, and the left/right joystick of new devices goes earlier or later;
  3. bugfix: swapped black and white in the .bmp bitmaps;
  4. Updated 'About' box.

Thanks Grégoire!

Note that everything on this page is released under the GNU Public Licence. A copy of the GPL can be obtained from the Free Software Foundation.
Date of First Publication: 2005/8/15 Date of Last Update: 2006/10/24Web page author: Click here