Titrax Conduit

http://www.jimweller.net/jims/titrax
Jim Weller 7/16/2004 12:27PM

This is the README file for the Titrax Conduit project. TitraxConduit is a win32 palm conduit for Titrax. It facilitates transferring project timing data from the palm to the desktop in the form of text files. Titrax is an GPL time tracking program for the Palm OS. It is based off an even earlier x-windows version, TimeTracker .

Screen Shots

Downloads

Implementation

This software is a Win32 conduit that transfers data from the Titrax palm databases to text files on the PC. It is organized as a Visual Studio .NET 2003 C++ Solution. The solution is comprised of two DLL's and an MSI installer. The MSI installer installs TitraxConduit.dll and TitraxInstall.dll. TitraxConduit.dll is the conduit component. TitraxInstall.dll is a utility library that allows the installer to register/deregister the conduit with HotSync.

Titrax data is output to text files in a Titrax folder in the user's palm profile directory for example "C:\Program Files\Palm\jim\Titrax". Using the HotSync manager to configure the conduit you can output both summaries and work logs. Output can be either comma separated values (CSV) or tab separated values (TSV). Various time formats are supported including excel time serials, localized time strings, and historical computer offsets (1900,1904,1970).

Note about byte alignment: The palm's m68k is forced to align on 2byte boundaries. By default my x86 compiled these dll's with structs on 4 byte boundaries, which of course doesn't match the palm memory representation. I use the /Zp2 compiler switch. Other solutions including padding structs are available.

Note about work logs: The work log, TitraxHistoryDB, is historical and inactive in the 4.0x series. I have a modified version of 4.08 (4.08j) available on my website that re- integrates titrax histories. It is compiled with the PalmOS SDK 5 and works well on most newer (and older) devices. I'm working with the author to re-integrate the feature.

Note about excel: Excel time serials are decimal values where the fractional part represents percentage of a day. If you set your file type to csv and time format to excel time serials (the default) then you can easily convert them to dates in excel. Open the CSV file from your palm profile directory using excel (or other spreadsheet software). The time entries will show as floating point values. For summaries change the cell format to dd:hh:mm or similar to get a days, hours, minutes representation of how long you worked on a project. For histories change the format to your favorite date time format. The start/stop times will display accordingly. You can of course do normal addition and subtraction of dates to come of with the statistics you need. I generally like to do percentages of total time spent on a particluar project.

Note about time: Palm time is seconds since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1904. Windows Time is seconds since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970. Excel time is a floating point value that is number of days since 1900 where the fractional part is the percentage of a day. Excel also has an option to work from 1904. Titrax Conduit can output start/stop times as all of these formats and as locale specific time strings.

Files

Legal Notes and References

Titrax Conduit is released under the terms of the GPL
http://www.gnu.org

Microsft, Excel, Windows, MSI, Microsoft Installer, Visual C++ and Visual Sudio belong to Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com

Palm, PalmOS, Conduit, Conduit Development Kit, Sync Manager, and HotSync belong to PalmSource
http://www.palm.com

Titrax is GPL and Copyright Bernd Esser
http://jack.testnetz.detecon.net/software/

A titrax user page
http://www.titrax.com/ (dated)

TimeTracker is GPL and Copyright Harald Tveit Alvestrand
http://www.alvestrand.no/titrax/