Klepsidra

Time your activities to bill clients, and understand where your time goes.

Overview

Klepsidra is an activity timer for freelance service providers, agencies, developers, and others providing services quoted and billed in time taken. Use it to time activities, for internal use and analysis, and for client billings.

Setup & Installation

Install Elixir, clone this repository, then change into its directory.

To start your Phoenix server:

• Run mix setup to install and setup dependencies
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server or inside IEx with iex -S mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Ready to run in production? Please check our deployment guides.

To do

MVP: Make application self-hosting

• Debugging

• Ensure a second warning message is displayed to the user, ensuring they truly understand the impact of deleting the timer

  • Look for good UX examples, as this is likely to become a UX annoyance, more than a saviour of data loss

• UI improvements

  • Update tag list sorting to case-insensitive alphabetical
    • Need to use following call in queries: ORDER BY name COLLATE NOCASE ASC to get case-insensitivity for the column
  • Calculate duration of open timers, updating regularly? types, etc.
    • Remove non-active entities-projects, customers, activity types-from relevant lists and select controls

• Implement a 'today' view

  • Provide daily navigation facility: back, forward and today
  • Update timer listings
    • Add timer tags

• Provide reporting

  • Count of timers
  • Aggregate time timed
  • Billable time timed
  • Filter
    • by customer
    • tags
    • date range

Future

• Start creating an undo feature, reducing reliance on confirmation dialogs, particularly for deletions * Build an audit trail-like functionality, to be able to undo any deletion or modification, at any time, as well as to see a history of actions taken
• Document truncate and markdown_to_html functions
• Audit other timers for strengths and weaknesses
• Markdown
  • Refactor conversion of plain text to Markdown everywhere; should interpretation happen at table layout level, or earlier at query level?
  • Create a dedicated field to markdown text, and another for HTML, to improve performance, by not requiring just in time mardown interpretation
• Expand role of activity types beyond the hour rate, to act as a rigid categorisation for major types of activities, which cannot be entrusted to tags only, e.g. exercise, learning, professional development
  • Automate billable, duration unit measurements, and tags within it; selecting this on an activity should automatically adjust these attributes on a timer
• Security improvements
  • Improve handling of return_to functionality
    • Ensure it is a validated route at point of sending
    • Ensure the parameter is read at the router.ex level
    • Send the information through to the target in an on_mount function
    • Remove the parameter and clean up the URL, redirecting to it, before the user can see it, in case they want to bookmark the page (https://elixirforum.com/t/how-to-store-return-to-url-when-navigating-from-liveview-to-another-page-liveview-regular/55480/4)
    • Insert it in the render code, as a verified route
• UI improvements
  • Replace timer listing description pop-up (title attribute), with a proper HTML-formatted popover component
  • Incorporate Gov.uk Design System (https://design-system.service.gov.uk/) accessibility and user interface/experience decisions, starting from input controls
  • Allow stopping a timer from timer 'show' view
  • Select a UI component framework, to aid in the building of a modern web app
  • Improve on cryptic or incomplete UI error messages
  • Resize datetime, duration and duration unit controls to more efficiently use space
  • Start implementing colour palette
  • Improve presentation of currency fields; at present they use an input control of type 'number' which is unintuitive UX
  • On timer note timeline, next to the created_on date, display the updated_on date in a visually highlighted way, showing that a note was edited and when
• Tagging UX improvements
  • Make it possible to drill into the tag from the live component
  • Provide ability to set new tag colour when creating freeform tag in live component
  • Document tag selector live component
  • Improve search functionality to perform fuzzy query directly in the database
  • Develop ability to cope with temporary data structures, before a timer has been created?
• General UX inmprovements
  • Permit pausing and resuming timers; add forward-pointing field to next timer, like a linked list
• Look into default timestamps() fields; it appears that datetime stamps are in UTC, where local timezone may be preferable
  • Specifically for timestamps recorded for notes
• Full-text search
  • Create a full-text tag search
  • Begin adding keyboard shortcuts for an improved user interface
  • Enable SQLite notes field full-text search
  • Start enabling full-text search on other relevant database fields
• Reformat listing display to a more useful format, removing description field to a popup box or tooltip; change date display to more informative format

One day

• Break down and list all ultimate desiderata for an activity timer

Tests

• Test on month-first locales
• Test on 12-hour clock locales
• Do all browsers return a 'T' delimited datetime-local stamp? Do both delimiters need to be handled? According to the standard, yes

Learn more

• Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
• Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html
• Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
• Forum: https://elixirforum.com/c/phoenix-forum
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix