Wednesday 13th September 2006

Quanto 1.1.1 Review

Quanto 1.1.1 is a lightweight time capture tool for Palm OS devices that has a slick interface and is easy to use. It can display statistics and charts on the Palm and export data as CSV or XML files but has no desktop companion.

Quanto 1.1.1 by Natara Software captures information about the time the user spends on different activities. It can then report, summarize and export the data. Typical uses would be to identify how much of the user's working day is being spent with different clients, or to analyse how well the competing demands of family, work, study, and personal time are being balanced.

Each change of activity needs to be notified to Quanto by the user selecting which activity they they are now working on. Quanto makes this very quick and easy, so it is no great overhead. Once the data has been captured Quanto can display activity history, statistics and pie charts from the information. The data can also be exported, but there is no dedicated desktop application.

Activities are configured as a two-level hierarchy - each top-level 'Activity' can be sub-divided into 'Detail' sub-activities. For example, an Activity might be configured for each of a user's clients. A client's Activity might then contain a Detail sub-entry for each major deliverable for that client. There appears to be no limit to the number of Activities that can be configured or the number of Detail sub-activities that can be set up within an Activity.

When first installed Quanto's Activity list is prepopulated with some generic activities, making it easy to start playing with the time-tracking functions straight away. Selecting Options > Activity Names... displays the 'Activity Name List' dialogue. This lists the currently configured Activities and provides options to add, delete, rename and change their order. One minor gripe is that whenever a text field is displayed to enter or edit an Activity or Detail name, Quanto does not give it focus. The user have to tap in the field to position the cursor before starting to enter text. This is both annoying and inconsistent with normal Palm OS usage.

Selecting an Activity and tapping on the [Edit Details] button displays the 'Detail Name List'. This allows the 'Detail' sub-activities to be configured for that Activity in exactly the same way as the Activities are configured.

Although the two-level Activity hierarchy gives a lot of flexibility you do need to plan Activity names quite carefully if you want to make the most of the limited reporting available within the application. For example, you may need to split billable and non-billable time for the same client into different Activities in order to easily extract the billable time on a client by client basis from the available reports.

By the way, changing an Activity name, or even deleting it, does not change historical records for that activity. Quanto stores the name of the Activity and Detail in each record, not just a code. This is very useful since it means that, for an example in a Production Support environment you can continually add Details entries for new incident numbers, and delete old Details once complete, without worrying about how it will effect the historical data.

Quanto has four basic views:

Current - display and edit the current activity
History - lists all recorded activities
Stats - display breakdowns of time spent on recorded activities
Chart - display Pie Charts of time spent on recorded activities

In each view icons along the bottom of the screen give access to the other basic views, commonly used functions within that view, and the preferences dialogue.

Quanto Current View

Whenever the user switches to Quanto it displays the Current view. This shows the current Activity and Detail names, when it was started and how long it has been running. You can edit any of these fields, apart from the duration, which is calculated from the start and current times. The Activity and Details fields are drop-downs, while tapping on the start date or time displays the Palm's standard date and time selectors.

In addition to the standard view and preferences icons along the bottom of the screen there are 'New Activity' and 'Interrupt' icons. Tapping on the yellow plus-sign icon stops the current activity and starts a new one. Quanto models the user's activities as a continuous timeline - there is always one, and only one, activity running. Activities cannot overlap and every second of the day is allocated to an activity.

When you start a new Activity Quanto updates the Current view with the new start time and date and attempts to guess the most likely Activity and Detail. If you commute or take lunchtimes at roughly the same time each day this feature works well. Unfortunately the very short unregistered evaluation time (3 days) doesn't give a chance to really appreciate this feature - having evaluated Quanto over a weekend, the software was registered before I noticed this function.

If Quanto hasn't correctly guessed the new Activity the user needs to select it from the drop-down and then select the related Detail name from the drop-down below, if needed. The user can retrospectively tap on any of the fields and modify the values, so there is no problem if a change of activity can only be recorded some time after its actual start.

If Quanto is assigned to a hardware button it can be configured to automatically create a new activity when launched from the button, but not when started by other means. This doesn't work quite as documented. At first I thought that whether a new Activity was started or not was random. Subsequent experiments revealed that Quanto was distinguishing between long and short clicks on the button:

If you release the button before Quanto displays the Current view then a new Activity is not started.
If you release the button after the Current view has been displayed then a new Activity is started.

This 'feature' was found on a Tungsten E. The short click might not be achievable on Palms with faster processors.

A broken blue bar icon at the bottom of the screen allows the current activity to be 'interrupted'. Tapping the icon displays a red framed 'Interrupt' dialogue with a timer counting up in minutes and seconds. Subsequently tapping the [Cancel] button ignores the interrupt and the current Activity is not modified in any way. Tapping the [Done] button at the end of the interrupt, however, results in a new 'Interruption' activity being created for the period the dialogue was displayed. A new activity with the original task's Activity and Detail names is then created to run from the point when the interrupt dialogue was closed.

There is a hidden 'Interruption' Activity name to which interrupts are assigned. Creating an explicit 'Interruption' Activity using the 'Activity Names...' dialogue allows the configuring of 'Detail' sub-activities. Like any other activity in the History view interrupt activities can subsequently be edited or deleted.

The Interruption functionality has proven to be very useful. One tap marks the start of an interruption, be it phone call or a colleague dropping by your office. The decision as to cancel the recording of the interruption, or to record it as an interruption, or under another Activity name can then be made once the interruption is over. This scheme works well and is very convenient.

Quanto History View

Tapping on the stopwatch and scroll icon at the foot of the other Quanto views displays the History view. This lists all the activities recorded by Quanto in reverse chronological order. The five way navigator works as expected to step through the activities by row or page and the View menu provides 'Got to Top' and Go to Bottom' options.

Selecting an activity displays its details. The 'Activity History Details' dialogue is identical to that for the Current Activity and allows modification of the start and end times, Activity and Detail names for any past activity.

The Activity menu also contains 'Delete' and 'Split...' options that operate on the currently highlighted activity in the History view. If an activity is deleted, the end time of the previous activity will be updated to include the freed up time.

The 'Split Activity' dialogue displays the activity's start and finish times and prompts for a time between the two where the activity should be split into two identical activities. The split time defaults to half way between the two limits. Once split the details of each new activity can be edited or split again.

The facilities to edit, delete or split historical activities provide comprehensive editing of the historical data and are well thought out and easy to use.

Quanto Stats View

Clicking on the Stats icon (Sigma and percent sign) displays a breakdown of how the user's time has been spent across all Activities. Activities are sorted in descending order of time consumed, and the duration and percentage of total time is given for each activity.

Clicking on an Activity in the Stats view displays a breakdown, in the same format, for the individual Details within that Activity. Tapping on the selected Detail returns to the 'Stats - All Activities' view.

By default all the individual activities recorded by Quanto are used to calculate the statistics. However in Options > Preferences... there are options to exclude particular Activities from contributing to the statistics and also to restrict the date range of the activities included.

The Exclude List can only be used to exclude Activities, not individual Details within an Activity. I was disappointed that it is necessary to enter the Activity name as text, rather than picking from a list. Activity names are case-sensitive and do not support wild-cards.

Preferences also allow the restriction of the Activities being reported on to a date range. When a date range is in use, it appears in the screen title and arrow buttons appear at the foot of the Stats and Chart views. These move the date range backwards and forwards by whatever elapsed time has been selected. Configure a seven day range and the arrows move it back and forth by a week. Select activities from a single day and the arrows move a day at a time.

The Exclude List and date filtering configured in preferences also effect the activities selected for exporting to files.

Quanto Chart View

Tapping on the pie-chart icon at the bottom of the screen displays the Chart view - the percentages calculated in the Stats view are presented as a colourful Pie chart and key. Tapping on the Pie segment for a particular Activity displays the Pie chart for the time spent against each Detail sub-activity. Tapping in the Pie again returns to the Activity Pie Chart.

The Chart view and Stats view work in parallel - tapping the Chart icon displays the Pie Chart for whatever was displayed in Stats view. Select the Details of one Activity in the Chart view, and the statistics of that Activity are displayed on return to the Stats view.

Exporting the Data

When the History view is being displayed Export > Options... displays an 'Export' dialogue. This allows the activity history to be output to an expansion card as either an XML or CSV file in \PALM\Programs\Natara\Quanto\. The filename defaults to 'QuantoActivity' but can be changed.

The XML format uses an <activity> tag for each recorded activity with the details, including start, finish and duration, as attributes. Storing the details as attributes minimises the size of the file generated but makes it rather harder to manipulate with XSLT or CSS. The inclusion of the duration in minutes is very welcome as it will often save having to parse the start and finish times and calculate the duration yourself.

<activity name="LDA" detail="Sys Maint" start="6/9/06 8:10" finish="6/9/06 12:28" minutes="258" />

In CSV format the activity is exported as:

6/9/06 8:10,6/9/06 12:28,"LDA","Sys Maint",258

If you plan to use Quanto to export to other applications via CSV files be careful how you name your Activities and Details. Whilst it correctly maps characters like double quotes and angle brackets to entity references when exporting XML files it does not handle double quotes embedded in Activity names so well. Unsuitably named Activity names can even create extra columns in the output:

12/9/06 14:38,12/9/06 14:50,"Frogplate","Research",12
12/9/06 14:50,12/9/06 15:00,"Frogplate","Te","st",10

When the top-level 'All Activities' Stats view is displayed Export saves a record for each Activity to a file called QuantoStats on the expansion card. Unlike in the History View, the exported data doesn't match the format displayed on screen - instead it outputs the total number of minutes worked on each activity and the number of records assigned to that activity - not the percentage of the total duration (which can be calculated from the minutes attributes anyway):

<activity name="LDA" minutes="2257" count="9" />

The CSV export format contains the same data as the XML version:

"LDA",2257,9

When the 'Details' Stats view is displayed for a selected Activity, Export works in exactly the same way as for the 'All Activities' screen. The formats are the same, but they list the results just for that Activity broken down by Details. Unfortunately the default filenames are the same - QuantoStats.XML and QuantoStats.CSV, but you are given the opportunity to edit them to reflect the Activity.

Natara Quanto 1.1.1 is shareware and costs $12.95. The evaluation version is fully functional, but is limited to only three days.

Reviewed by Jonathan Littlewood, 13-Sep-2006

Pros:

Easy to use, lightweight time capture
Two-level Activity identification is flexible
Exports to XML and CSV can be filtered in the Palm

Cons:

3 days evaluation is not long enough
No dedicated desktop application available
Fails to give focus to text in dialogues
Minor problems with CSV file handling

Other sites:

Natara Software

Posted by frogplate.

Tags: palmOS