NR Time for Mac OS X 10.5

It’s an awesome day, really. I just released my first product for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — NR Time — and it’s available for trial downloads and license purchases of course.

NR Time is a tool that makes your time logging completely transparent. Period.

As a freelancer, I always needed a tool that could tell me precisely how much time did I spend working for one client or on one task and what was it for another. If nothing else, the earnings depend on this and having no convenient tool meant that I was stuck with the paper notepad where I recorded the beginning and ending times for every task.

If you ever did that, you can imagine what kind of headache coffee breaks are. You need to record the time when you go out, and then remember to jot the time of return. Finally, the calculation time comes when at the end of the day you juggle with numbers to figure what it was that you spent working today. It gives me creeps every time I think how I lived all these years.

So what does NR Time do for you, briefly:

• Let’s you enter as many tasks as you like
• Let’s you start and stop any number of them at the same time
• Updates the time for each task in real time and shows it in tenths of hour (1.1 stands for 1 hour 6 minutes and is easier to operate with hourly rate)
• Updates the total for all tasks and displays it in the status area in hours (1:06)
• Let’s you pause all running tasks by clicking on the notification area icon and resume with the same gesture
• Gives you an intuitive keyboard controls over the tasks
  • ⌅ – to enter / exit the task name edit more
  • 0-9, “.” – to start entering the time spent manually
  • SPACE – to toggle activity flag
  • ⌘ + N / ⌫ – to add / remove selected tasks

The trial version is fully functional for 15 days. If you find it useful, consider purchasing a license for only $10 (details on the product home page).

Give it a spin! It’s a very simple application solving a very simple task, but it saved me lots of silver hair. Hopefully, you will find it useful.

Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.5

The upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.5 went fine. Downloading and installing 340Mb update was a breeze and a matter of 20 minutes, but then. Immediately after the restart neither the keyboard nor the touch pad worked. Putting into sleep (it was late night and I postponed the investigation until morning) and getting back to normal unfreezed the keyboard and mouse pointer, but the touch pad button still didn’t work.

Another reboot helped and now everything is working. One thing I noticed though, it was accessing the hard drive a LOT more during the startup. Maybe it was just installing / indexing changed parts, who knows… we’ll see.

Remember

• If you see oddities right after upgrading, don’t panic. The reboot may help.
• If your mouse isn’t working,use the power button (hardware) to call the reboot / sleep / shutdown dialog and the “space” key to select the Reboot option.
• If your keyboard isn’t working, try closing your laptop to sleep.

I’m a Mac Convert Now

Dreams eventually come true and I finally converted to Macs. I still have my 5-year old HP Compaq nx9005 with Win XP and Ubuntu running to my side for various tasks (like verifying the web sites I work on in IE), but all my ongoing work and music experiments shifted to a great Macbook Pro MB134 from the Apple’s latest line.

APPLE MacBook Pro MB134, 15.4″, Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2x 2.5GHz), 2×1024MB, 250GB, DVD±RW DL, nVidia GeForce 8600Md GT 512MB, 15.4″ WXGA+ (1440×900), LED-TFT, DVI, Gigabit-LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, 2xUSB2.0, ExpressCard, WebCam, OSX 10.5 “Leopard”

There’s not much to say other than that I, as all migrants, feel like a huge army of nurses taking care of me all the time; so smooth Leopard’s interface and laptop hardware are. All these Spaces, Dashboards, Expose, Stacks, iCals, Frontrows and others feel like from a future. Even Rails, Apache, and PHP5 are pre-installed!

Well, hooray!