You should start by installing and playing with the program, but please read this file before using Doing for real.

I have kept it as short as possible in the hope that people will read it. It only contains information that is not obvious, and you will save yourself much time and confusion by reading on. The online help, which is under the i symbol at the top right of each tab, gives more details.

Data Model

In Doing you are always doing something, even if its just a certain something called 'Nothing'. That means that I don't need to store end times or durations, but just the times of the transitions and the names of the activities following them. (I use the names rather than some database ID so that the records in the history continue to mean something even after activities get deleted from the list of choices.)

If you rename an activity I rename all of its transitions, but if you delete it I do nothing. In this case the pattern and formal names are no longer available. The activity list and history are in the databases 'Do4-Acts' and 'Do4-Trans' respectively.

The advantage of this format is that it has little redundance (duplicated data) and is therefore very robust (no inconsistent states for the data). Furthermore, I am storing your data in the raw form in which you entered it, rather than some processed version whose flexibility would be limited by my imagination. All processing of the data gets done at the export stage.

Using the Clock

This is a bit complicated at first but becomes very ergonomic once you've got the hang of it.

1. Very alert people can just click on the activities when they start them.
2. Ordinary mortals will often have to wind the clock back before clicking the new activity, because they probably started it some time ago. Theres nothing to prevent you from winding forward and making entries for the future too, but it doesn't seem to make as much sense.
3. Doing works to the nearest minute, and won't store stints (periods of a single activity) shorter than this. That means that if when clicking in the list, you miss and select a different activity, just hit the right one quickly. Only in the unlikely event that the current minute changed in between the two clicks would you get a one-minute stint of the wrong activity, but you could correct this in the 'see' tab anyway.
4. As you wind the clock, you should see the list selection changing to show what you were doing at the time you wind to.
5. Suppose you've been doing Project1 for a few hours, but now decide to reclassify this time as Project2. You should wind the clock back to the exact minute when Project1 started (the earliest minute at which Project1 is selected in the list) and then hit Project2. This works for the same reason as what I said in point 3.
6. Suppose you clicked Project1 half an hour ago with good intentions, but now your conscience tells you that you haven't really started working yet. Click Project1 again to move its start time to now, and then get working.
Simililarly (but less usefully) if you currently have 'Nothing' until 9:30 and then change to Project1, winding to 9:00 and clicking Project1 will move Project1's start time back to 9:00.
7. The above points have the side effect that you should enter your stints in chronological order. Supposing you had 'Work' all day Monday and Wednesday, then wound back to Tuesday morning and clicked 'Work'. Doing would think you were moving the start time of Wednesday back 24 hours, and would ERASE the real start time for Wednesday.

To simplify: Doing is a tool for counting working hours as they happen. The clock is there just in case you forget to clock in the moment you walk into the office. It is not an invitation to leave all your data entry until three weeks later.

Export

You can easily export to any software that likes to see table-like data with tab separated fields. eg. MS Office. Doing exports memos which the standard palm software then makes available under windows. From there you can copy-paste straight into Office or whatever. In most cases Doing generates one memo per month, but sometimes has to split them further due to the size limit of a memo.

In the 'out' tab you will see the 1-5 radio, a fairly complicated set of options, a Go button and a Results list. The 1-5 are storage slots where the other options are remembered. Ie. all five slots start at the default setting and you can adjust them independantly. After setting the other options, hitting Go generates the output and updates the Results list which is slightly easier to read that the generated memos.

The three styles are most easily summarised like this: Prof = what most employers want to see, Basic = useful for sending to a database, Raw = just for peeping into the raw data. The Raw style exports the data more or less verbatim. This could help you to see how Doing works internally. 'Basic' processes the raw data into a set of from-to stints and exports them one per line. It is now meaningful to declare some activities to be included in this report and others (eg sleeping) to be irrelevant. That's what the right hand multi-select list box is for. The list box on the left says what info should be listed in each record and in what order. Eg. Do you want the start and end times or just the duration?

The 'Prof' style is a development of 'Basic' which forces one line per day to be printed. The fields offered in the left hand list box are now a little different from those available under Basic, and most people can get the body of their timesheet generated by this style alone.

If you have a very complicated life with seperate clients and sub-projects, I suggest you export Basic reports from Doing and paste them into a database like MS Access from which you can do whatever you want.

Purge

Doing likes to keep two whole months of data plus this month so far. If it finds itself with data older than this it asks to purge on startup. You can customise this behaviour under 'set' and immediately delete things older than a date of your choice.

That was the desperately important stuff. The rest is optional.

FAQ

Minor Updates

If you agreed to receive email from me, I will inform you of minor updates as they appear. These are always free and contain bug fixes, cosmetic improvements and minor features that really should have been there all along. They don't include major new functionalities.

You should install the minor updates as I tell you about them, even if you can't see anything wrong with your current version. That was a warning.

If you chose not to receive email from me, you can send me a mail to give me permission after all. Otherwise you can occasionally check the current minor version number at the web site.

Requests

If you want something I haven't thought of, ask me for it. Here are the contact addresses:

Freeware. Good for all Palms with an inverting backlight (i.e. if, with the light on, the letters look brighter than the background.)

It's dark. You are fumbling around using your Palm backlight as a flashlight, but it's just not bright enough. Torch, using only 524 bytes! of palm memory, makes your screen as bright as possible through judicious choice of screen colouring (black.)

Torch is not only freeware but open source too:

	#include <Pilot.h>
	RectangleType r={0,0,160,160};
	DWord PilotMain( Word cmd, Ptr, Word)
	{
	  EventType e;
	  if (cmd==sysAppLaunchCmdNormalLaunch) {
	    WinDrawRectangle(&r,0);
	    WinEraseChars("stone-age-software", 18, 38, 50);
	    do {
	      EvtGetEvent(&e, evtWaitForever);
	      SysHandleEvent(&e);
	    } while (e.eType!=appStopEvent && e.eType!=penDownEvent); }
	  return 0;
	}

Challengers for the title of world's smallest useful Palm app are heartily invited.

Remember that the scores in this game are decided more by the babes than by the turkeys. If you score above 25,000 you can take a look through the holes 8^)