Simple Work Timer

Einstein once said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." To help me keep track of the time I spend working on a particular project, I wrote a simple little app called Simple Work Timer (or SWT.) It is the simplest of devices but a piece of software that I use more than just about any other program.


All it is is a little window with 4 buttons. The top one displays the hours, minutes and seconds since the timer was started. The second button displays the amount of time that has passed in hours (for example this button would show 1.5 after 1 and a half hours.) The third button starts and pauses the timer. The last button resets the timer to zero.

Clicking either of the top two buttons will copy that button's text to your clipboard. I use this most often with the second "hours" button. This allows me to paste the exact time I've spent on a project into Quickbooks or a spreadsheet for tracking and billing my time.

As the timer runs, the title of the program will display the hours and minutes since the timer was started. So, a simple glance down at your taskbar is all you need to take a peek at your current hours. This will also tell you if you forgot to unpause the timer when you went out for your smoke break, since SWT will also append the text "Paused" to it's program title when paused.

Perhaps you occasionally need to have multiple timers running at once. All you have to do is run multiple instances of the program and it will add multiple, independent copies of itself to your desktop. To help me keep track of which timer is which, I always place the timer in the same location on my screen for a particular client. For example, for my (fictional) client Joe's Widgets I always put the timer in the lower-right-hand corner of my screen. That way if I start another timer for another task, I'll always be able to distinguish between it and Joe's timer. I've found that SWT works very well coupled with Launchy, especially when launching multiple timers.

I've provided two links at the bottom of this post. The first link is to download Simple Work Timer. SWT is Windows only and requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. If you don't know what that means, don't worry - You probably already have it. If not, follow this link to download and install the Framework. SWT itself doesn't require any installation. It's just one executable file that you can put anywhere on your hard drive and run it.

The second link is to download the source code of SWT. It was originally programmed in VB.NET 1.1 but I've up-converted it to 2.0 for you and translated it to C# as well. Both the VB.Net version and C# version are contained in the solution in their respective folders. Obviously this program is very basic, but it's (fairly) well commented and could be a good learning tool for new developers. Here's some of the things you can learn from this code:

• A comparison of VB.NET code to C#.
• How to add an icon to your application.
• How to modify the title of your window.
• Using the timer component.
• Copying text to the clipboard.
• Casting and type conversion.

Without further ado, here's the downloads:

Download Simple Work Timer Executable
or
Download the Source Code