In the wake of an apocalyptic society, it’s now more important than ever to have the ability to easily manage your time.
Earlier this year, Alistair made a little time logging script to use in-house. We wanted to get a better picture of how we were allocating our time between projects. Alistair made a little stopwatch-like desktop widget to go with his little time tracking server. As soon as he demoed his little project to me, my enthusiasm sparked (I’m easily excited). Of course, time management applications are abundant but this was a perfect project to prove that Symphony is capable of powering web applications.
Introducing Jikan
Time logging application is perfect for Symphony’s application proof-of-concept debut. This concept will be able to showcase Symphony’s innate power to marry time log data, XML, XSLT and graphs together. Over the next few days, Jikan was born. This would be an application I would develop as a side project. As Symphony’s next version development began, Jikan was filed away.
Fast forward to today, Symphony 2 beta is almost amongst us and the it’s time to pull this little project back out from the filing cabinet.
Powered by Symphony
The most exciting thing for me in regards to developing Jikan with Symphony is the ability to represent the log data in virtually limitless ways. With XSLT, I would be able to make time log comparisons between different people or warn users if their hours are seeing spiked activities based on a running average. With this in mind, I knew the system needed to be as modular as possible.
Jikan’s interface is broken up into panels and each panel has its own functionality and logic. This modularity synergy between the frontend and backend enables us to create new panels as we go along which makes the project even more exciting.
Interface
The iPhone hadn’t been introduced yet when I designed the interface and luckily the panel architecture really suit mobile devices. Since this was conceived as a proof-of-concept I had the freedom to be as crazy as I wanted without the need to consider real-world factors such as target demographic or browser compatibility. The design is overall a little more over-the-top than my usual designs.
Business
When I showed Scott and Alistair my design, I accompanied with a rough business plan in the off-chance this project eventuated. All the usual business models were considered: hosted subscription, download, monkey currency1, etc. While we haven’t made a decision on a business model, one thing is for certain: it’ll be a super model with a tangy twist.
Discuss
If you see just one more time tracking application, you’ll hurl a sadistic cowboy at a barely legal piano player? Or do you like the idea so much you want to apply for a job as a barely legal piano player? Discuss!
Footnotes
- Monkeys throw faeces as way of exchanging goods and services. ↩