Improvements to Kapow

I have made some changes to the development version of Kapow while I have worked on FocusWriter, but I haven’t blogged about what I have been up to. I figured that I should remedy that!

First and foremost I have been working on making the user interface more comfortable. A small change, but larger difference in actual use, is that you can now set (and even change) the task of a session before it is finished. The task field starts focused, so all you have to do is type in a task and press enter to start a session.

I have never been too happy with the “Billed” column, so I have renamed and hidden it for new installs. To make the report concept more clear I have added a row below the last row of each report that contains its totals. I have also added a menu action called “Create Report…” that is the same thing as checking the billed box for a row.

A common request has been to be able to export reports. I have added support for exporting a report as an HTML file, as well as exporting the time data of a report as either an iCalendar file or a file of comma separate values.

I have made a variety of other, smaller changes. For instance, you can now specify the data file on the command-line. I have also dramatically sped up loading the data file, which helps reduce program start time quite a bit. On my computer a large test file went from taking around 1 second to a mere 15 milliseconds, and on my slowest test computer it went from 3 and a half seconds to only 120 milliseconds.

What would the point of a post about visual changes be without showing them? Without further ado, here is the improved interface of Kapow: