Who Created it?

Klok was created by Rob McKeown, co-owner of Mcgraphix, Inc., as a way to track hours spent on consulting projects and as an entry in Adobe's AIR developer derby contest. It became evident that it would be useful to others so it was released as Freeware. It has since been downloaded over 7000 times.

How do I use it?

The main screen shows a hierarchical list of all your clients, projects and/or tasks and a calendar view showing the current week. To track time spent on a particular client, project or task, simply drag that item from the tree and drop it on the calendar. This will create a one hour entry for that task at the location at which you dropped it. To change the start or end time, you can drag the "gripper" at the top and bottom of the entry. Hold down the "Shift" key to constrain it in 15 minute increments. To move the entire entry, just drag it to a new location. Again, the "Shift" key allows you to constrain the start time to 15 minute intervals. If you wish to remove an item from the calendar view or a task or project from the tree view on the left, just drag it to the trash can in the bottom left.

The left and right arrows directly above the calendar view allow you to move back or ahead one week at a time. The small calendar icon, will quickly jump to the current week when clicked. To zoom in and out of the week view, you can click the magnifier glass icons to the right or drag the slider between them.

Double clicking an item from the week view, will allow you to enter comments regarding the time spent. You can also alter the start and end time from the edit panel shown below the week view.

Double clicking an item from the tree view will take you to the project view. From here you can change the name, enter contact information, provide a time estimate, specify the color to be used in the tree, on the calendar and in reports. You can also add sub-tasks if necessary.

Clicking on the Time Entries tab will display all time entries for a particular task. Each entry corresponds to an entry on the calendar. Adding an entry here will add one to the calendar view. To delete an entry, drag it to the trash. To edit an entry, select it from the list and edit the details as necessary below.

If at any time you realize that you have accidentally deleted something, don't worry. I do that all the time so there is a way you can retrieve it from the trash. Just double click the trash icon to view what's in it. Select the items you wish to retstore and click the "restore selected" button.

Click on the reports link at the top to launch reports view. From the list of reports, click one to launch. Reporting is still being enhanced and will be much more feature rich in an upcoming version.

Wondering what this does in the upper left corner? When you are about to start working on a task or about to go into a meeting, you may want to make sure you track your time exactly. So before you start, just drag the task and drop it on the "Currently working on" area to indicate that this is the task you are currently working on. This will start a timer so that when you are done with the task, you can click the "stop" button (not shown here but trust me... it will be just to the right of that tiny down arrow. While I'm on the subject, clicking that tiny arrow will give you a drop down of the last 5 projects you worked on making it easy to switch between tasks like meetings, coding, ui design and testing for example.

Over in the upper right you will see the normal (for Windows users anyway) buttons for minimizing, maximizing and closing the window. Just to the left, is the collapse icon. When clicked, Klok will happily scrunch up into a tiny area on your screen which you can tuck away while you work. This is useful, when you have a timer running. While running the timer will display how long you have been working on a task. When in this view, Klok will stay above every other window, so it doesn't get lost.

If you have any questions, problems or bugs, feel free to email me at rob (at) mcgraphix (dot) com.

How do I get it?

You may also download the file and install it manually. You will need to AIR runtime first

Support Klok

Help support Klok development by making a donation.

I Found a Bug. What do I do?

First of all, thanks for finding it since I obviously missed it. Until I have a proper bug tracking system in place, you can email me at: rob (at) mcgraphix (dot) com.

Gotta pay the bills