Comment 7 for bug 686062

The integration with the clock indicator (is that what it is called?) makes sense to me but I would like to stress the importance of be able to easily see that I am "on the clock". Waiting 27 minutes for a bubble to pop-up and remind me is not the most optimal when I just want to check at a glance. So I agree with Wouter van Vliet that some visual clue would be needed that a recorded activity is active.

I would like to be able to easily see what activity I am currently on. I first thought maybe the clock could (optionally) change between the time and current activity but fitting a random string into an indicator would probably end up being a bit abusive to the whole system and potentially start back on the path of a messy dumping ground of information as the notification area had become. So would it be possible to show the current hamster activity displayed in one or all of the Unity dashboards? Maybe even show it in the desktop expose view? As there seems to be a recent files and documents dash area that makes use of Zeitgeist, seeing the "current" and "recent past" Hamster tracking activities in the same area would make sense to me.

Better yet. If it integrated with Zeitgeist would it not then be possible to say "Show me the documents I was working on during /this/ activity"? Thats probably a separate feature request to this issue though but I could not help firing it in there while its in my head ;)

I'm not too bothered about having an extra click to access Hamster either as its not like I rapidly switch between activities. At the same time. Would an extra click be needed? Could a text field in the same style as the MeMenu's "Post message" not work for entering the activity? The user would simply click the clock indicator, enter text into the activity name field and hit return. It might be an idea to have two buttons (in one row) under this text field: Tags, and Overview so the user can easily click what tags to mark the Hamster activity with. The activityName@category already works for Hamster so this would remain the same.

I also like rbertran idea of being able to easily start an activity based on a task shown in the indicator. It makes sense to have all this in one indicator group since Time, Data, Calendar, Task, and Activity tracking all relate to clocking. Maybe calendar event should have a similar ability to start activity time tracking as knowing how long I spent on an event is also useful.

Anyway thats my 2 pence to the issue.

Thanks all