Wednesday, September 13, 2006

QuickLogger Plus updates (finally!)

About 6 weeks ago, I posted a little utility online called QuickLogger Plus. I got a fair bit of feedback, pretty much all positive, and a fistful of feature requests. I started plotting and planning... and then nothing happened. I don't think I even replied to most of the comments or e-mail.

I'm happy to say that I've finally taken a little time to sit down with the code and do some more work with it. I've tightened up the configuration a bit, and managed to add a few new features:


  • Flexible formatting: the formatting of the log entry is now controlled by a single configuration variable called entryTemplate - for example: "[[ISO_DATE]]" & VbTab & "[[ISO_TIME]]" & VbTab & "[[ENTRY]]" will create a tab-separated entry with ISO-style date and time, while "[[LOCAL_DATE]] [[LOCAL_TIME]] [[ENTRY]]" will format the line like the original QuickLogger script. You could also do HTML, comma-separated value, probably even RTF or any other text-based format if you like.
  • New logging fields: with the entryTemplate system, there are a few new pieces of information that can be logged, including:

    • current logged in user with [[USER_NAME]] and [[USER_DOMAIN]]
    • elapsed time since the last entry [[DURATION_MINUTES]]

  • Easier extensibility: need to log something else that I haven't included support for? Just create a token (i.e. [[MY_OBSCURE_DATA]]) in entryTemplate, add it to the validTokens array (line 158), and add a switch to the select case statement starting on line 161.


Feature requests still on the back burner include:


  • support for parsing embedded "tags" in the entry similar to those used in todo.txt - I've had a couple requests for this, but I haven't quite figured out how I'd like to handle it
  • logging to Excel, ODBC, or other non-plaintext formats - I've had a couple requests for this as well, but I'm not planning on adding this in the near future. I guess I'm a believer in human-readable plaintext. With the new entryTemplate, however, it should be a lot easier to create a template that facilitates importing into other applications (comma-separated values, etc.)


Download here - quicklogger.vbs - and let me know if you run into any bugs, have any new feature requests, etc. Thanks again to everyone for the feedback on the first release, and hopefully I'll be better at replying and keeping everyone up-to-date!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Was wondering about one thing.. would it be possible to have the dialogue box stay 'always on top' ? If so, I'd love it if you could keep the dialogue box open while you're doing a job, and then when you close the dialogue box, the line gets another timestamp, so you have a reminder on what you were working on, and total time spent on that is recorded.