I've just released a new version of What-Am-I-Doing on to the test URL. As a click once application it should (and has) downloaded to the users who are using it from this URL.

The most exciting development is the changes to the interface along the lines of "What are you trying to do" rather than my previous geeky / as it developed interface. The changes have led to some simplification and some duplication - which is intentional.

The main allocation screen has been altered so that it's easier to see the list of customers, and the list other projects. Todays allocated items has moved from the left to the right - which kind of makes sense in a work flow - you're moving stuff from left to right. You can also double click on this grid to allocate directly to a project. This works as people do tend to work on a set of projects in a day. More often than not, the rules have already allocated to the project so its just a case of using the items there. 

I still feel the need to add projects from the main allocation screen. It's really annoy me if, after selecting some entries I realized that I needed to change screen to add a project. On the other hand, the customer / project management screen is much easier to use in isolation when  setting up new customers and projects..

The Rules screen has not changed much - it's just come into the same screen rather than being a dialog. This area probably needs some more work, but that can be for the next release.

Behind the scenes, there's a significant change. On the setup screen you can now change the URL that the data is logged to. The default is, of course, http://www.whatamidoing.co.uk, but if you double click this text box then it'll ask you for a company name. The entered company name is checked against the main database and the appropriate URL is returned. This is important as it means that I can ship 1 application and it can serve both standard customers and the people that are running it on an in-house server. It also means that I maintain the control over who can use an internal / company specific URL.

If you've got any comments on the interface please let me know.

I've been looking for ways to get more information in to What-Am-I-Doing.

The first step was to grab information about the files locked by the target application.

A significant piece of the puzzle that was missing was time spent in outlook. Email consumes about 30% of my time, and I'd really like to be able to allocate this to projects.

The solution (for me at least) was to create an addin to Outlook that uses the event triggerd when a selected item changes to identify the selected email item. Once I have the item, i can get the sender, recipient and subject of the email. I use and API call to send this information to What-Am-I-Doing.

Using the "Other Info" field of the rules, I can automatically allocate time to a customer / project because I'm dealing with an email that is from that customer. It doesn't matter whether I'm reading an email, or writing one. It also doesn't matter whether the email is being read in it's own window or in the preview pane.

If you want to download the addin, you can get it from the what-am-i-doing website. You have to register / login to download it. I guess it's not much use to you if you're not running the app anyway.

I've added rules to the What-Am-I-Doing application so that time can be automatically allocated. This is a massive step forwards as, because of some of the ways that I work, I can often allocate a considerable amount of my time to a project without any input.

The rules are wildcard based and can be applied to either the application or the title information.

On the interface, I've added a "prototyping area". In this area, you can type the criteria for rules and see which lines in the "to allocate" area are highlighted.

I've setup about 20 rules in this way so far, and it seems to be allocating 60% to 65% of my time automatically each day.