Whats new in TimePanic 4.2 for Windows?

TimePanic 4.2 for Windows introduces hourly rates and adds little usability enhancements here and there.

New features

• TimePanic now supports hourly rates (customer request).
• Hourly rates can be assigned to projects and to sub-projects. Hourly rates can be variable.
• Hourly rates allow to create reports that calculate net invoice amounts based on the projects used in the activities.

Minor improvements

• Windows 7 is now supported.
• Report columns can now be right-aligned.
• The Display option has been moved from the "View" tab to the "Structure" tab to make it easier to understand (customer request).
• There is now an extra tab for rarely used options. This makes it easier to accommodate simple "niche" requests.
• The option "Automatically reload types" has been introduced back in version 3.3 and is now available in the user interface.
• The option "Show information texts" has been moved here from the "View" tab. It is no longer available in the freeware edition.
• A couple of small new options are enabled by default and allow to disable certain functions:
• "Adjust the width of comment columns as well" (customer request).
• "Animate side bar" (customer request).
• "Allow insert with shift" (customer request).
• "Automatically finalize last activity" (customer request).
• "Show week numbers in calendars" (customer request).
• "Select newly created activities" (customer request).
• "Minimize application after saving" is a small new convenience option (customer request).
• The way rounding is handled in TimePanic has always been a source of confusion. In this version, several changes have been made to alleviate this problem:
• In previous versions, the sum displayed in the status bar was based on real times instead of the rounded times displayed in the day view or the report view. This principle was often perceived as an inconsistency ("TimePanic can't do math") because the sum in the status bar was sometimes different from the sum of the displayed values. As of this version, the sum in the status bar is based on the rounded times. If you prefer the old way of rounding, enable the new option "late rounding in status bar" in the advanced options.
• Reports in matrix mode have a sum column and a sum row. In previous versions, the sums were based on the real (non-rounded) times. As a result, the sums could be inconsistent with the displayed individual times. As of this version, the sums are based on the displayed (rounded) times. Consistency (= early rounding) is, in this case, more important than precision (= late rounding).
• In the statistical information, three of the fields have been replaced by a single field: "Total duration of all (rounded) intervals", "Total duration of all (rounded) activity groups" and "Total duration of all (rounded) activities" have been replaced by "Total hours". This field uses early rounding and is the recommended method for calculating the sum of all hours displayed in a report.
• In the statistical information, the fields "Total working time", "Total chargeable working time" and "Total non-chargeable working time" have been renamed to "Total chargeable and non-chargeable hours (late rounding)", "Total chargeable hours (late rounding)" and "Total non-chargeable hours (late rounding)", respectively. The complicated names are meant as an invitation to read the documentation before using these fields.
• The dialog for selecting statistical information has been simplified: The list of fields has been reduced to only six important fields. For the other 30 fields, you have to click "Show Advanced Fields".
• When using metric time (decimal duration format), it is now possible to round to the nearest tenth (customer request).

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Changing the flags of an activity by means of in-place editing always adjusted the times, even if automatic time adjustment was off (customer request).
• Fixed: When using the report option I want to interactively specify the week when the report is generated, the forward arrow button in the calendar used to select the week did not work under Windows Vista (customer request).
• Fixed: Under rare circumstances, all favorite activities and the activities of the current day could be lost (customer request). This can happen in previous versions if the data are stored on a network drive and the connection is temporarily lost. If automatic saving is enabled and the connection is restored before the user has closed the error message displayed by TimePanic, all favorite activities and the activities of the current day are deleted.
• Fixed: Under certain circumstances, many tooltips in the toolbar suddenly displayed the text "ToDo" (customer request).
• Fixed: The three report columns "Start time of first activity of the day", "End time of last activity of the day" and "Duration of non-chargeable hours" now exclude non chargeable activities at the beginning and at the end of the day (customer request).
• Fixed: After saving, TimePanic did not return all memory provided by Windows for the save operation (customer request). In technical terms, it was a file handle leak.
• Fixed: Line breaks in comments were ignored in reports displayed in print view (customer request).
• Fixed: After side grading from the freeware edition to the commercial edition of TimePanic, the export function did not support the additional columns of the commercial version (customer request).

Bug fixes related to ActiveSync synchronization

• Fixed: Deleting an activity on the PC could result in an unintentional time adjustment of an adjacent activity on the mobile device after synchronization if automatic time adjustment was disabled on the PC and enabled on the mobile device.
• Fixed: If the visibility of a project, work type or person was changed on the PC, this change was not synchronized to the mobile device unless some other property was changed, too (at the same time or later).

Patches

Build 612 fixes the following problems:

• Under Windows 7, if TimePanic is minimized to the task bar, the "Do you want to save your changes" dialog, which is displayed when shutting down Windows, remains invisible and locks the application (customer request).
• When a report in matrix mode is saved from the data view to a text file, the column headers are exported incorrectly: The generic name <IntervalFormatted> is used instead of the column names visible in the report view (customer request).
• The option late rounding in status bar now also applies to the TimePanic title when running minimized in the task bar (customer request).
• Under certain circumstances, the license key (and other user preferences) were not saved when closing the Windows session (custom request). Time tracking data were not affected.

Build 614 fixes the following problems:

• Fixed: Starting a new activity by clicking on a favorite activity caused the activity list to flicker (customer request)
• Fixed: In some reports, the calculated amount was missing (customer request).

Build 615 fixes the following problems:

• Fixed: Changing the flags of an activity by means of the F11 key or the F12 key always adjusted the times, even if automatic time adjustment was off (customer request).