Ubuntu released Intrepid Ibex earlier this afternoon, just as scheduled. It comes with lots of new features. While new versions of all the key software is certainly good, a convenient encrypted directory is handy and the VM builder is very convenient, it's actually a couple of very small additions that I'm enjoying the most.

Hamster

Until I switched to Intrepid and discovered this excellent application about a month ago I had been tracking my time with GnoTime. This worked, but it has lots of options that I really don't need, the interface is clunky and the provided reports just don't provide what I want.

So for the last month I've been tracking my time with Hamster, and it's been a very welcome change. It lives quietly in a panel at the side of my desktop, I can jump to it with a hot key and quickly type a new description and there I am, tracked. Hamster has a lovely report screen with plenty of information and even graphs. Which aren't actually very useful! However there is also a "Generate Report" button which creates a simple HTML table document with all the viewed data in it. Nice and easy to copy/paste/convert to a spreadsheet and process.

Tasque

This is following the same theme of a small, dedicated application that just does one thing in a very simple way. In this case it's managing to-do lists.

Tasque in Intrepid does install and does work and provides a number of storage locations for your to-do data. However the one that I chose to use - Evolution (due to a vaguely recent to-do listing attempt already being based there), is not currently working!

Thankfully it didn't take much to rebuild evolution-sharp with a later version and then update the requirements in tasque and rebuild that too.

So now I'm happily tracking the time I'm spending filling up my to-do list!