Xcra

Version 3 by Stephane Carrez

Xcra is a tool which will help you record the time spent on various tasks, and manage a set of notes strongly or loosely coupled with the active task. If is very useful if you are faced with one of the following problems:

  • at the end of the day, you don't know where you have spent your time,
  • your project manager (or you) needs to charge the time on your project,
  • you have to remember complex commands (related or not to your project),
  • you have to remember some actions to do.

Xcra integrates a task manager and a note manager. The xcra task manager will help you on the following points:

  • it records each day the time spent on your different activities;
  • you inform xcra of the task that you are working on by clicking on a button;
  • you are able to add/subtract the time for a particular task and for a particular day;
  • you can create/remove tasks;
  • it produces several summary reports to understand where you have spent some time, on which activity, and how much.
  • it can save the information in an external database (specific database, Oleo data-sheet, ...).

The xcra note manager will help you on the following points:

  • it records various free-text which are correlated or not with a task. Such free-text could be:
    • a set of complex commands to launch (and to remember!);
    • a set of actions to do to finish the activity;
    • the result of a command that you want to save for some time;
    • personal notes...
  • it allows you to retrieve quickly some information related or not to the current activity;

Xcra window looks like:

The first and second buttons correspond to the task manager. They tell you the current task and the time spent on it. The third button gives you access to the notes related to the current task.

Xcra contains an online help (English) for each dialog box it contains. Online help is organized in topics and sub-topics for clarity and easiness of use.

Requirements:

  • X11R5 or X11R6, (Athena widgets)
  • gcc, g++ 2.6.3 or 2.7 (libg++ not used), egcs-2.91.66,
  • perl 4.036

Xcra has been tested on the following platforms:

  • SunOS 4.1.1, sun3, g++ 2.6.3/g++ 2.7.2, X11R6
  • SunOS 4.1.3, sun4, g++ 2.7.2, X11R5
  • SunOS 5.3, sun4, g++ 2.7.2, X11R5
  • SunOS 5.3, sun4, Sun C++ SparcWorks 4.0.1, X11R5
  • GNU/Linux 1.2.13, i486, g++ 2.7.2, X11R6
  • GNU/Linux 2.2.14, i686, egcs 1.1.2, X11R6

GNU configure is used so that porting it to another platform should be quite straight forward.


I've started Xcra a long time ago... I'm still using it under GNU/Linux in KDE environment.

March 2000Xcra 2.2.1 release (build fix).xcra-2.2.1.tar.gz
August 1996Xcra 2.2 release (bug fix).
December 1995Xcra 2.1 release.xcra-2.1.tar.gz
October 1995Xcra 2.0 release.
April 1995Xcra 1.2 release.
April 1995Xcra 1.1 release.
February 1995Xcra 1.0 release.
September 1994Xcra 0.1..0.3 releases.