Village Gamer

Vancouver developer TechSingular Applications has announced the first release of Activitap, an app specifically designed to minimize the number of taps required to record what activities are being done when, and to turn this information into a deliverable timesheet without any further calculation or editing in most circumstances.

Available free of charge for a limited time, Activitap was designed for professional consultants who switch between several tasks and clients in a day. Its functionality is, however, general enough to be used by just about anyone who needs to prepare a timesheet for rapidly changing tasks.

The key to the usability of this app is recognition of the fact that professionals are likely doing things they have done before. Having entered and classified something once, there should be no reason to have to do so again. Activitap was designed so that entire log entries, or just the values used in individual entry fields (activity descriptions, categories, and timekeeping or budget codes) are automatically available as items to pick when adding new entries. There is no need to set things up; the choices grow naturally as you use the app.

Timesheet views update their totals on the fly, allowing you to view the current or past timesheets at any time. If you manually override a value, the original and new values will be remembered and the change highlighted in the app, not the sent timesheet. Timesheets are email-ready, and can be sent to anyone in your address book. A configuration option allows you to set the timesheet recipients if you don’t want to choose them each time.

As with activity logging, configuration of the application was designed to require minimum effort. In fact you may be able to use the app without any prior configuration. The most likely change you may need is the day of the week for which timesheets are generated. This is easily accomplished by picking any date on which a timesheet is required. Activitap’s default configuration ignores any entries categorized as “Personal” and includes all others in timesheets. You can change the configuration to include or exclude any categories, and also to exclude any codes within included categories. The Activitap website at www.activitap.com offers a downloadable 28-page user guide–most of the space being devoted to illustrative screen shots. The website also includes a support forum.