So, the job timer went live on Tuesday night - late Tuesday night - but a full three days ahead of my anticipated delivery date. I'm hoping it's functionality is fairly straightforward so I won't bore you with a lot of details here. There are controls for timer Start, Stop and Reset. You can select a project and a task, add comments and log the hours to your timesheet once the timer is stopped.

Job timer started.

Job timer stopped.

Known Issues

There are a couple of bugs worth noting from the outset. If you stop th timer, the elapsed time will show in the Hours text field. However, if you then navigate to another page or reload the page you're on, the elapsed time will vanish. You can quickly start and stop the timer to bring the elapsed time back but your hours really just need to stay there until you reset the timer. The same thing happens with your selected project/task. Those selections are lost if the page is reloaded.

These are relatively quick fixes but I just don't think I'm going to have time to address them before leaving on vacation for the weekend.

UPDATE: These known issues have been addressed. 

Future Enhancements

1. Integration with the dashboard as a widget - this will also provide integration of the job timer with the Netvibes and Google modules.

2. Port the timer as desktop widgets for Mac and PC and as a Vista sidebar gadget. The gadget will log your time online or offline and synch with your timesheet when an internet connection becomes available.

3. Allow multiple jobs to be timed at once. A couple of users have requested this feature but I'm having trouble figuring out how useful this could be. I mean, I can multi-task with the best of 'em but I can't fully do 3 tasks at a time and feel good about billing the entire time for all three. Anyone seeing something I'm missing here? Please let me know.

I'm also fielding input concerning widget technology. I have to admit that the Yahoo! Widgets platform sounds tempting because it's (in theory) completely cross-platform. The idea of building one widget and deploying on Mac, PC and Vista sounds too good. My concern is the adoption rate of this platform. I don't want to force anyone into downloading Yahoo's widget platform just for a job timer. Any thoughts here?

Another idea I had was building something with Adobe's Apollo platform - but again, there's that whole adoption thing to contend with. So, I'm open to ideas - I'm giving myself one week to field comments and do some research before I decide on a technology so let your voice be heard.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff