I don’t know how many of you are working as freelancers or do need any kind of time recording to prove their working hours or only to record how many hours they spend on their master thesis 
. For me slimtimer does very well and I am really happy with this tool. It comes directly with a small browser bookmark bar script, that opens some kind of timer and shows the current worked time on a specific task.
I think, this is fine as long as you spend most of your time in a browser, but as soon as you dig deeper on a terminal or in textmate this behavior is not really suitable – as executing a rake task you want to start and stop recording time, don’t you?
Ok, it took me a day but I created some small little command line interface for slimtimer and it works well – the only thing you need is a slimtimer account and an API key that you get without any questions directly from the slimtimer website.
The next step is installing the slimtimer command line interface on your local workstation with executing:
sudo gem install slimtimercli
As soon as the gem is installed, you need to setup slimtimercli for the first usage using the setup command
slimtimer --setup
This will ask for your e-mail as username and your password and API key for authentication. Now you need to fetch your tasks and check on which you are going to start working
slimtimer --tasks
Ok, now the hairy moment starts, prepare your engines, clean your keyboard and be ready to work with
slimtimer --start my_shiny_task
Hours later, totally exhausted, you might stop working and of course stop the timer, how? Easy as opening a bottle of water
slimtimer --end
That’s cool hey? So that’s pretty much it, more documentation can be found using
slimtimer --help
If you want to supply patches, complaints or compliments please submit them to the brand new Google Group for slimtimercli.
