Mac OS X port

[iliv]

Hello,

I'm a big fan of Project Hamster. It is hands down the best time tracking software there is out there. Design and usability are unmatched by any other. It is most intuitive to use application in its class I've ever run into. It makes a pretty much dull and tedious task of time tracking an interesting exercise because I can feel how this little app alleviates most boring input efforts with memorized entries and tags. I could go on and on, statistic module albeit not extremely flexible and detailed is very decent and, well, looks great! A point that gets overlooked by many in software development world.

Anyway, I couldn't find a good enough replacement for Project Hamster on OS X -- despite the myriad of commercial applications -- nothing is quite as good. I've been checking out your wordpress site and github account in hopes to see OS X version for years but alas this is apparently not something you're planning to do.

I just wanted to contact you and let you know that there is a real need for a good application like project hamster on OS X. There's a gap to fill. Much like GnuCash OS X port is a kick-ass personal finance application on OS X that has no rivals even of commercial breed, had the Project Hamster been ported to OS X, it would've been the king of time tracking.

I know how open source software development is and I totally understand that OS X is not everyone's priority but I do wonder what it would take to port Hamster to OS X. Especially seeing how GnuCash is actively supported. There must be framework already established that could be taken advantage of and save Project Hamster developers a ton of time.

Is there any "political will" at all? How demanding an effort like that would be? Heck, I so want to see Hamster on OS X that I'm considering to run a donation campaign or something.

Ivan

[nchachereau]

Hi there! Thank you for all this enthusiasm, I am sure everyone who tries to devote some free time to hamster is glad you like it so much.

However, as we are only a few people, without very much time and doing this on the side... porting the app to a platform we do not even use is really not an option. At all 😞 Especially since the current code base has so many bugs... So in the interest of cleaning the list of issue, I am marking this as wontfix and closing.

I hope you will find a way to run hamster on OS X (does anyone know whether this is possible? after all, GTK+ is more or less cross platform...) or another great application for your new platform of choice. Kind regards!

[jeff-dagenais]

sad.

Any updates on this? Any other suggestions? Does the rewrite have a better chance of working on macOS?

[ederag]

This would require someone with knowledge of macOS and dbus.
And yes, the rewrite uses up to date python packaging
that has better chance to work cross-platform.

[mapkyca]

I'm also trying to scratch this itch.

I travel an awful lot for work and so use owncloud to sync the hamster db between various machines, which works great. However, my new gig is now mainly a OSX ecosystem.

I'm actually hoping to sidestep the whole issue by writing an interface to poke into the database directly. It seems fairly achievable, since as far as I can see the database is pretty simple...

I will let folks know how I get on...

[ederag]

db.py is doing just that, directly, if the issue is only dbus.
Is the overview window showing ?

[plowsec]

I just tested on OSX, I could successfully install the dependencies (including GTK3) and build hamster. For now I have trouble with dbus but the situation is not as hopeless as it used to be :)

[ederag]

Great news, thanks !
You might be interested in PR #573, and the --no-dbus option.
I have now moved off the project (the new team is full of energy; the project is fine),
but it would be great to see that work useful.

The instructions for testing a PR might be useful.

[plowsec]

Oh wonderful! I should have checked the PRs. So here is a screenshot:

I could not install hamster with the following command:

( umask 0022 && sudo ./waf install; )

So instead, I launched hamster-cli.py manually (python3 src/hamster-cli.py) and fixed the errors as they appeared.

One thing that gave me trouble was the error

(hamster-cli.py:5156): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: 22:55:09.752: Settings schema 'org.gnome.Hamster' is not installed

I fixed it in the following way (I have no idea what I'm doing but I just want the damn thing to work):

cp data/org.gnome* /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas

Then it is my understanding that I should update the gschema.compiled with the command below:

glib-compile-schemas /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

And then:

python3 src/hamster-cli.py --no-dbus

I had to install those dependencies:

brew install python3 gtk+3 pygobject3 adwaita-icon-theme
brew install gettext
brew install intltool
brew link gettext --force

Thanks for the help and the --no-dbus flag :)

[ederag]

Congratulations !
It would be great to make the installation process work on mac as well, but meanwhile,
this workaround might be useful, to work without any installation.

[ederag]

Note: PR #573 has just been updated with the latest fixes.

[GeraldJansen]

What a nice surprise. Yay for the --no-dbus flag!

[ggdupont]

@plowsec thanks for making this work, I've been missing hamster tracker since I moved to macos... Quick question though: I can't manage to get the "gi" module available even after cleaning my python env and installing it fresh with homebrew like you suggested. Any clue on why my python interpreter might not find the package installed?