=== Charm - the Cross-Platform Time Tracker ===
Whether you are a busy professional and you need to keep track of the
time you spend on your projects, or you are a student who
wants to know why you always have to rush right before the exam -
knowing how time is spent is commonly known to be a good idea.

Charm is a program for Mac Os X, Linux and Windows that helps to keep
track of time. It is built around two major ideas - tasks, and
events. Tasks are the things time is spend on, repeatedly. For
example, ironing laundry is a task. The laundry done for two hours on
last Tuesday is an event in that task. When doing laundry multiple
times, the events will be accumulated, and can later be printed in
activity reports or weekly time sheets. So in case laundry would be
done for three hours on Wednesday again, the activity report for the
"Ironing Laundry" task would list the event on tuesday, the event on
wednesday and a total of five hours.

=== Tasks ===
By default, the list of tasks known to Charm is empty. They have to be
created manually. So the first time work is done on a task, the task
entry needs to be created in the task list. Then, by selecting a task
and starting it, time will be recorded on that task. A comment can be
added that may help to identify later what the individual event was
for.
Switching fromone task to another is a matter of starting the other
task.

Tasks can have subtasks, and create a hierarchy this way. It is
recommended to create rather few top level tasks, since tasks are also
used to group in reports. Other tasks can then be created as children
or even grandchildren of the top level tasks.

=== Events ===
Every time time is recorded for a task, an event is created. What
events exist can be seen in the event editor (View->Event
Editor). Also, new events can be created there (without recording
them), modified or deleted.


=== Reports ===
== Activity Reports ==
Activity Reports group all events that happened in a certain time
frame, like a day or a week. They are handy to get an overview of what
was worked on during that time.

== Time Sheets ==
Time Sheets are created per week, and group event time to tasks and
week days. Time Sheets are great to report to the boss, you see.

=== Charm Preferences ===
Altough Charm has been developed under a philosophy to "Simply get it
right.", everything is not for everybody. Some behaviour of Charm can
thus be customized.

== Database Options ==
Sometimes, it makes no sense to book time to parent tasks. Instead,
the parent tasks collate the time of the leaf tasks. Check "only
record events for tasks that do not have children" to configure that
behaviour. By default, events can be recorded for all events.

Then, most of the times it makes sense to only record events for one
task at a time. Check "only allow one event at a time" for that.

== Appearance ==
The font size of the task tracker can be configured in this tab.

== Esoteric Options ==
Some friends of us are strange folk. That is expected, for they are
geeks and artists and coders. Since those are known to be very
professional, efficient people, the options in this tab offer
enhancements in usability that are quite useful, but not as obvious as
the other ones. So far, one feature has made it into this category:

To enter a great deal of events, switching AM/PM is cumbersome. People
from the US and other countries usually prefer AM/PM time
formats. Some still prefer to enter 24 hour times, since it is much
faster. Check "always use 24h time format when editing" to configure
this. By default it is off.

=== Authors and License ===
Charm has been developed by Mirko Boehm ([email protected]), as a work of
fun and experimentation. Other contributors are Pradeepto Bhattacharya
and Till Adam.

Charm is Free Software, developed under the terms
of the GPL. While we hope it is of good use, there is no guaranty of
function or usefulness of any kind.

Feedback is encouraged and always welcome. Feel free to suggest
improvements, or point out bugs in the software.