15-Minute Reviews :: Timestimator v1.5

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Timestimator version 1.5 by Evercyber – An application to aid in common time functionality.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Timestimator calculates due dates, durations and provides you with a perpetual calendar with convenient navigation abilities and customizable worldclock list.

Lease apartments? Are engaged in supply chain management? Manage warehouses? Organize travel? All of these require advanced date calculations. Timestimator makes the life easier for people who often need to calculate arrival dates, shipment periods, or get local time on the opposite side of Earth.”

Quick Pros

• Calculate date from as well as days between
• Timezones somewhat handy
• Ability to edit holidays handy
• Is a bit more powerful than web-based alternatives

Quick Cons

• Interface is not vastly intuitive or pleasant-looking
• Percent per Unit and Cost per Unit has 2 boxes for a number
• Timezone selection is awkward as a drop-down/text-box
• World clock functionality is not as expected

Expansion

Upon first launch of this application, you are greeted by a tabbed area with options on the top half of the screen; The bottom half contains three calendars starting with the current month and going for the two months after (This can be adjusted as well). The tabbed area gives you access to the Due date, Duration, Timezones and World clock areas, providing the options for each as the tab is clicked on. It isn’t very hard to get all of these running and is surprisingly simple while providing quite a bit of functionality; The application does seem to fall a bit short with the interface looking good (The results of Due date, Duration and Timezones simply tossed into a text box) or intuitiveness (No way to set presets for days, options feeling like their scattered and so forth). I feel with a little polish and effort this could be improved however.

The four common functions of this application are due date, duration, timezones and world clock. The first function, Due date, gives you the ability to calculate the resulting day by providing a starting day and a certain number of days, weeks, months or years before or after the provided date. The options allow you to exclude holidays (which can be altered in the Preferences to your region’s holidays) as well as specific days of the week (for example if you were wanting business days only). There is also a basic interest calculator included as well, but it feels a bit weak.

The second function is Duration and this allows you to calculate the number of days, weeks, months or years between two dates as well as calculate an amount based on the unit you choose and a cost per unit inserted. As with Due date, this function allows you to exclude holidays and specific days of the week as well for more control over the result. One quirk I do have with both Due date and Duration besides the interface is that the decimal entry is awkward, forcing two boxes for decimal entry is not very simple when one box would do.

The third function is the Timezones functionality, and it does as intended; It shows you the timezone difference between two selected timezones, as well as the time in the second timezone based on the selected time in the first timezone. An interesting aspect here is that you can punch in any time into the first timezone to get the second timezone’s time from that time. The downfall is that if you click on the Now button to choose the current time, the time will not continue updating based on the current time; Instead, it only displays the time when you clicked Now. The timezone entry system is fairly complex too; The dropdown list has a significant number of listings. The author was clearly trying to make things easy by providing a wide range of ways to access your desired timezone so scrolling through the timezones is a tedious; The alternative is typing in part of the name of the place you’re looking for and then click the drop down, hoping it brings you close to what you want. It would have been nice to have seen maybe separate drop-downs based on how you wanted to enter, including daylight savings abbreviations and possibly a way to enter a time based on GMT by itself.

Finally, the fourth function is the World clock. This function is very simple; You add timezones with the same dropdown found in the Timezone tab, and it automatically adds the timezone to the end of the list in a table format. While this is handy for seeing timezones at a glance, there isn’t much options here. There is no way to reorder the listing manually (via buttons, apparent keystrokes or clicking on the headers to sort by alphabetical or time) – The only way to get the order right is by adding all the timezones in the order you want them to appear. If you add a lot of timezones, it can be quite tedious to delete them and then reinput them.

Final Verdict

While this application does need some polishing up to make it feel more like a professional tool, it does have some functionality which is fairly handy (such as the holiday and day exclusion options) and may make it worth looking past the pitfalls. For free, if you have been looking for an application such as this one and need it, it may not be a bad application to try. As for paying $19 for this title, I would find it difficult to recommend it without seeing some polish go on the application and quite a few improvements; However, if you are in need of this kind of functionality, it may still be worth looking to see if it will work good for you (The Trial version is 30 days). If you are looking for similar functionality and don’t need the exclusion options, an alternative may be The tools found over at timeanddate.com

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, January 08, 2008