So apparently recently the Internet (and blog world) have discovered Active Timer, a small app I wrote about a year and a half ago. Apparently people find the app useful, go figure. Now that other people actually use the app, I’ve become compelled to add a couple features, hopefully sometime this week. It’s also kind of ugly, so I may have to shiny-it-up a bit.
By the way, this entry brought to you by Jay’s recent update.
Please please do update it. I would love it if you could export the results to excel. And/or at least if once the application has been quit and restarted time you could start again without clearing the previous results.
Being able to hit a hotkey while in an application to differentiate between (say) “good” Firefox use and “bad” Firefox use would be an extra-cool feature.
And maybe you could work with another developer to combine time spent with keypresses and/or mouse movement per application?
Anyway thanks for providing the application!
That’s actually a bug — the button is supposed to let you continue running the timers after quit (which is why it opens up to the old state when you quit and relaunch it). You can get around this bug by saving the timers to a file, and then opening them again. You’ll be able to then start the timers again. I’ll be sure to fix this later today.
How would you feel about sharing with other developers how it works?
It may prove worthwhile to let potential users know that it does not launch under 10.2.8.
I wonder if all your apps are destined for 10.3 or higher??
Great idea unfortunately I cannot use it 🙁
I’m one of the people that discovered Active Timer in the last couple of months, and I’m really happy to hear that you’re continuing to work on it. As it is, it’s much more useful to me than the many elaborate time tracking apps that force you to track time manually.
There are a couple of features that would make it nearly perfect. One would be for Active TImer to detect idle time. For example, if I go out for lunch, after a user defined time (5 minutes or so) of no mouse or keyboard activity, the timer would shut off. It would start again when it detects new activity.
Another nice feature would be for Active Timer to automatically fill out a “time sheet” at the end of each day. For example, at 10pm it would dump the day’s timer info into some kind of file (text, XML?).
Finally, it would be great if Active Timer could run in the background (possibly in the menu bar?) so it would be difficult to accidentally quit the app.
By the way, I would be more than happy to pay a reasonable price for an updated version of Active Timer.