I released Active Timer 1.2 today. The biggest new feature is probably the fact that it can keep track of your idle time as a separate item. Leave suggestions for new feature in the comments!
I released Active Timer 1.2 today. The biggest new feature is probably the fact that it can keep track of your idle time as a separate item. Leave suggestions for new feature in the comments!
Thanks for the update! Keeping track of idle time is the single most important feature I was hoping for.
Jack
Great App!! Perfect for designers. I love it so much I designed a new Icon for it. You can get it at:
http://www.triggeragency.com/_blog/activetimericon.zip
I tried Active Timer 1.2 and really liked it. Simple and usefull, there should be more apps like this.
I also downloaded 1.2a update which solved the saving problems. I was happy to find that the software is still developed and maintaned. 🙂
Perhaps a sugestion for future: why not consider designing a widget that would do the similar task?
Anyway, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Hi Robert, Active Timer fiils a need for me — I have long wanted a time tracking app that tracks time in applications and doesn’t require a charge out rate and try to produce an invoice!
I tried it today (AT1.2a) and had Word X running. I had a bad freeze that froze the OS also. I’m running 10.3.9 on a G5 PowerBook 400. Word is buggy and unreliable (I have to use it for some collaborative work) but it did seem a lot more flay than usual with AT running. Will carry on testing . . .
hi–are there any plans to release this in widget form? if so, do you have any idea when you might have that done?
Active Timer tracks time spent in applications
The following is one of my current favorite small, useful, freeware applications for the Mac because it allows me to break up the tasks I’m doing and see how much time is actually spent doing them.
I have a general idea, but Active Timer let…
No, no plans for a widget version. It’s a good idea, but it would be a fairly large amount of work given the way that Dashboard and OS X operate. Most of my time is spent working on NicePlayer, although I do have time to implement small new features and fix bugs in Active Timer.
Robert,
Let me add my voice to the call for widgetizing this great app.
But what are the chances that I can convince you to implement three more feature possibilities?
Right now, I use Active Timer to get a pretty good idea of how I’ve spent the time, and kick myself in the ass when I’ve been screwing off instead of working. But if you put in the following features, I think 90% of the working population couldn’t bear to live without it– and frankly, would pay a pretty penny for it.
1) For those of us who need to (and hate to!) complete timesheets, the ability to track when individual files have been open (in addition to applications) would be INVALUABLE! That alone would make this app worth paying for.
2) Then the ability to print and/or export these results would be a fantastic help.
3) Finally, now imagine if the app could automatically show usage for specific calendar days. (User-defined days –e.g. 4am to 4am, etc.– would be even better for us night-owls.) I could do all my time logging at the end of the week!
Anyone else care to clamor at the wizard’s door?
Thanks, Robert, for all your great work.
Best,
A d a m
I agree with Adam’s comments (Nov 3rd) on ActiveTimer wrt files within the application. If there was a way to see the document titles (or maybe window titles) and how much time was being spent then that would be very valuable from a personal process standpoint. I also agree that it could justify a jump to a commercial app from freeware with that kind of ability. If that is too much effort then maybe releasing it as Open Source and allowing others to make those changes would work?
Thanks for the work on this Robert,
-DR
Bug?
It seems that after several Sleep -> Wake cycles on my Mini, AT stopped timing. The UI still thought it was timing (showed a Pause button).
Hitting “Pause” and then “Start” gets it to start timing again..
Thanks,
Steve
I found Active Timer today … and i love it !
It’s a pity that you don’t consider it as a main project, i found it very useful.
Anyway thanks a lot for your work 🙂
Simone
I’ll look in to having Active Timer track documents as well.
As a side note, you should be currently able to print the times that are tracked… does that not work?
Hi, what a nice software!
But the real time saving feature would be tracking of active time spent in open documents!!!
So loking forward to the ability to track active time of individual files!
(for ex – right now I have over 20 open Illustrator files that belongs to 2-3 different clients in 5 to 6 design projects. The real help in the end of the day would be to se a list with “Document” name, “Active time” and “Idle time”, and with a weekly and monthly summary option.
🙂
Thanks for the work so far!
/Foppa
[…] The author of the program, Robert Chin’s blog is here. […]
Yes, being able to track the documents/window active under each application would be super useful to me. Widget, not so much.
Great work!
🙂
I believe that the best additional feature would be drilling down into Safari to see how much time you spend at each URL you visit. Seeing that browser time seems to multiply so quickly, it would be nice to know whether you’re spending time at the “good” URL’s versus the “bad” URL’s.
Great little product. I just found it and it works great so far.
However, this is just raw data and we all have too much of that. It NEEDS to have a way to summarize.
I tried moving it to MS to do this and found a copy to word, replace the double pgh markers with single and the ‘seconds’ with blank and convert to a table then copy to excel was a good step.
Then I couldn’t find a way to summarize by app. Tried a pivot table but guess I don’t know enough about them as this did not work.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. If you can do this, then automate it, I have a killer app for you.
Thanks
Howard
One other item: has anybody found that it slows the machine, or am I imagining??
Working with this: additional comments, could be too much detail.
i.e. when working in word doc, it is good to track the doc, but tracking each activity (format, tables, etc) is over kill, particularly if the data cannot be aggregated, sorted, purged etc.
Thanks