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Comment by tom_ilsinszki | Hacker News Reader

Were you the only one developing it? How long did it take? Love the app and the video on the webpage, by the way.

Luckily, I have a precise answer to this because I have this weird habit of tracking every minute of my time on my own projects. Here's the breakdown on Etude in hh:mm

Actual iPhone app: 210:11

Song converter: 72:52

Store (UI + server side): 82:23

Building site and designing marketing materials: 44:52

I did most of the work, but I did contract some of the graphics I had trouble with to a designer, and I've taken someone awesome on board to work with music companies and other "strategic" stuff for the future.

OT, but how did you get into that time tracking habit and what do you use to track your time?

(not) Properly tracking my time is my biggest weakness.

NB: Not the OP

Personally I track time using Excel. I have a table of start time, end time and a category and desc.

I set up a macro to create a new row, another to create a new task after the previous. It takes me about 5 seconds to "start working" and about 30 seconds to "end" and type in a desc.

It's great later when you need to have precise timing to see if you hit your estimates. I got into the habit when I was developing custom firmware on contract at Technman.

I see it as a huge motivator. I don't track time when I am not working - so it highlights for me the holes in my productivity when I slip.

I use OfficeTime: http://officetime.net

I also wrote some Ruby scripts for parsing exports from it and making cool graphs

Note to others: OfficeTime appears to be primarily an OSX app. They have a downloadable Windows beta, but no immediately-downloadable Linux beta.

http://www.officetime.net/download.html

One thing you could use is Freshbooks. I started using it for consulting and then started gradually using it for general time tracking.

[I'm not the OP.] I use Freckle for time tracking. http://letsfreckle.com/

Graphics look great. Any chance you can point out who the designer was? She/he might be interested in other contracts perhaps?

Hm this adds up to roughly 11 work weeks of straight-through work. Do you have some kind of real-time estimate and break down about which parts you developed first or in conjunction with what other features?

My mind usually races a million miles an hour when starting new projects and I end up doing a little bit of everything.

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