Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app

royalsloth.eu

45 pointsRoyalSloth42 comments

So don't take this too harshly, this looks well featured and I appreciate an ad-free model that can be used anywhere....

However... It truly amazes me how bad design and UX on many cross-platform desktop apps are. They often are literally the 'Big Bang Theory' of showing that backend engineers are downright inept at design.

This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association. Few Bold fonts, poor padding, time stamps are mashed together and VERY hard to read. The home-view table has an extra col, the time column is too wide and the title col is not wide enough to read whole task names. Your site literally illustrates a font-weight bug in the Mac version.

I'm sure it has great features and works fine! But your competition makes incredibly good looking products that are incredibly glanceable. Notably, many of the platform specific companies make amazing looking products that are deeply integrated into their OS. (Notably placement in the task/menu bar) Look at how Clockify is doing almost everything you do...for free. Sure, you offer data privacy by being fully offline..but then again you don't sync anything and forget about phones, you aren't even there!

I mean this looks like something you might find buried in an open source project from 2008...for $16USD.

The only way to improve is to hear such opinions. So thanks, will see what I can do about the design. It's easy to get carried away with feature development.

Please make it usable from the keyboard. Nothing irks me more than to have to mouse-wrangle things around to track my time, which I do in 6 minute increments, so it can get frustrating.

If I have a way to switch tasks by keyboard, I'm more likely to use the app. If I have to mouse-wrangle .. just, meh.

Better keyboard support comes in next version. Do you mind telling me why do you switch between tasks every 6 minutes?

Pretty simple: 6 minutes is the minimum default for time tracking in my realm, per contract. Clients don't want multiple entries for 30 seconds or 2 minutes here and there - instead, we report in 10th's of an hour.

I quite often fix bugs in 2 or 3 minutes, or even less - on separate tasks/projects.

However the minimum time allotment for these things (billing) is 6 minutes. All time tracking (per contract) is rounded up to the next 6-minute (1/10th of an hour) interval.

The majority of the bugs I've been resolving take from 30min to a few hours (if I know the codebase) - but they are usually complex distributed systems issues.

What kind of bugs are those that could be fixed in 2 minutes?

All kinds of things. Mis-configured project defaults, typo's, additional formatting/UI tweaking, really a lot of productive things can be done in less than 6 minutes.

Different strokes for different folks - just because you don't work that way, shouldn't preclude thinking about folks who do. The world is a big use case.

I'm impressed by your response. Keep up the good work. You are getting compared to commercial teams so don't lose heart.

But this is a good point time trackers are a chore to use for some of us. Mainly because we hate tracking time. So good UX is everything for people like myself.

To be honest, none of that stuff really matters in a productivity tracker, your UI is good enough.

The only thing that really matters in a productivity tracker is whether the tracker can automatically record my activity without me having to manually enter new tasks or manually tell it I'm swapping to another activity.

I jump around between brower tabs, terminal windows, ide's, music player, etc so frequently there's no way I'll ever take the time to manually record every time I alt-tab. All I really want is a tracker that automatically records the window title or tab title every time the window focus changes, and the timestamp.

Afaik that's not possible since OS's don't allow one app to know about the others running alongside it. A time tracker would have to be integrated into the OS to do that. But if anyone ever figured out a way to do that, plus fully offline operation and zero-cloud data privacy, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

ManicTime does exactly that on Windows, even in the free version. On Mac, Timing is a similar alternative. Both track windows and work offline.

Thanks!

By the way, you wouldn't happen to know of any that do this on Linux, would you?

> This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association

This is O/T. but is there a decently concise "best practices" resource to which someone could refer to learn this stuff?

Not quite a "best practices", but absolutely have a look at this: https://twitter.com/i/events/994601867987619840

Honestly for $16 honestly if it does the job it’s great value. Do you want him to hire a full time UX/UI person?

Nice to see JavaFX app - best cross platform technology out there that is not very popular.

As someone who has built a stats app for macOS, I wish you the best! Cross platform is a big deal and something I never got around to. I had trouble finding a business model that worked - have my upvote!

When I read "cross platform", it also implies that my data is available across these these platform. For example, I log my time when I am on my desktop writing, and I log my time on my phone when I am on the road visiting clients. Both set of data are collected into the one database.

Does "cross platform" also carry this meaning for you?

No the word you are looking for is: synchronization.

Cross platform means works on multiple platforms (in this case Windows, Mac, Linux).

Learned about JavaFX. Why not Electron or other alternatives? Sorry if it sounds too childish.

Have you make any sales so far?

Yes

Congrats. Out of curiosity, what is your market segment breakdown (EU vs US)?

Seeing that this is a desktop app, I wonder if EU has a different sentiment than US market.

It didn't sell in such numbers that I could compare different markets and draw any conclusions. Maybe next time.

Do you mind if I PM you? I'd like to ask more questions regarding your thought process going into this route (Desktop app, JavaFX, marketing, etc) which I felt a bit unusual compare to the typical SaaS.

Sure thing.

Mind to drop me a line (please check my e-mail, I just update it) with your e-mail?

Thank you very much!

You can't see email on HN. Check the website posted above and find my email there.

Sent. I really appreciate your time!

This looks interesting. I see that the license is only valid for a certain version. How often are new versions released? I couldn't find any info on release dates of previous/current versions.

They are not bound to specific dates, as shipping to hit an arbitrary date creates a buggy software.

A version is released when a new feature/a set of features is ready. This is actually the first public release, that's why there are no release dates online.

I think you should tie the licence to major versions, and give people confidence that they will still receive updates for bug fixes and patches. But they’ll have to purchase a licence to get new features.

I just feel it's hard to evaluate the price if I don't have a rough idea of how often there might be updates. Is it a monthly thing? Every 4 months? 8? Once a year? I don't know how much time passed between v1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2. I don't even need exact dates. A statement like "We expect to push out a new version every few weeks/months/once a year or so" makes it easier to reason about the cost.

You are right that was updated to free updates for one major version (e.g: license 1.2.0 is also valid for 1.3.0, 1.4.0 but not for 2.0.0).

Thanks for suggestions

Minimum 2GB or RAM!!! Seriously... WTF?

I think it's a joke.

He's selling this thing so I would think you wouldn't want to joke about the requirements.

Whatever software you buy, there are usually some kind of minimum system requirements listed so people don't run it on some ancient potato and complain how it doesn't work.

It uses ~220Mb of RAM in total.

Roger that.

btw, I really dig the execution - all platforms covered, simple/straightforward function. Nice work.

My only comment (and perhaps I simply missed the info) is it would be great to have keyboard shortcuts available to tie into my keyboard program buttons or Elgato deck.

Here is the list of current shortcuts (not much I know): https://docs.royalsloth.eu/slothtracker/documentation/#keybo...

It's the requirement for the system, not for the app.

That’s so you can open your OS + Chrome to download this app!

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