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Comment by bfioca | Hacker News Reader

Great note. We're releasing a reworked version of offline time entry next month. Our stand on bringing classic features to this new version involves evaluating how they might work in this new balance-centered mindset. Reports on time spent by app are likely coming back in some form, but we're reworking everything so it's less about hours tracking and more about whether you got your work done. Hopefully that helps explain the reasoning for the differences a bit more.

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So not to push back against the ethos of being balanced - but having access to minute by minute details of apps/websites - is kind of important to answering the question "Where the hell did my time go!??" I know a lot of people that signed up for rescue time use it as a Quantified Self kinda tool (For example Beeminder, IFTTT, Zapier, and Exist.io use it in this manner). I'm afraid that this change might exclude those that want that minute by minute accounting. (I do use this for Beeminder integration currently - so I hope that didn't break!). Anyhow, I'm willing to give the new design a shot - I think the design looks beautiful and the features look great.

You're totally right - we think it might exclude some of those people, too. We're tracking user feedback, though, and keeping an eye on it. But we just want to make sure we don't promote unhealthy habits with too much detail.

I've dug a bit into the new version. It's entirely different product. There's no baby stepping this change for your legacy users. I'm very happy that legacy dashboard is accessible otherwise I'd have a real problem with the new design. To make the old version and the new version more "compatible" you could change the nomenclature on the old version from "unproductive time" to "personal time" - and it would make more sense if you are switching back and forth between the new/old dashboards. Also, for integrating calendars, only gmail and outlook are available - I'd love to have ical links monitored. I aggregate different calendars on iCal.

Thanks for this. Yeah, it’s definitely entirely different. The transition is going to be tricky at first for folks used to the old version but so far it seems to be making sense to new people. Thanks for those notes. iCal is something we can technically support but it doesn’t post changes to webhooks so you’d have to manually sync every time. :/

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