If you freelance, then arguably your only stock in trade is time -- and it's hugely important to track it, both for your clients and for yourself. Equally, if you're in a big corporation, the odds are that you have to slog through some kind of time-recording report, and having an app that at least does some of the work for you has got to be gold.
Work Tracker 1.0 is an app for recording how long you spend on any particular task, or for any particular client.
Really, it times anything and also any number of things: if you have to spend today working for the Acme company, but you also have to tell them that this amount of time was on admin, that amount on sales calls, or whatever, Work Tracker handles the lot. You click the + button to create a new timer, and when you're ready, click a power-like icon. Off it goes until you stop it by clicking that same power icon.
That's not the most obvious thing: a play/pause icon would be clearer. Yet this is our only criticism of the app: it's got clunky edges like this. For instance, the odds are that you are going to use these timers to do exactly that: time things. Nothing else. Start, run, stop, gasp at how long you spent, or wonder at how little you just earned. If you need to report these figures to anyone, though, you can export the details.
If you are always using the same half dozen timers, then you can export what the app calls a Task-Set. That's all good, except it means that at some point in the future, you may possibly want to save something but the app requires you to specify a save folder for this eventuality, before it will let you do anything else.
It's unnecessary as the app could just ask the first time you go to save, but it's also unnecessarily convoluted anyway. Rather than asking where you want it to save, it says:
There's that long "but first of all line," then there's the choose button and standing slightly apart from it is the ellipses icon that usually signifies a menu that's going to lead to more options. We're not done, yet: once you've gone through this, and chosen or created a new folder, you come back to this same screen, and now have to click an Apply button.
It all just smacks of this app working the way that the developer does -- and if that fits you too, then it's excellent. If it doesn't, you hit these rough edges. These are all points that could be smoothed over, they're not important, but they add up. So for instance, there is an excellent option to limit the time you spend on something: say a client is paying you for two hours, and no more.
Rather than just watching the clock working, you can set a limit. It plays a quiet and short little sound effect when the time is up, and you can't change that. Still, you can see with a glance when the clock has stopped running, and there's an "Expire" label on it. To set this limit, though, you click on the eye icon, and you get a dropdown box with 00:00:00 written in it, and your cursor in the middle. You expect to just be able to write 2 and have it default to hours, or perhaps minutes, but it doesn't. It ignores you completely, unless you explicitly type all six digits, plus colons. If you're employed by someone who wants to know the seconds, possibly you need a different job.
It's also sometimes hard to see that 00:00:00. Still, you can report the hours, minutes, and those vital seconds particularly easily. Under a Data menu, there are options to export it in .txt or .csv format. They automatically go to this save folder you set, and good luck if that was a few weeks ago and you can't remember (under the Window menu, you can choose to Open Launch Dialog, and it will ask you again about this save location, plus it will show you where you've picked so far. You can't cancel out of that, though, you have to Apply it again).
So it takes longer to get used to how Work Tracker functions than it might, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it has these features. Multiple timers, reporting, and a way to judge how much money you've earned at your regular rate.
Work Tracker 1.1.0 requires OS X 10.7 or higher, and
costs $4 in the App Store.
Who is Work Tracker 1.1.0 for:
It's for you if you need to track times, most especially if you've got to do a lot of it, and your work is primarily at your Mac.
Who is Work Tracker 1.1.0 not for:
The problem with these timers is that you have to remember to use them, or they're pointless. Plus, the multiple steps to get Work Tracker going are a barrier to that.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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