(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
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TimeTracker is a new (still beta) iPhone web application that helps you track billable time, or just account for your time spent on particular projects or tasks.
Its interface is easy to navigate and looks pretty good on the iPhone, with features like:
- Large buttons across the bottom of all screens, which change depending on what level of the app you’re at, to be relevant for where you are
- Views of All Tickets (like projects), All Tasks, Active Tasks
- Nice, large editing windows when creating or editing tasks, with decent space for adding notes
- One tap (on a big easy-to-spot button) to start or stop a timer on individual tasks
There are also some (fairly major) quirks and limitations with TimeTracker right now, such as:
- For ‘technical reasons’ times need to be entered as a decimal - so for example, logging 15 minutes needs to be entered as .25. Or, to show where this will get even more awkward, one hour and twenty-nine minutes has to be entered as 1.483. If your job role allows for rounding off of times, this may not be too big a deal, if you can stick to .25 and .50 sort of blocks, but if you need to track time precisely (as I do in billing IT services clients) this looks like a real pain.
- The only desktop browser it currently works with is Safari.
- It has some flaky looking rendering of multiple word titles on tasks or projects - they don’t fit within the space provided, so parts of longer titles get chopped off
- No ability to export or backup your data. This has to be changed in order for this to be used as a serious time tracking tool.
TimeTracker is still in beta (but these days that doesn’t tell you much), and the above weak points make it feel ‘very beta’ in my book.
The app does have some strong points though. It’s sharp looking on both the iPhone and Safari, for a start. Here’s a quick look at some of its main screens:
Viewing a single project (ticket) in Safari:
![timetrackersafari]](http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/timetrackersafari.jpg){kind=tracking}
And a single task details view on the iPhone:
A single task view timing view, where you can set time as billable or not, and start timing work on this task,
You can get more details, or give this app a try at:
TimeTracker on Safari (desktop browser)
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I am...
by KrisZ, on January 18 2008 @ 10:10 pm
Patrick,
Nice post, I appreciate all of the constructive criticism, it will help me advance development of TimeTracker.
There are a few things I would like to address:
1) I hope to soon do away with the decimals in the time entry and make it more iPhone-ey
2) Firefox and IE7 support is (likely) coming, but I have no time frame for the release
3) The disgusting text rendering is hit or miss, some of the elements with the text-overflow: ellipsis attribute honor it others don’t, I will try to figure out what is causing this.
4) Export options are coming soon. I think that to start only CSV will be supporter, but later Excel and Numbers will also be offered.
If anyone else has used this and has suggestions, please email them to me at TimeTrackerTeam@Mac.com
by patrick, on January 19 2008 @ 8:44 pm
Chris - thanks for taking time to respond. Very glad to hear that these features are being worked on. Look forward to seeing the next version …