I was not happy with features and UX of other productivity trackers. Most of the time tracking software is made for controlling employees or for billing clients and I just wanted an automated productivity measurement.
I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standalone trackers lack features and most of them are not automatic.
So I started to play with OS X accessibility and got promising results pretty fast. Then there were about 14 months of writing some code once in a week or two and 3 months of almost full time polishing and gathering feedback.
Now it's marketing time. Qbserve did well on PH but almost no other sites picked it from there. This week I pitched about 70 journalists and bloggers who write about Mac or productivity apps but the results are not clear yet.
I'll be very grateful for advices on how to promote it better and overall feedback. Thank you!
I’d put the price on your website and not click on a button to buy/try before finding out the price. Also I’d “raise the price” and offer a launch special discount (or not raise the price and do the same).
Just something to consider. I wouldn't mention when you're planning on increasing the price. Just that the price is going to go up "soon". Now I know I have a whole month to put off buying it and may forget about it in that time period.
That being said, I'll be buying it. It's a great app and well worth the price.
this is super awesome. I've been using rescuetime for around two years, and although it's worked great I'd love to see more feature progress. Also there's no 2FA support which is quite scary for something with such sensitive data.
I love your dock icon as well. I was trying to build a custom version of that but for my tmux line, but rescuetime's API doesn't provide realtime info.
Will you open up some APIs for the data? I'd love to be able to do my own analysis and build my own tools. I'd also like to backup the data to s3
Thank you! I'm researching what will be the best way to export data and connect to other apps (IFTTT probably).
In case somebody would like to export the tracked information: it's stored in SQLite in the ~/Library/Application\ Support/Qbserve/ and has a very simple scheme of HistoryLog tables for each month that refer to Activities table that refer to Categories and Apps tables.
Your first comment in the thread was a near-perfect match of how I see the time tracking space. Will definitely hit the free trial. Very interested to see how it progresses.
Great to hear you're considering data export. I'd love to display time usage in a tool like Gyroscope (https://gyrosco.pe/), which already integrates with RescueTime and a variety of other activity-specific trackers. Visualizations and stats in Qbserve are great for diving into the details of time spent on the computer, while exports to more generalized tools help show how the big pieces of life fit together.
Second this. As you seem to focus on software developers as your target audience it would likely be greatly appreciated with an official open dataset and structure thus enabling us to use the data in a much more intelligent way highly specialized for personal workflow.
A built in console/scripting engine would also be a nice to have but not necessary if the data can be exported/extracted.
Looks like an excellent start, and definitely fills a needed niche under OS X. As far as feature feedback, and perhaps for 2.0, one possible addition you could consider for your idle detection or tracking capabilities would be Bluetooth device reads. When I leave my system I take my phone, so in turn that can act as a useful automatic proxy for whether I'm in the area so to speak or not. I use that already to automatically do things like change my away status on IRC or activate the screensaver if I've forgotten and change display timeout. It's a niche nicety and not really necessary but might be worth considering. Alternatively if Qbserve was AppleScript-able enough that could just be handled via scripting same as anything else.
As far as marketing if you decide you'd like to just get it in front of a lot of possible seats you might consider picking one or more of the application bundles, particularly "productivity" focused ones, and see about getting it in there. You won't make much money on it directly, but it is a good way to get a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily risk it otherwise to give it a spin without actually giving it away for free, and in turn sell paid upgrades from there. I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing that vs pure organic, at least not for a while, and how much economic sense that'll make for you depends on existing sales and what sort of major upgrade schedule you're considering. It's an option to consider though and can be one of the better forms of advertising, in that it goes right to a naturally more targeted, self-selected audience for low outlay. Qbserve certainly looks plenty quality enough to fit in. Best of luck to you!
Edit to add: While you specifically contrast this to business software for controlling employees, nevertheless I think a number of small businesses in particular might find this interesting, more from the employee empowerment/knowledge point of view rather then control. To that end some form of basic multiseat discounts might earn you some more bulk orders (doesn't even have to be much, 5% off 5-10, 12% off 10-50, etc, or whatever makes sense to you). Similarly, things like Educational/Non-profit discounts and Family seats are tried and true ways to get people on the train.
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Also a small bit of extra kudos postscript: thank you so much for going to the trouble to actually choose a distinct, unique non-word name for your software. The trend of picking single standard words for application names (acknowledging that modern Apple is the originator of evil here) has been incredibly irritating as it makes searching and discussion entirely unnecessarily more difficult.
I will definitely consider the small business option. We now have educational discounts and the license is also works for the whole family (up to 5 machines).
Apple the "originator of evil"? Perhaps you're too young to remember when Microsoft named a whole windows-based user interface "Windows"? At least Apple had the decency to put the letter "i" in front of everything. ;-)
OT: The app looks great at first glance, and is timely as I'm ramping up my independent development work. You might put "cube-serve" as a pronunciation guide somewhere on the page, although that was my first guess; I'm still trying to work out how to pronounce "Qotoqot", though...
Under OS X in modern times? Absolutely. They've made it standard practice for nearly every piece of first party software they make that doesn't have significant legacy or isn't specifically aimed at developers.
>At least Apple had the decency to put the letter "i" in front of everything
If only. That went away a long time ago however for non-legacy. "iMail", "iPages", "iNumbers", "iPhotos", "iMessages" etc would obviously not be the most creative or exciting names, but they would fulfill the fundamental core purpose of a trademark brand name in terms of being trivially, reasonably (wouldn't be surprised if there are some collisions mixed in there) uniquely identifiable. Apple has not done that, and in fact in many cases actively moved away from that (iMessage was a thing, now it's just "Messages"). They do this constantly and they've encouraged it in the MAS.
Apple themselves can somewhat get away with it by virtue of size. Doing a search for "Apple Mail" is reasonably on target for Mail.app, though conversely if you want to search for something related to Apple and mail that isn't Mail.app (notice how just here in discussing it I have to use a made up, but very common user invented name just to distinguish what I'm talking about) you will have more difficulty. Even for major examples like that though it's still worse then where Apple actually still has something more specific, like GarageBand or FaceTime. And when it's some random small 3rd party? Argh.
Specificity in names is good and easy, this isn't some huge burden. It's irritating it's even an issue that has to be talked about at all. Qbserve is an excellent example: it's a small, focused niche app that's very new, but the name is simple and memorable,and a search for "Qbserve" is all about the product.
Hat tip to the software author for showing some morals and not trying to bleed consumers dry with a monthly service cost for something which is not a service. He has just won some custom from me.
For a solo developer a one-time purchase model can do pretty well. 60 million+ Mac users is a big market. Speaking from experience.
A desktop app with no server component doesn't necessarily need aggressive monetisation because at a certain point it reaches feature maturity and doesn't need much more work. It sells itself while the developer works on other things.
Of course if you're looking to go beyond a "micro-isv/lifestyle" business and want huge growth it's a different sorry.
You've hit several good points here! This looks really cool. I've never used something like this, but I'm seriously considering buying it. I love the single price up front and the privacy of not sending my tracking data to some unknown server on the internet.
My only complaint is that I absolutely hate the name. I don't even know how to pronounce it. "Cube-serv?" "Queue Observe?" Don't make me think. Also, I'd be embarrassed to try to say the word to someone else when telling them about it. "Looks like a really cool app! What's it called?" "Oh, it's um... Q... Uh... Cube..., uh I don't know. I have to go." And even if I could pronounce it, trying to spell it for someone so they can look it up. Ugh. Forget about it.
On the other hand, using IPA more widely would help more people know about it. It is the standard in linguistics—although that’s not necessarily a sufficient argument, as it might be too technical for a general audience.
I looks nice and clean. I have used only 3 hours but I have a feedback for the application and website database. It can recognise popular Macbook applications and websites but the current database doesn't seem large enough. Can we tag applications & websites in "Neural" tab as productive or distracting? I think it would be great if you could just open-source the database and let people contribute it so that everyone can benefit from that.
In the details tab when you click on a particular entry, you can modify that entries productivity category, more so there is a checkbox to send that info to the developers. I believe this is the functionality you are looking for.
Thank you. Database includes the most popular apps and sites and it will grow in future.
Unrecognized domains and apps are sent by users on categorization but you can opt-out by unchecking "Submit..." or disable it completely (in Settings). Check out the help and privacy policy for more details: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/help/
> Can we tag applications & websites in "Neural" tab as productive or distracting?
You can add any site, application and even windows to any category. Select the activity you'd like to change in the Details tab to see the popover with settings for this activity.
Have you used the Application Timing?
https://timingapp.com/
It tracks visited sites (on all browsers) + allows you create pools for projects + applications and what directory the file you're working on. Long as you keep your assets in a single folder, you're always tracking to which project. Items can be in multiple pools so you can go by task vs project time.
I've been using this for about a year for personal use. While it doesn't look as pretty or divvy up tasks between "neutral", "productive" and "distractive' that's something you can define if you wanted.
I'm not trying to be harsh but just based on the product site, I'm not exactly compelled to give up Timing although your application does look nice.
Yes, I used it for a while to see what kinds of trackers exist on OS X. But I rarely need to know the path or track a specific project. Productivity of sites and chats is more important for me since I want to know stats of my procrastination.
I'd love to have the ability to filter productive/distracting on a finer basis than domain alone.
If I'm on github.com/mycompany/* it's productive, if I'm on github.com/someuser/somerandomlibrary it's probably neutral/slightly distracting. If I'm on github.com/donatj/* I'm probably distracted with personal projects I shouldn't be poking at work.
I don't know if it would be possible, but if you could add referer tracking as well... somehow... For example a link I clicked from hacker news is almost certainly distracting.
Yes, StayFocusd does it this but it's a browser extension. I can build one for Qbserve but right now it's not a priority, sorry. Added it to possible features though, thank you.
The thing i'm noticing most (and i can hack around this probably) is that there are some things that are productive in certain contexts (monitoring twitter after launching/announcing a thing) and not in others not (twtittering while i'm supposed to be writing code, or letting myself get distracted by twitter while waiting for something to build).
Would you consider some notion of rule sets scoped to some notion of "what i'm supposed to be doing"?
It will be hard to implement since the "smallest tracking unit" is activity - a website or a window. I also can't see how to implement it without making everything too complex (the app's UX is too complex already in my opinion).
You can try to use a different browser since domains are bound to browsers. Like using productive Twitter in Safari and distracting Twitter in Opera.
So, I honestly wouldn't change anything about the interface, except to wrap the entire thing in an outer shell with something that represents what GTD software might call a context.
And depending on context, different rule sets apply. Anyway, that's just a suggestion, don't mean to stomp on your notion of product, what you've got is a great start and a neat coupling of product experience and interesting engineering!
I especially like the ambient info display in the app icon. Seeing whether the app is bordered in green or blue every time i tab up the app switcher is a great piece of design.
There are actually 3 dropdown menus based on productivity selection. So if you've added a productive category, select "Productive" tab first and then it will appear in the dropdown.
If it's missing from there then it's probably a bug.
This is a really nice app. I work with kids (age 8 - 18) and they seem to be the most unaware of the enormous amounts of computer time eaten up by games and trivial activities. I'll definitely be sharing this with them!
I was able to figure out all the features simply by experimentation, but a tour might be helpful to guide through the process of adding a new category/website/app. There are obviously going to be niche cases that you can't get information on with this app (I might be working on a personal project and there would be no way of knowing), but for 99% of people this seems to be what they would need. I second the suggestion below about allowing more detailed domain name matching, since github.com/mycompany is productive while github.com/anythingelse is usually not.
Overall it's a beautiful product and well-executed idea, I appreciate the 10 day trial and I'll definitely be purchasing it. I fell to 19% productivity as I was writing this comment so I'm going to get back to work :)
Hadn't thought of exporting, that would actually be really cool because I'm sure there are many ways to analyze one's productivity and glean useful insights (e.g. what times of the day are most productive, which apps are the biggest distractions, etc)
Hi, downloaded the app and definitely giving it a try at work. Had not thought about using an app to track my activities but I think it may be useful for tracking my time at the office and also just for fun (I like looking at the stats).
So far I think it looks pretty good for version 1.0. Will probably have more feedback after a few days.
It would be awesome if you could correlate this with songs playing on Spotify. Allow me to explain.
I'm listing to Spotify all day while writing code, listening to playlists like "Discover Weekly" or the "Radio". I find that some songs often make me much more productive than others. With all the data you collect, you could easily determine what songs are playing while I'm "productive" --such as while an editor (Atom) is open for a period of time. Then, those songs could get added to a "productive" playlist that I can use later when I need to really focus.
The problem currently is that we don't know what songs are playing when we are super productive because the truly great songs making us productive don't distract us, and thus never get added to a playlist as "productive" songs; they just keep playing in the background acting as a muse.
Love the idea! Only suggestion would to be switch "Distractive" to "Unproductive" or "Distracting." I'm sure distractive is technically a word, but this is my first time hearing it. But that's just me. I may just have a limited vocabulary.
I've been using Qbserve for a couple weeks and I'm really happy with it. For me the best feature is just having that little number in the menu bar that shows what percentage of my time has been focused. This, more than any other timer or tracker, has been a simple and effective motivator for me to keep creating.
There are a lot of features I can imagine that would let me slice and dice tracked data better, but for a V1, this is something special.
It logs app window names: you can select the app in the Details table and there's a popover with the "View windows" button. You can also check to show each window as a separate activity.
I'm editing a WordPress template at the moment, the application only logs the file name and not the Sublime project name [0] (even though this appears in the Sublime title bar and app window as file.php - Project Name).
The project name (blurred) only shows up in Qbserve on an untitled new window. Possible bug?
I second this. This might be too much for this app but I'd really like to be able to track time manually for a project (like toggl.com) and then be able to see the overview for the project at once as opposed to overall view right now.
Great! The fact that this is private is a huge +1 for me. Looking forward to trying it out! I saw one of your comments on the data being available at ~/Library/Application\ Support/Qbserve/ it would be good if the schema was documented on the site, maybe in a developers section?
I really like this idea. Unfortunately I'm a multi-device user including things like using a Chromebook which doesn't have native apps. Would love to see this aggregate data across different types of devices.
This looks fantastic! Great work. I have some feedback too: Right now it groups all of my CLI programs into iTerm2. I would be very interested in tracking the actual programs. vim time means I'm coding, irssi (IRC), newsbeauter, cmus (music), or sl probably means I'm goofing off.
You can try to show iTerm2 windows as activities (there's a checkbox when you select it in the Details table).
But it can bring some noise in case window titles are changed too often. I'm thinking about adding custom rules setting, so you can filter window names with regexes.
ManicTime looks slick, feature filled and usable, but the visualization it chose is confusing. I look at all those little lines and it reminds me of the windows XP defragger.
This is a cool project. I thought about building something similar a few years ago when I was doing a lot of consulting. The most annoying part of the work was accurately billing clients when some days I'd switch between several projects.
Here's a few things that could make it super useful:
* Track time spent writing email by contact
* Track hangout/skype/etc by contact
* Track time spent on code per project
* Connect phone records to tie in the time on the phone with contacts
Just downloaded it and fired it up, and immediate first impressions is that there's a lot to like in the app so far.
I'll be curious to see if I can build gentle nudges back on task if i'm off in the woods, or how i can better categorize different types of app usage. Coupling to my todo lists might be helpful.
This looks like it would be very useful to me. A pet peeve of mine is when an application does not use a monochrome icon in the menu bar. I don't suppose you could offer a monochrome option for the percentage, turning it the same colour as the icon?
This looks like a great tool. Im testing it out now.
I regularly use multiple computers for personal/work. Can there be a way to cross sync data across systems using an external host? I'd like to use Dropbox or some similar solution to keep the data files up to date.
hard to believe,but in a sense, maybe you did this work while employed by someone else and you try to hide this. If this is the case, just wanted to learn why is important to hide it. Until when?
Looks great! The interface picture, halfway down, should be the top one – it's too hard to tell what the app does from the first one. Might give it a try.
Did you test it thoroughly for websites tracking? I made a Firefox plugin[1] to track how long I would spend on facebook but it never had really accurate results.
Do you track only the current tab? Do you still track it if it's not foreground? Even if Firefox has many windows?
How do you track tabs in the browser from the OS by the way?
Looks beautiful. Any plans to add 'Focus' mode like Rescuetime. Basically just ability to block distracting websites? I'd probably switch over from rescuetime if that's added :)
I'm thinking about it but it's not a priority since there are many apps that do it already. Free StayFocusd, WasteNoTime for browsers and also the Focus[1] native app (paid).
A +1 for this request. I used to use a program called Concentrate [1] which would block distracting sites & also prevent distracting apps from launching.
A built-in Pomodoro timer could be good too. Some programs (like Focus) have a timer & internet blocker, but having one app with the timer, blocker & statistics would mean less clutter in my Mac menu-bar. (I currently use Vitamin-R [2] for pomodoro timer & focus statistics, but it doesn't have website blocking, and I sometimes forget to start my Vitamin-R timer if I'm tracking time with Harvest instead... I'd love one app that did it all.)
I see that you track time with Harvest now, right? Are you pleased with it?
Take a look at TimeCamp - it's better equipped, more intuitive and even cheaper than Harvest.
Here is the full comparison: https://www.timecamp.com/blog/index.php/2016/04/timecamp-vs-....
Yep, I'm pretty happy with Harvest. Even as a solo operator, invoicing is their most important feature for me, and I see TimeCamp only includes that at the Pro level (Harvest has it in their free tier). Cost isn't an issue for me, ~$100/year pays for itself with an hour of client work and it wouldn't be worth the time for me to switch just to save a few dollars.
I'd need to see more details about things like your Mac desktop app (eg screenshots, system requirements), as Harvest's Mac app is a big part of my workflow, also their integration with Alfred app on the Mac. I also like that Harvest pays attention to lots of really tiny details too.
It's probably not worth it for me to switch, but your link might be useful to someone else just starting out!
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadI tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standalone trackers lack features and most of them are not automatic.
So I started to play with OS X accessibility and got promising results pretty fast. Then there were about 14 months of writing some code once in a week or two and 3 months of almost full time polishing and gathering feedback.
Now it's marketing time. Qbserve did well on PH but almost no other sites picked it from there. This week I pitched about 70 journalists and bloggers who write about Mac or productivity apps but the results are not clear yet.
I'll be very grateful for advices on how to promote it better and overall feedback. Thank you!
That being said, I'll be buying it. It's a great app and well worth the price.
Ugh, smells like marketing tactics. Whenever I see leading yet vague language, I become a lot more likely to close the tab.
I love your dock icon as well. I was trying to build a custom version of that but for my tmux line, but rescuetime's API doesn't provide realtime info.
Will you open up some APIs for the data? I'd love to be able to do my own analysis and build my own tools. I'd also like to backup the data to s3
In case somebody would like to export the tracked information: it's stored in SQLite in the ~/Library/Application\ Support/Qbserve/ and has a very simple scheme of HistoryLog tables for each month that refer to Activities table that refer to Categories and Apps tables.
Great to hear you're considering data export. I'd love to display time usage in a tool like Gyroscope (https://gyrosco.pe/), which already integrates with RescueTime and a variety of other activity-specific trackers. Visualizations and stats in Qbserve are great for diving into the details of time spent on the computer, while exports to more generalized tools help show how the big pieces of life fit together.
A built in console/scripting engine would also be a nice to have but not necessary if the data can be exported/extracted.
As far as marketing if you decide you'd like to just get it in front of a lot of possible seats you might consider picking one or more of the application bundles, particularly "productivity" focused ones, and see about getting it in there. You won't make much money on it directly, but it is a good way to get a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily risk it otherwise to give it a spin without actually giving it away for free, and in turn sell paid upgrades from there. I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing that vs pure organic, at least not for a while, and how much economic sense that'll make for you depends on existing sales and what sort of major upgrade schedule you're considering. It's an option to consider though and can be one of the better forms of advertising, in that it goes right to a naturally more targeted, self-selected audience for low outlay. Qbserve certainly looks plenty quality enough to fit in. Best of luck to you!
Edit to add: While you specifically contrast this to business software for controlling employees, nevertheless I think a number of small businesses in particular might find this interesting, more from the employee empowerment/knowledge point of view rather then control. To that end some form of basic multiseat discounts might earn you some more bulk orders (doesn't even have to be much, 5% off 5-10, 12% off 10-50, etc, or whatever makes sense to you). Similarly, things like Educational/Non-profit discounts and Family seats are tried and true ways to get people on the train.
----
Also a small bit of extra kudos postscript: thank you so much for going to the trouble to actually choose a distinct, unique non-word name for your software. The trend of picking single standard words for application names (acknowledging that modern Apple is the originator of evil here) has been incredibly irritating as it makes searching and discussion entirely unnecessarily more difficult.
I will definitely consider the small business option. We now have educational discounts and the license is also works for the whole family (up to 5 machines).
OT: The app looks great at first glance, and is timely as I'm ramping up my independent development work. You might put "cube-serve" as a pronunciation guide somewhere on the page, although that was my first guess; I'm still trying to work out how to pronounce "Qotoqot", though...
Under OS X in modern times? Absolutely. They've made it standard practice for nearly every piece of first party software they make that doesn't have significant legacy or isn't specifically aimed at developers.
>At least Apple had the decency to put the letter "i" in front of everything
If only. That went away a long time ago however for non-legacy. "iMail", "iPages", "iNumbers", "iPhotos", "iMessages" etc would obviously not be the most creative or exciting names, but they would fulfill the fundamental core purpose of a trademark brand name in terms of being trivially, reasonably (wouldn't be surprised if there are some collisions mixed in there) uniquely identifiable. Apple has not done that, and in fact in many cases actively moved away from that (iMessage was a thing, now it's just "Messages"). They do this constantly and they've encouraged it in the MAS.
Apple themselves can somewhat get away with it by virtue of size. Doing a search for "Apple Mail" is reasonably on target for Mail.app, though conversely if you want to search for something related to Apple and mail that isn't Mail.app (notice how just here in discussing it I have to use a made up, but very common user invented name just to distinguish what I'm talking about) you will have more difficulty. Even for major examples like that though it's still worse then where Apple actually still has something more specific, like GarageBand or FaceTime. And when it's some random small 3rd party? Argh.
Specificity in names is good and easy, this isn't some huge burden. It's irritating it's even an issue that has to be talked about at all. Qbserve is an excellent example: it's a small, focused niche app that's very new, but the name is simple and memorable,and a search for "Qbserve" is all about the product.
It's 'kotokot' and means cat-o-cat in Russian.
Very soon having a big monthly software bill will be seen as normal. This makes me sad. Don't we have enough recurring bills as it is?
A desktop app with no server component doesn't necessarily need aggressive monetisation because at a certain point it reaches feature maturity and doesn't need much more work. It sells itself while the developer works on other things.
Of course if you're looking to go beyond a "micro-isv/lifestyle" business and want huge growth it's a different sorry.
My only complaint is that I absolutely hate the name. I don't even know how to pronounce it. "Cube-serv?" "Queue Observe?" Don't make me think. Also, I'd be embarrassed to try to say the word to someone else when telling them about it. "Looks like a really cool app! What's it called?" "Oh, it's um... Q... Uh... Cube..., uh I don't know. I have to go." And even if I could pronounce it, trying to spell it for someone so they can look it up. Ugh. Forget about it.
It's cube-serve in my opinion, an observing cube. Well, I'm not a native English speaker... :)
Seems trivial, but this has happened to me before with new, "nice to have but not essential" software.
Obviously, once users use it enough they'll remember. But during the trial they may forget about it.
Unrecognized domains and apps are sent by users on categorization but you can opt-out by unchecking "Submit..." or disable it completely (in Settings). Check out the help and privacy policy for more details: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/help/
> Can we tag applications & websites in "Neural" tab as productive or distracting?
You can add any site, application and even windows to any category. Select the activity you'd like to change in the Details tab to see the popover with settings for this activity.
If I'm on github.com/mycompany/* it's productive, if I'm on github.com/someuser/somerandomlibrary it's probably neutral/slightly distracting. If I'm on github.com/donatj/* I'm probably distracted with personal projects I shouldn't be poking at work.
Tried it out, bought a copy :)
The thing i'm noticing most (and i can hack around this probably) is that there are some things that are productive in certain contexts (monitoring twitter after launching/announcing a thing) and not in others not (twtittering while i'm supposed to be writing code, or letting myself get distracted by twitter while waiting for something to build).
Would you consider some notion of rule sets scoped to some notion of "what i'm supposed to be doing"?
It will be hard to implement since the "smallest tracking unit" is activity - a website or a window. I also can't see how to implement it without making everything too complex (the app's UX is too complex already in my opinion).
You can try to use a different browser since domains are bound to browsers. Like using productive Twitter in Safari and distracting Twitter in Opera.
So, I honestly wouldn't change anything about the interface, except to wrap the entire thing in an outer shell with something that represents what GTD software might call a context.
And depending on context, different rule sets apply. Anyway, that's just a suggestion, don't mean to stomp on your notion of product, what you've got is a great start and a neat coupling of product experience and interesting engineering!
I especially like the ambient info display in the app icon. Seeing whether the app is bordered in green or blue every time i tab up the app switcher is a great piece of design.
Would be nice if you'd do a PR to get your app into Homebrew. It's just much easier to find, install and update apps with Cask.
(I'm one of the maintainers of Homebrew Cask)
If it's missing from there then it's probably a bug.
If it still fails to get the tabs, please contact me: https://qotoqot.com/contact/
I was able to figure out all the features simply by experimentation, but a tour might be helpful to guide through the process of adding a new category/website/app. There are obviously going to be niche cases that you can't get information on with this app (I might be working on a personal project and there would be no way of knowing), but for 99% of people this seems to be what they would need. I second the suggestion below about allowing more detailed domain name matching, since github.com/mycompany is productive while github.com/anythingelse is usually not.
Overall it's a beautiful product and well-executed idea, I appreciate the 10 day trial and I'll definitely be purchasing it. I fell to 19% productivity as I was writing this comment so I'm going to get back to work :)
So far I think it looks pretty good for version 1.0. Will probably have more feedback after a few days.
I'm listing to Spotify all day while writing code, listening to playlists like "Discover Weekly" or the "Radio". I find that some songs often make me much more productive than others. With all the data you collect, you could easily determine what songs are playing while I'm "productive" --such as while an editor (Atom) is open for a period of time. Then, those songs could get added to a "productive" playlist that I can use later when I need to really focus.
The problem currently is that we don't know what songs are playing when we are super productive because the truly great songs making us productive don't distract us, and thus never get added to a playlist as "productive" songs; they just keep playing in the background acting as a muse.
We will have export in future and you will be able to match data from Qbserve and data from Spotify to see which tracks create the flow for you.
Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
* Make the price more readily apparent on the landing page
* Tracking the '6,400 sites, apps and games' is great, but it would be good if I could find out if the ones I care about in that list!
* Make the above the fold screenshot bigger, I tried squinting/zooming before I realised I could scroll down
* Can I determine which things are productive/neutral/distractive? As I wouldn't want to buy it if that was static
Looks good though!
I'm seeing a huge green 'Buy Now — $30' button on the front page. Was this added in the past 20 minutes?
> Tracking the '6,400 sites, apps and games' is great, but it would be good if I could find out if the ones I care about in that list!
Mostly the ones from top 10k Alexa but all the unrecognized can be categorized easily.
I was wondering this as well, could you add this on the roadmap if it's not already doable?
http://imgur.com/5G6ywyX
There are a lot of features I can imagine that would let me slice and dice tracked data better, but for a V1, this is something special.
It would be perfect if it could also log more details such as what filename/project is open in Sublime, that way I know what I'm working on.
The project name (blurred) only shows up in Qbserve on an untitled new window. Possible bug?
[0] http://i.imgur.com/qxE06nC.jpg
disclaimer: that's awesome :)
But it can bring some noise in case window titles are changed too often. I'm thinking about adding custom rules setting, so you can filter window names with regexes.
But I remember using ManicTime on Windows, give it a try maybe.
YMMW but IMO it is a shining example of modern Windows UX done right. A couple of examples
* double clicking selects the block you clicked on until next previously tagged time
* the tagging dialog has wonderful autocomplete
* you can set up automatic tagging
* you can add timelines from outlook etc
Here's a few things that could make it super useful:
* Track time spent writing email by contact * Track hangout/skype/etc by contact * Track time spent on code per project * Connect phone records to tie in the time on the phone with contacts
Good luck!
https://twitter.com/rescuetime/followers
Small nitpick: How can you guarantee data is kept locally without open-sourcing the app?
This is similar to WakaTime but only for OS X and not as granular data, because one is for programmers and the other more general users.
WakaTime works only with developer apps.
I'll be curious to see if I can build gentle nudges back on task if i'm off in the woods, or how i can better categorize different types of app usage. Coupling to my todo lists might be helpful.
I regularly use multiple computers for personal/work. Can there be a way to cross sync data across systems using an external host? I'd like to use Dropbox or some similar solution to keep the data files up to date.
Would that be possible?
"About" page will be added later.
I'm going to file a bug or even dig into the sources later.
Unfortunately I restarted soon afterwards, and now all of the Firefox usage just shows up as "Neutral" =/
But it was working nicely at first :)
Do you track only the current tab? Do you still track it if it's not foreground? Even if Firefox has many windows?
How do you track tabs in the browser from the OS by the way?
[1]: https://github.com/mimoo/FirefoxTimeTracker
[1] https://heyfocus.com/
A built-in Pomodoro timer could be good too. Some programs (like Focus) have a timer & internet blocker, but having one app with the timer, blocker & statistics would mean less clutter in my Mac menu-bar. (I currently use Vitamin-R [2] for pomodoro timer & focus statistics, but it doesn't have website blocking, and I sometimes forget to start my Vitamin-R timer if I'm tracking time with Harvest instead... I'd love one app that did it all.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon...
I'd need to see more details about things like your Mac desktop app (eg screenshots, system requirements), as Harvest's Mac app is a big part of my workflow, also their integration with Alfred app on the Mac. I also like that Harvest pays attention to lots of really tiny details too.
It's probably not worth it for me to switch, but your link might be useful to someone else just starting out!