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Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X

429 points by ivm 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
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ghostbrainalpha 10y ago
I'm very happy with the icon in the dock!
ivm 10y ago
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!
- ckluis 10y ago
  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).
  - ivm 10y ago
    Added price to the site, thanks. It's 25% off currently, I'm going to raise the price in July.
    - theseanstewart 10y ago
      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.
      - curiousgal 10y ago
        Found the marketing guy! Solid advice. Kudos.
      - bronson 10y ago
        > price is going to go up "soon". Ugh, smells like marketing tactics. Whenever I see leading yet vague language, I become a lot more likely to close the tab.
  - peternicky 10y ago
    I'm getting very long loading times and still can't see the page. Please fix because I would like to use this application.
- jtmarmon 10y ago
  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
  - ivm 10y ago
    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.
    - jtmarmon 10y ago
      thanks! that's easy enough :D
    - harlanlewis 10y ago
      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/ 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.
      - ivm 10y ago
        Thank you for the tip, I will see how we can integrate it with Gyroscope.
- deleted 10y ago
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- xoa 10y ago
  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. ---- 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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Thank you a lot! 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).
- hjnilsson 10y ago
  What is your long-term monetisation plan here then? One-time payment won't last forever, as we've seen from different programs lately.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Why not? Thousands of app companies exist on one-time payment for many years, releasing payed updates sometimes. MacPaw is a good modern example.
  - jabbslad 10y ago
    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.
  - copperx 10y ago
    You charge for significant version upgrades. The industry was OK with that model for decades before SaaS became feasible. 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?
  - nicky0 10y ago
    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.
- vitd 10y ago
  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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Haha, yes, we had some doubts about the name's UX but nothing better was found. It's cube-serve in my opinion, an observing cube. Well, I'm not a native English speaker... :)
    - Sean1708 10y ago
      You could make the IPA form (kjuːb-sɜːv) part of the logo design, I always think that looks pretty cool.
      - ivm 10y ago
        :D Sounds interesting but I don't know how many users know how to read this...
        kentt 10y ago
        I would guess that most people don't. I certainly wouldn't feel confident.
        evincarofautumn 10y ago
        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.
- podgib 10y ago
  Do you have a timeline for Firefox site tracking? I'd definitely buy this to replace RescueTime if it supported Firefox
  - ivm 10y ago
    I hope I can convince Firefox team to report page URLs to OS X accessibility. Or maybe I will try to commit it myself.
    - mweibel 10y ago
      Do you have a issue or feature request open? I'd be happy to add a plus one:-)
      - ivm 10y ago
        Not yet, sorry.
    - lensi 10y ago
      Timingapp.com is able to track Firefox urls somehow.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    I must say, I use FF all the time. Of course, all my work is on FF tabs, so it's still useful to track distractions.
  - mescalito 10y ago
    I used desktime and they seem to provide an extension for urls, couldn't you do something similar?
    - ivm 10y ago
      Probably. We just need to release some other features and fixes first.
- buremba 10y ago
  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.
  - TJTorola 10y ago
    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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    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/ 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.
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  Have you used the Application Timing? https://timingapp.com/ 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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    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.
- donatj 10y ago
  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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    I think I'm going to add custom filters to solve this and probably iTerm tracking.
    - donatj 10y ago
      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.
      - ivm 10y ago
        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.
- knowtheory 10y ago
  Hey! 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"?
  - ivm 10y ago
    Thank you! 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.
    - knowtheory 10y ago
      Yeah! I dig it. 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.
- mkolodny 10y ago
  I'd buy it right now if I could buy it through the Mac App Store - I have a bunch of credit there.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Sorry, it's not working in a sandboxed environment that is a must for the Mac App Store.
- tehno 10y ago
  > $ brew cask info qbserve > Error: No available Cask for qbserve 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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Thanks for the tip, I'll do it!
  - adidalal 10y ago
    Just added to Homebrew Cask, feel free to `brew cask install qbserve` (I'm one of the maintainers of Homebrew Cask)
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Thank you!
- ambicapter 10y ago
  I added a category and it shows up in categories but not in the dropdown menu for a specific activity? OS X 10.10.5
  - ivm 10y ago
    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.
    - ambicapter 10y ago
      Oh I get it. Is it supposed to be reading tabs in Safari? Because it really depends on the website whether or not I'm being 'productive'.
      - ivm 10y ago
        Yes, it should show all the domains you used in Safari separately.
        ambicapter 10y ago
        Okay, and if it doesn't? I'm using the trial right now.
        ivm 10y ago
        Please re-check the accessibility access in the system settings: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18391 https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18391 If it still fails to get the tabs, please contact me: https://qotoqot.com/contact/ https://qotoqot.com/contact/
- primitivesuave 10y ago
  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 :)
  - ivm 10y ago
    Thank you! The top priorities (after fixing small issues) are custom window/URL matching and then data exporting.
    - primitivesuave 10y ago
      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)
- nspassov 10y ago
  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.
- DenisM 10y ago
  Make a 3 minute video of typical use pattern? I'd watch that.
- spoinkaroo 10y ago
  Where do I find the student / 5 person discount? I am a student and interested in purchasing.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Please contact us: https://qotoqot.com/contact/ https://qotoqot.com/contact/
- poorman 10y ago
  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.
  - ivm 10y ago
    This is an interesting idea but sorry, it's too much for the app to become a separate feature. 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.
  - raihansaputra 10y ago
    Cross the data with last.fm scrobbler? (Connect your spotify to last.fm, sync timestamps with data from tracker)
- 1dayitwillmake 10y ago
  This app is awesome, i love it already - best of these i've ever used. Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
  - ivm 10y ago
    Thank you, please check the settings for the idle time adjustment.
- 1dayitwillmake 10y ago
  This app is awesome, i love it already - best of these i've ever used. Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
pwelch 10y ago
+1 for privacy and storing locally
Joe8Bit 10y ago
Some feedback: * 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!
- underyx 10y ago
  >Make the price more readily apparent on the landing page I'm seeing a huge green 'Buy Now — $30' button on the front page. Was this added in the past 20 minutes?
  - JakeTheAndroid 10y ago
    Yes, it was.
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you, I fixed the price. > 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.
  - cheapsteak 10y ago
    > Can I determine which things are productive/neutral/distractive? I was wondering this as well, could you add this on the roadmap if it's not already doable?
    - ivm 10y ago
      You can categorize any activity in the table in the Details tab and it will remain in this category.
howlingfantods 10y ago
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.
- ivm 10y ago
  Oh, right, thank you. I've already updated it in the app but forgot the screenshots and texts.
  - howlingfantods 10y ago
    Is the website down? It's not loading for me anymore
    - welder 10y ago
      Probably the HN effect... here's a screen shot: http://imgur.com/5G6ywyX http://imgur.com/5G6ywyX
    - ivm 10y ago
      Should be good now.
zzzmarcus 10y ago
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.
asadhaider 10y ago
This looks like a simple way to keep track of time I spend on projects. 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.
- ivm 10y ago
  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.
  - asadhaider 10y ago
    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? [0] http://i.imgur.com/qxE06nC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qxE06nC.jpg
    - ivm 10y ago
      Could be a problem with how ST reports its project names to the system. I'll take a look soon, sorry about that.
- pyvek 10y ago
  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.
joshcrowder 10y ago
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?
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you, I'll add it a bit later.
Yhippa 10y ago
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.
jrcii 10y ago
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.
- llimllib 10y ago
  You spend a measurable amount of time goofing off by watching trains go across your terminal? disclaimer: that's awesome :)
- ivm 10y ago
  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.
thuruv 10y ago
Dead link. :(
- ivm 10y ago
  Sorry, try again. For some reason a small DO droplet with 2 static pages is down from being on HN.
cdnsteve 10y ago
So was this developed using Swift? Curious, I see SQLite backend.
- ivm 10y ago
  It was started before Swift become more or less mature, so the whole codebase is in Objective-C.
  - KayL 10y ago
    Sounds like no plans for Windows platform? (I'm a multiple platform user.)
    - ivm 10y ago
      Sorry, no, it will require complete re-write and the app also heavily relies on OS X accessibility. But I remember using ManicTime on Windows, give it a try maybe.
      - lj3 10y ago
        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.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        It is wonderful. 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
tharshan09 10y ago
Just curious, what is the tech stack?
- ivm 10y ago
  Just Cocoa (Obj-C), SQLite with FMDB, and CorePlot.
fintler 10y ago
On a 13' Macbook, I need to scroll down to click "Download" or "Buy Now". You might want to move those buttons up a bit.
imdsm 10y ago
How long is it -25%? If I try for ten days, can I still get the -25%?
- ivm 10y ago
  Yes, it's until June, 30.
lancefisher 10y ago
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 Good luck!
welder 10y ago
This is the new RescueTime! Now you just need to market it to all of RescueTime's users: https://twitter.com/rescuetime/followers 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.
- methyl 10y ago
  Use packet sniffer like Wireshark to track if the app is exchanging data with the Web or not.
- ivm 10y ago
  It works completely offline, so feel free to block it with firewall. WakaTime works only with developer apps.
knowtheory 10y ago
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.
Zirro 10y ago
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?
- ivm 10y ago
  You can disable the colors in the settings tab. It should work both for classic and dark menu bar styles.
rememberlenny 10y ago
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. Would that be possible?
- ivm 10y ago
  Sorry, right now it's not possible. I would like to add synchronization some day but it's a bit far on the todo list.
pibefision 10y ago
Why in this kind of sites, there is not a single person behind the marketing site? What's the reason to be hidden?
- ivm 10y ago
  We're not hidden, I just failed to create "About" page somewhere.
  - pibefision 10y ago
    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?
    - ivm 10y ago
      I'm not hiding, you can find us by company name easily. ;) "About" page will be added later.
- WA 10y ago
  I find any lack of imprint or about page off-putting as well. I'd never buy from such a website, because it doesn't seem legitimate.
sd8f9iu 10y ago
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.
botreats 10y ago
I like the idea of this a lot, but not working with Firefox is a dealbreaker. If only 100% of my time spent in Firefox was actually productive....
- ivm 10y ago
  Firefox does not report URL to OS X accessibility. I'm going to file a bug or even dig into the sources later.
  - jish 10y ago
    When I first downloaded the app, it was actually tracking my Firefox usage somehow (github.com, news.ycombinator.com). Unfortunately I restarted soon afterwards, and now all of the Firefox usage just shows up as "Neutral" =/ But it was working nicely at first :)
baby 10y ago
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? [1]: https://github.com/mimoo/FirefoxTimeTracker https://github.com/mimoo/FirefoxTimeTracker
- ivm 10y ago
  I use OS X accessibility, so Qbserve tracks the focused windows. In case of browsers it's usually the current tab of the top window.
gruffj 10y ago
Great app, really enjoyed using it so far. I've found the percentage of productive time shown in the toolbar to be really useful.
Jonovono 10y ago
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 :)
- ivm 10y ago
  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). [1] https://heyfocus.com/ https://heyfocus.com/
  - achikin 10y ago
    Don't do that. Keep your app simple and clean as it is now.
- SyneRyder 10y ago
  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.) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getconcentrating.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getconcentrating.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon...
  - OlaRybacka 10y ago
    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-harvest/ https://www.timecamp.com/blog/index.php/2016/04/timecamp-vs-....
deweerdt 10y ago
I bought the app, and I'm really happy with it, thanks! I know it's a long shot, but some sort of shell integration would be awesome. My typical day is > 60% iTerm2. iTerm2 has shell integration: https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html, and maybe that would be one way is something that Qbserve could be fetching info about what's going on in the terminal.
- ivm 10y ago
  Yes, I got many requests for iTerm2 tracking and it will be definitely added. I'm looking into the available options, so thank you for the link!
  - azag0 10y ago
    Any chance of tracking Terminal.app?
    - ivm 10y ago
      Sure, I will check it too.
      - azag0 10y ago
        And I forgot to say that you made a great app! 95% gonna buy.
jbverschoor 10y ago
I'm currently testing Timings, but it's support for activities and projects isn't done properly. Checking out this one
zmarouf 10y ago
Am I right in assuming that Qbserve only tracks active windows? To elaborate: If I have a monitor set to a fullscreen OSX Desktop with either Spotify or VLC while actually coding, the time spent listening/watching won't count unless the application is active, correct?
- ivm 10y ago
  Yes, it uses OS X accessibility to get the focused app and its focused window.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  Correct.
zombieprocess 10y ago
In terms of distribution - Could you create a dmg with the drag & drop to the Applications directory as is standard for OSX?
- ivm 10y ago
  Oh, right, thank you for the tip.
jbverschoor 10y ago
OK tried it, but it's not for me. I need to be able to track activity per project. Projects can be determined from the open window path or url. Timings does this, but it's just one big mess
- ivm 10y ago
  Timing uses completely different tracking approach, iirc there's AppleScript involved. Qbserve uses accessibility but I have plans to make improvements for per-project tracking.
mcoppola 10y ago
Early impressions are excellent. I can easily see some billable/reporting functionality added as premium features. I'll be adding this to my daily routine and seeing how it works for the trial period - but you likely have a paid user in me already. Thank you!
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you, I think there's enough data collected to produce invoices for clients, we just need to decide how to organize per-client activity management in the UI.
stinos 10y ago
Away from the keyboard or watching a movie? Idle time is detected intelligently. Problem is it heavily depends on the person what is really idling. Ideally you should be able to read the mind to see if there's any work-related activity :] I'm still using manual time tracking mainly because of this (even despite the obvious disadvantage of forgetting to turn it on or off): there's all kinds of solutions like detecting mouse/keyboard idling to fancier ones like detecting if your phone is near your pc and stuff like that, but at least for me none of these are as correct as just manually saying 'now I'm working, now I'm not': they can't detect things like me sitting outside with pen & paper.
- ivm 10y ago
  You can set idle per-category. "Videos & TV" category is idle by default. So if you have Youtube open and there's no mouse/keyboard input then Qbserve assumes you're watching a video.
  - dionidium 10y ago
    How? My options seem limited to "Productive, Neutral, and Distracting."
    - ivm 10y ago
      Sorry, missed your reply. Please go into the category tab in the Details and select a required category. There will be an "Always track time" checkbox. It prevents the app from going idle during activities in this category.
      - dionidium 10y ago
        I have the opposite issue, actually. ScreenSaverEngine shows up in "neutral," but it shouldn't be counted in any of those three buckets. It's just idle time.
        ivm 10y ago
ryanmarsh 10y ago
If you're a consultant or you work in a consulting firm I have some advice for you. Get comfortable with fudging the numbers on your time reports. It's ok. Report what's reasonable given: You aren't being paid for your minutes you're being paid for the ability to solve a customer's problem in minutes. I bill my clients 40 no matter what because sometimes I give them 100 hours worth of value in 1 hour. It all balances out. It took a while to realize this wasn't an integrity violation. You aren't a machine resource. You're a human working in immense complexity. Your productivity is a roller coaster. It's ok. Don't sell minutes. In reality your customer can't handle the unpredictablity in billable hours if you were exacting and billed what you're actually worth. Instead we smooth it into 40 (or whatever), and that's ok.
- steve19 10y ago
  Does it work both ways? If you customer thinks the 100 hours you billed is only worth 1 hour, are you OK with them paying 1 hour?
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    No, they pay what I bill. If we don't agree on that then we don't do business. If I want repeat customers then I don't gouge them.
- aplummer 10y ago
  For anyone reading this, billing the incorrect amount of time in consulting is an integrity violation, and probably illegal. If you agree to sell in hours, then the client pays in hours. Attributed value billing should be in your contract if you are going to do that, not snuck in under the guise of hourly rates.
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    Do you bill your clients for the time you sip coffee or take a shit?
graeme 10y ago
Does the license allow use on multiple computers? I have a computer for heavy work, and another where I do email and social media. I'd like to track both.
- ivm 10y ago
  Yes, up to 5 machines for the personal/family use.
  - graeme 10y ago
    Great, I'm doing the trial now and very likely to buy. Also, thanks for the Focus app recommendation elsewhere in the thread. I had been looking for exactly such a native app.
spoinkaroo 10y ago
This looks like exactly what I need, I'm going to try the free trial and then let you know what I think and probably buy it.
Karunamon 10y ago
YES! Finally an excuse to drop Rescuetime and their goofy UI. I've had this running for about an hour or so, and it seems to provide me exactly what they do, for cheaper, while respecting privacy. Congrats on an awesome app, and I hope you do well selling this!
Karunamon 10y ago
Minor UI feedback: The settings UI is extremely hard to read on my screen. The headings are light grey on white, and no amount of messing with my screen's contrast settings leaves something easy to read. The checkboxes also immediately convey "disabled" due to their coloring. Your UI in general is spot on and sanely designed, but please consider taking a cue from the OSX HIG[1] and use the system colors and leave the light grey stuff for actual disablement, it will make your app look a lot more native. [1] (about halfway down the page): https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/ControlsButtons.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000957-CH48-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...
- ivm 10y ago
  Got it, sorry. We'll update the colors. We try to follow HIG despite building a custom look, so non-blue checkboxes is a mistake.
albertzeyer 10y ago
Fwiw, I developed a very puristic similar project: https://github.com/albertz/timecapture https://github.com/albertz/timecapture So far, it's only tracking the time and recording which app is in the foreground and what file / url is currently opened in there. It doesn't have any GUI and it won't show you nice statistics like Qbserve. But it shouldn't be difficult to calculate any statistics you want from the data. Python, Open Source, easy to add support for other platforms and apps (so far mostly MacOSX support). Patches are welcome. :)
- raphman_ 10y ago
  FWIW, there's already https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy which seems to offer the same features as your tool (and a little bit more).
manish_gill 10y ago
Hi. Trying it out and would happily buy after using it for the next few days. One query I have: Is there any way I can hide the app icon from the cmd+tab list? I want the ability for it to stay and works quietly behind the scene and since I have too many applications running on at the same time. Maybe a "hide icon" or some other thing? Thanks. Looks like a fantastic product on first look. :)
- escobar 10y ago
  To remove the icon from your cmd+tab: open the preferences/settings for the application and under "Application Options" use the multi-select field from "Both" to "Only Menu Bar", then restart the app. The icon won't be in your dock or cmd+tab anymore, but lives in the menu bar :)
peternicky 10y ago
I have used Rescuetime for years and for the most part, am very satisfied with the service. It would be helpful if you added a simple comparison between Rescuetime and your service.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Yes, RescueTime is really your main competitor. Let people like me know what you offer to get me to think about switching!
- ivm 10y ago
  Currently the differences are window tracking (RT only tracks apps afaik), chat tracking, instant feedback, and keeping the tracked data on your machine. Downsides compared to RT: no sync between devices (and it's not coming soon), no "offline time" (but it's temporary).
  - peternicky 10y ago
    Thanks for this info, but I don't know what you mean by "instant feedback" and "chat tracking". Rescuetime does allow window tracking (unless I don't understand what that means). For me personally, the most essential Rescuetime features missing in your app are: - ability to install a client on gnu, OS X and Windows. - 95% of the time, it correctly categorizes my activities, requiring very little input from me. Looking forward to trying your app!
    - ivm 10y ago
      Instant feedback: to see your productivity in RT you need to go to its dashboard. Qbserve shows productivity score in the dock icon (with color) and in the menu bar (colors + percents). Chat tracking: Qbserve can look into Skype, Slack and Telegram Messenger apps and track your chat/team names as separate activities.
daemonk 10y ago
I really like the UI. Is it possible to implement keyboard/mouse movement activity tracking? I don't mean keylogging or anything, but something like key presses per minute while an app is focused or mouse movement in pixels per minute while an app in focused.
- ivm 10y ago
  Thanks for the idea! It should be possible since the app has accessibility access.
- adiabatty 10y ago
  I second this. I'd like to know if my keypresses are going into a text editor (productive!) or IRC (unproductive!). As someone who's fighting off RSI, knowing where my keypresses are going is more important than tracking where the time goes.
daemonk 10y ago
Just bought it. I really like it. One thing that would make this perfect for me is the ability to show stats for specific time ranges within a day. I use my laptop for both work and home. It would be nice to see a set of stats for just 9am-6pm everyday; or whatever ranges I want. I guess the time tracking works right now by just tallying up seconds for each category? And it isn't recording time stamps? Recording time stamps might end up taking up too much space?
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you! The time range feature is on the roadmap already.
- whoByFire 10y ago
  You can avoid saving time stamps if you just do separate sums for preset time stamp ranges. It will add another dimension to the data but that dimension can be pretty roughly discretized. 99% of users would be perfectly happy with 15 minute, or even 30 minute discretization. 95% with 1 hour discretization.
danielparks 10y ago
I've only been using it for 30 minutes, but so far it's great! Being able to map a domain with all its subdomains to a category would be awesome. I access a whole bunch of hosts in an internal domain, and they're all productive.
r0m4n0 10y ago
What my employer thinks I'm doing: 8 hours on stackoverflow = 8 hours of research What I'm actually doing: earning reputation to improve my resume
xufi 10y ago
This is pretty cool. I'd love to use it to keep track of time since Itend to get distracted by looking at other tabs and I've been looking for a way to keep track of where im wasting most of my time
muhammadusman 10y ago
The UI is so much nicer than RescueTime, I love it!
billions 10y ago
Would be nice to compare productivity with others. Just purchased the full version.
Nemant 10y ago
Only 7MB! Good job! Product looks awesome. If it works well for the next 10 days I'm definitely buying it :)
weinzierl 10y ago
I installed the trial version and it looks awesome. Unfortunately the lack of Firefox support is a deal breaker for me as I spend a lot of time in Firefox. This would be my top feature request.
spark3k 10y ago
Timecamp have been at this for a while now. With syncing to project management apps.
kentt 10y ago
Congratulation on shipping!
aantix 10y ago
I love the alerts. I setup an alert for when I have been distracted for more than 30 minutes. Could you disable those distracting sites after 30 minutes? I'm only half-way kidding.. Still a fantastic app.
- kkirsche 10y ago
  I used to use an app, think it was called orange, to do this. Would love that functionality though to disable top distractions
ivan_k 10y ago
Wonderful tool! I can see myself using it every single day. Comment on usability: currently, different ports from the same domain name are recorded as different websites. I think it should be sufficient to group all the ports used with `localhost` as "productive". Thanks for the great work!
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you! Yes, localhost special case would be a nice enhancement. Domains from different browsers probably will be grouped later by default.
kasperset 10y ago
I like this app as it is. New features would be welcome but I prefer lean and mean app. Simpler the better.
mrmondo 10y ago
Looks interesting! I have to ask: is it OS X native or is it some JavaScript thing?
- ivm 10y ago
  OS X native, 100% Objective-C and Cocoa. :)
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    Lovely! You sir/madam are a hero!
pault 10y ago
I've been using Rescuetime for the last 8 years or so, and I will be purchasing this in the next few weeks to see if it will work as a replacement. From what I can see, it shouldn't be a problem. Congratulations on shipping!
maknz 10y ago
Damn this is good. I'll be buying.
elevenfist 10y ago
I love the idea of apps like these, but can people really not remember what they do all day? That thought is almost inconceivable.
imron 10y ago
Any possibility of Mavericks support?
- ivm 10y ago
  Sorry, it's not planned. We would like to support more systems but there are some UI rendering quirks that prevent smooth backwards compatibility.
  - imron 10y ago
    Bummer.
r00fus 10y ago
I like how qotoqot.com shows up as "productive"
avivo 10y ago
I use ulogme which also records when you are typing, and is more customizable (and open source and free). Explanation and demo with screenshots: https://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivity/ https://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivi... Github URL: https://github.com/karpathy/ulogme https://github.com/karpathy/ulogme There are definitely some good ideas in it for inspiration when making a similar product.
- ivm 10y ago
  Awesome, thank you. My friend who uses Linux was interested in getting something like Qbserve there.
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jakobegger 10y ago
This is pretty misleading. From their product page: > All the tracked information is stored locally. From their privacy policy: > we are using third party service Firebase.com to collect it (...) So privacy is a selling point, but they have a lot of analytics in their app. Some of it can be turned off, some of it can't. If you claim your app stores all data locally, it's quite dishonest if it talks to a bunch of analytics services...
- ivm 10y ago
  Not "a lot" but 3 points (stated in the Privacy Policy): ping once a day (HockeyApp), OS version+language once a month, and opt-out uncategorized hosts/apps submissions. I don't see how it's not private and "misleading".
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    Every domain you visit and every app you have installed is a lot of information. Information I don't want to share, even 'anonymously'. (It would be trivial to deanonymize that data) If you claim your app stores data locally, it better not share data like this. Otherwise your marketing copy is just the usual horseshit.
    - ivm 10y ago
      No way, we are not collecting this because we don't need it (and yes, it would be not very private). I probably should improve the phrasing in the Privacy Policy. Qbserve detects popular apps and sites automatically by matching them to the entries in the bundled database. If it can't find a match, it puts the app/site into "Uncategorized" category. Then when the user decides to assign it to some category, there's a checkbox with text "Submit domain + category" and hint "Send it to developers to improve Qbserve". You can disable this checkbox forever in the app's settings. Then we get somethings like { "host":"ycombinator.com", "category":"news" }, check if this site is really popular and add it to the bundled database in the next update.
      - 10y ago
phelm 10y ago
This looks very useful, I am preparing to be a little shocked by the results. I will probably be buying after the trial. One thing, this app seems to interact strangely with Spectacle (OSX Window controller) whereby browser windows move very slowly across the screen rather than the instant snap that I am used to.
- florianletsch 10y ago
  Have been running the trial for a few hours and am really satisfied so far. I see the same issues with Spectactle, though. Hope this can be addressed in a future version, as I'd love to have both apps running permanently.
- ivm 10y ago
  Yes, there're some issues with multiple application using accessibility. I'll see what can be done, thank you.
Tempest1981 10y ago
Is it $30 per machine, or per user, or per household?
- ivm 10y ago
  Per household, up to 5 machines.
DarthMader 10y ago
I assume this does not work with a vpn?
vyoming 10y ago
Any reason why you chose fastspring instead of stripe for payment processing ?
- ivm 10y ago
  I read many good reviews of Fastspring on HN, they also has CocoaFob integration. Plus I prefer older services to new ones doing the same thing.
fuzzythinker 10y ago
Does it really require Yosemite+ ? I think there's still quite a bit of people still holding on to Mavericks.
- ivm 10y ago
  I've run into some UI issues I can't even remember in the beginning of the development and decided to skip it for now. I can try to build it for Mavericks in a couple of months though.
arvinsim 10y ago
Is there an export feature?
- ivm 10y ago
  Not yet, but it's on the roadmap with a very high priority.

429 points by ivm 10y ago

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ghostbrainalpha 10y ago

I'm very happy with the icon in the dock!

ivm 10y ago

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!

ckluis 10y ago
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).
- ivm 10y ago
  Added price to the site, thanks. It's 25% off currently, I'm going to raise the price in July.
  - theseanstewart 10y ago
    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.
    - curiousgal 10y ago
      Found the marketing guy! Solid advice. Kudos.
    - bronson 10y ago
      > price is going to go up "soon". Ugh, smells like marketing tactics. Whenever I see leading yet vague language, I become a lot more likely to close the tab.
- peternicky 10y ago
  I'm getting very long loading times and still can't see the page. Please fix because I would like to use this application.
jtmarmon 10y ago
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
- ivm 10y ago
  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.
  - jtmarmon 10y ago
    thanks! that's easy enough :D
  - harlanlewis 10y ago
    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/ 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.
    - ivm 10y ago
      Thank you for the tip, I will see how we can integrate it with Gyroscope.
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xoa 10y ago
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. ---- 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.
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you a lot! 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).
hjnilsson 10y ago
What is your long-term monetisation plan here then? One-time payment won't last forever, as we've seen from different programs lately.
- ivm 10y ago
  Why not? Thousands of app companies exist on one-time payment for many years, releasing payed updates sometimes. MacPaw is a good modern example.
- jabbslad 10y ago
  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.
- copperx 10y ago
  You charge for significant version upgrades. The industry was OK with that model for decades before SaaS became feasible. 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?
- nicky0 10y ago
  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.
vitd 10y ago
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.
- ivm 10y ago
  Haha, yes, we had some doubts about the name's UX but nothing better was found. It's cube-serve in my opinion, an observing cube. Well, I'm not a native English speaker... :)
  - Sean1708 10y ago
    You could make the IPA form (kjuːb-sɜːv) part of the logo design, I always think that looks pretty cool.
    - ivm 10y ago
      :D Sounds interesting but I don't know how many users know how to read this...
      - kentt 10y ago
        I would guess that most people don't. I certainly wouldn't feel confident.
        evincarofautumn 10y ago
        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.
podgib 10y ago
Do you have a timeline for Firefox site tracking? I'd definitely buy this to replace RescueTime if it supported Firefox
- ivm 10y ago
  I hope I can convince Firefox team to report page URLs to OS X accessibility. Or maybe I will try to commit it myself.
  - mweibel 10y ago
    Do you have a issue or feature request open? I'd be happy to add a plus one:-)
    - ivm 10y ago
      Not yet, sorry.
  - lensi 10y ago
    Timingapp.com is able to track Firefox urls somehow.
- r00fus 10y ago
  I must say, I use FF all the time. Of course, all my work is on FF tabs, so it's still useful to track distractions.
- mescalito 10y ago
  I used desktime and they seem to provide an extension for urls, couldn't you do something similar?
  - ivm 10y ago
    Probably. We just need to release some other features and fixes first.
buremba 10y ago
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.
- TJTorola 10y ago
  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.
- ivm 10y ago
  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/ 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.
fuzzywalrus 10y ago
Have you used the Application Timing? https://timingapp.com/ 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.
- ivm 10y ago
  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.
donatj 10y ago
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.
- ivm 10y ago
  I think I'm going to add custom filters to solve this and probably iTerm tracking.
  - donatj 10y ago
    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.
    - ivm 10y ago
      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.
knowtheory 10y ago
Hey! 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"?
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you! 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.
  - knowtheory 10y ago
    Yeah! I dig it. 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.
mkolodny 10y ago
I'd buy it right now if I could buy it through the Mac App Store - I have a bunch of credit there.
- ivm 10y ago
  Sorry, it's not working in a sandboxed environment that is a must for the Mac App Store.
tehno 10y ago
> $ brew cask info qbserve > Error: No available Cask for qbserve 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.
- ivm 10y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I'll do it!
- adidalal 10y ago
  Just added to Homebrew Cask, feel free to `brew cask install qbserve` (I'm one of the maintainers of Homebrew Cask)
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Thank you!
ambicapter 10y ago
I added a category and it shows up in categories but not in the dropdown menu for a specific activity? OS X 10.10.5
- ivm 10y ago
  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.
  - ambicapter 10y ago
    Oh I get it. Is it supposed to be reading tabs in Safari? Because it really depends on the website whether or not I'm being 'productive'.
    - ivm 10y ago
      Yes, it should show all the domains you used in Safari separately.
      - ambicapter 10y ago
        Okay, and if it doesn't? I'm using the trial right now.
        ivm 10y ago
        Please re-check the accessibility access in the system settings: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18391 https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18391 If it still fails to get the tabs, please contact me: https://qotoqot.com/contact/ https://qotoqot.com/contact/
primitivesuave 10y ago
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 :)
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you! The top priorities (after fixing small issues) are custom window/URL matching and then data exporting.
  - primitivesuave 10y ago
    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)
nspassov 10y ago
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.
DenisM 10y ago
Make a 3 minute video of typical use pattern? I'd watch that.
spoinkaroo 10y ago
Where do I find the student / 5 person discount? I am a student and interested in purchasing.
- ivm 10y ago
  Please contact us: https://qotoqot.com/contact/ https://qotoqot.com/contact/
poorman 10y ago
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.
- ivm 10y ago
  This is an interesting idea but sorry, it's too much for the app to become a separate feature. 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.
- raihansaputra 10y ago
  Cross the data with last.fm scrobbler? (Connect your spotify to last.fm, sync timestamps with data from tracker)
1dayitwillmake 10y ago
This app is awesome, i love it already - best of these i've ever used. Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
- ivm 10y ago
  Thank you, please check the settings for the idle time adjustment.
1dayitwillmake 10y ago
This app is awesome, i love it already - best of these i've ever used. Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well

pwelch 10y ago

+1 for privacy and storing locally

Joe8Bit 10y ago

Some feedback: * 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!

underyx 10y ago
>Make the price more readily apparent on the landing page I'm seeing a huge green 'Buy Now — $30' button on the front page. Was this added in the past 20 minutes?
- JakeTheAndroid 10y ago
  Yes, it was.
ivm 10y ago
Thank you, I fixed the price. > 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.
- cheapsteak 10y ago
  > Can I determine which things are productive/neutral/distractive? I was wondering this as well, could you add this on the roadmap if it's not already doable?
  - ivm 10y ago
    You can categorize any activity in the table in the Details tab and it will remain in this category.

howlingfantods 10y ago

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.

ivm 10y ago
Oh, right, thank you. I've already updated it in the app but forgot the screenshots and texts.
- howlingfantods 10y ago
  Is the website down? It's not loading for me anymore
  - welder 10y ago
    Probably the HN effect... here's a screen shot: http://imgur.com/5G6ywyX http://imgur.com/5G6ywyX
  - ivm 10y ago
    Should be good now.

zzzmarcus 10y ago

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.

asadhaider 10y ago

This looks like a simple way to keep track of time I spend on projects. 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.

ivm 10y ago
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.
- asadhaider 10y ago
  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? [0] http://i.imgur.com/qxE06nC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qxE06nC.jpg
  - ivm 10y ago
    Could be a problem with how ST reports its project names to the system. I'll take a look soon, sorry about that.
pyvek 10y ago
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.

joshcrowder 10y ago

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?

ivm 10y ago
Thank you, I'll add it a bit later.

Yhippa 10y ago

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.

jrcii 10y ago

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.

llimllib 10y ago
You spend a measurable amount of time goofing off by watching trains go across your terminal? disclaimer: that's awesome :)
ivm 10y ago
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.

thuruv 10y ago

Dead link. :(

ivm 10y ago
Sorry, try again. For some reason a small DO droplet with 2 static pages is down from being on HN.

cdnsteve 10y ago

So was this developed using Swift? Curious, I see SQLite backend.

ivm 10y ago
It was started before Swift become more or less mature, so the whole codebase is in Objective-C.
- KayL 10y ago
  Sounds like no plans for Windows platform? (I'm a multiple platform user.)
  - ivm 10y ago
    Sorry, no, it will require complete re-write and the app also heavily relies on OS X accessibility. But I remember using ManicTime on Windows, give it a try maybe.
    - lj3 10y ago
      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.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        It is wonderful. 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

tharshan09 10y ago

Just curious, what is the tech stack?

ivm 10y ago
Just Cocoa (Obj-C), SQLite with FMDB, and CorePlot.

fintler 10y ago

On a 13' Macbook, I need to scroll down to click "Download" or "Buy Now". You might want to move those buttons up a bit.

imdsm 10y ago

How long is it -25%? If I try for ten days, can I still get the -25%?

ivm 10y ago
Yes, it's until June, 30.

lancefisher 10y ago

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 Good luck!

welder 10y ago

This is the new RescueTime! Now you just need to market it to all of RescueTime's users: https://twitter.com/rescuetime/followers 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.

methyl 10y ago
Use packet sniffer like Wireshark to track if the app is exchanging data with the Web or not.
ivm 10y ago
It works completely offline, so feel free to block it with firewall. WakaTime works only with developer apps.

knowtheory 10y ago

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.

Zirro 10y ago

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?

ivm 10y ago
You can disable the colors in the settings tab. It should work both for classic and dark menu bar styles.

rememberlenny 10y ago

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. Would that be possible?

ivm 10y ago
Sorry, right now it's not possible. I would like to add synchronization some day but it's a bit far on the todo list.

pibefision 10y ago

Why in this kind of sites, there is not a single person behind the marketing site? What's the reason to be hidden?

ivm 10y ago
We're not hidden, I just failed to create "About" page somewhere.
- pibefision 10y ago
  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?
  - ivm 10y ago
    I'm not hiding, you can find us by company name easily. ;) "About" page will be added later.
WA 10y ago
I find any lack of imprint or about page off-putting as well. I'd never buy from such a website, because it doesn't seem legitimate.

sd8f9iu 10y ago

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.

botreats 10y ago

I like the idea of this a lot, but not working with Firefox is a dealbreaker. If only 100% of my time spent in Firefox was actually productive....

ivm 10y ago
Firefox does not report URL to OS X accessibility. I'm going to file a bug or even dig into the sources later.
- jish 10y ago
  When I first downloaded the app, it was actually tracking my Firefox usage somehow (github.com, news.ycombinator.com). Unfortunately I restarted soon afterwards, and now all of the Firefox usage just shows up as "Neutral" =/ But it was working nicely at first :)

baby 10y ago

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? [1]: https://github.com/mimoo/FirefoxTimeTracker https://github.com/mimoo/FirefoxTimeTracker

ivm 10y ago
I use OS X accessibility, so Qbserve tracks the focused windows. In case of browsers it's usually the current tab of the top window.

gruffj 10y ago

Great app, really enjoyed using it so far. I've found the percentage of productive time shown in the toolbar to be really useful.

Jonovono 10y ago

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 :)

ivm 10y ago
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). [1] https://heyfocus.com/ https://heyfocus.com/
- achikin 10y ago
  Don't do that. Keep your app simple and clean as it is now.
SyneRyder 10y ago
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.) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getconcentrating.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getconcentrating.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150701133312/http://www.getcon...
- OlaRybacka 10y ago
  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-harvest/ https://www.timecamp.com/blog/index.php/2016/04/timecamp-vs-....

deweerdt 10y ago

I bought the app, and I'm really happy with it, thanks! I know it's a long shot, but some sort of shell integration would be awesome. My typical day is > 60% iTerm2. iTerm2 has shell integration: https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html, and maybe that would be one way is something that Qbserve could be fetching info about what's going on in the terminal.

ivm 10y ago
Yes, I got many requests for iTerm2 tracking and it will be definitely added. I'm looking into the available options, so thank you for the link!
- azag0 10y ago
  Any chance of tracking Terminal.app?
  - ivm 10y ago
    Sure, I will check it too.
    - azag0 10y ago
      And I forgot to say that you made a great app! 95% gonna buy.

jbverschoor 10y ago

I'm currently testing Timings, but it's support for activities and projects isn't done properly. Checking out this one

zmarouf 10y ago

Am I right in assuming that Qbserve only tracks active windows? To elaborate: If I have a monitor set to a fullscreen OSX Desktop with either Spotify or VLC while actually coding, the time spent listening/watching won't count unless the application is active, correct?

ivm 10y ago
Yes, it uses OS X accessibility to get the focused app and its focused window.
curiousgal 10y ago
Correct.

zombieprocess 10y ago

In terms of distribution - Could you create a dmg with the drag & drop to the Applications directory as is standard for OSX?

ivm 10y ago
Oh, right, thank you for the tip.

jbverschoor 10y ago

OK tried it, but it's not for me. I need to be able to track activity per project. Projects can be determined from the open window path or url. Timings does this, but it's just one big mess

ivm 10y ago
Timing uses completely different tracking approach, iirc there's AppleScript involved. Qbserve uses accessibility but I have plans to make improvements for per-project tracking.

mcoppola 10y ago

Early impressions are excellent. I can easily see some billable/reporting functionality added as premium features. I'll be adding this to my daily routine and seeing how it works for the trial period - but you likely have a paid user in me already. Thank you!

ivm 10y ago
Thank you, I think there's enough data collected to produce invoices for clients, we just need to decide how to organize per-client activity management in the UI.

stinos 10y ago

Away from the keyboard or watching a movie? Idle time is detected intelligently. Problem is it heavily depends on the person what is really idling. Ideally you should be able to read the mind to see if there's any work-related activity :] I'm still using manual time tracking mainly because of this (even despite the obvious disadvantage of forgetting to turn it on or off): there's all kinds of solutions like detecting mouse/keyboard idling to fancier ones like detecting if your phone is near your pc and stuff like that, but at least for me none of these are as correct as just manually saying 'now I'm working, now I'm not': they can't detect things like me sitting outside with pen & paper.

ivm 10y ago
You can set idle per-category. "Videos & TV" category is idle by default. So if you have Youtube open and there's no mouse/keyboard input then Qbserve assumes you're watching a video.
- dionidium 10y ago
  How? My options seem limited to "Productive, Neutral, and Distracting."
  - ivm 10y ago
    Sorry, missed your reply. Please go into the category tab in the Details and select a required category. There will be an "Always track time" checkbox. It prevents the app from going idle during activities in this category.
    - dionidium 10y ago
      I have the opposite issue, actually. ScreenSaverEngine shows up in "neutral," but it shouldn't be counted in any of those three buckets. It's just idle time.
      - ivm 10y ago

ryanmarsh 10y ago

If you're a consultant or you work in a consulting firm I have some advice for you. Get comfortable with fudging the numbers on your time reports. It's ok. Report what's reasonable given: You aren't being paid for your minutes you're being paid for the ability to solve a customer's problem in minutes. I bill my clients 40 no matter what because sometimes I give them 100 hours worth of value in 1 hour. It all balances out. It took a while to realize this wasn't an integrity violation. You aren't a machine resource. You're a human working in immense complexity. Your productivity is a roller coaster. It's ok. Don't sell minutes. In reality your customer can't handle the unpredictablity in billable hours if you were exacting and billed what you're actually worth. Instead we smooth it into 40 (or whatever), and that's ok.

steve19 10y ago
Does it work both ways? If you customer thinks the 100 hours you billed is only worth 1 hour, are you OK with them paying 1 hour?
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  No, they pay what I bill. If we don't agree on that then we don't do business. If I want repeat customers then I don't gouge them.
aplummer 10y ago
For anyone reading this, billing the incorrect amount of time in consulting is an integrity violation, and probably illegal. If you agree to sell in hours, then the client pays in hours. Attributed value billing should be in your contract if you are going to do that, not snuck in under the guise of hourly rates.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Do you bill your clients for the time you sip coffee or take a shit?

graeme 10y ago

Does the license allow use on multiple computers? I have a computer for heavy work, and another where I do email and social media. I'd like to track both.

ivm 10y ago
Yes, up to 5 machines for the personal/family use.
- graeme 10y ago
  Great, I'm doing the trial now and very likely to buy. Also, thanks for the Focus app recommendation elsewhere in the thread. I had been looking for exactly such a native app.

spoinkaroo 10y ago

This looks like exactly what I need, I'm going to try the free trial and then let you know what I think and probably buy it.

Karunamon 10y ago

YES! Finally an excuse to drop Rescuetime and their goofy UI. I've had this running for about an hour or so, and it seems to provide me exactly what they do, for cheaper, while respecting privacy. Congrats on an awesome app, and I hope you do well selling this!

Karunamon 10y ago

Minor UI feedback: The settings UI is extremely hard to read on my screen. The headings are light grey on white, and no amount of messing with my screen's contrast settings leaves something easy to read. The checkboxes also immediately convey "disabled" due to their coloring. Your UI in general is spot on and sanely designed, but please consider taking a cue from the OSX HIG[1] and use the system colors and leave the light grey stuff for actual disablement, it will make your app look a lot more native. [1] (about halfway down the page): https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/ControlsButtons.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000957-CH48-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

ivm 10y ago
Got it, sorry. We'll update the colors. We try to follow HIG despite building a custom look, so non-blue checkboxes is a mistake.

albertzeyer 10y ago

Fwiw, I developed a very puristic similar project: https://github.com/albertz/timecapture https://github.com/albertz/timecapture So far, it's only tracking the time and recording which app is in the foreground and what file / url is currently opened in there. It doesn't have any GUI and it won't show you nice statistics like Qbserve. But it shouldn't be difficult to calculate any statistics you want from the data. Python, Open Source, easy to add support for other platforms and apps (so far mostly MacOSX support). Patches are welcome. :)

raphman_ 10y ago
FWIW, there's already https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy which seems to offer the same features as your tool (and a little bit more).

manish_gill 10y ago

Hi. Trying it out and would happily buy after using it for the next few days. One query I have: Is there any way I can hide the app icon from the cmd+tab list? I want the ability for it to stay and works quietly behind the scene and since I have too many applications running on at the same time. Maybe a "hide icon" or some other thing? Thanks. Looks like a fantastic product on first look. :)

escobar 10y ago
To remove the icon from your cmd+tab: open the preferences/settings for the application and under "Application Options" use the multi-select field from "Both" to "Only Menu Bar", then restart the app. The icon won't be in your dock or cmd+tab anymore, but lives in the menu bar :)

peternicky 10y ago

I have used Rescuetime for years and for the most part, am very satisfied with the service. It would be helpful if you added a simple comparison between Rescuetime and your service.

Ensorceled 10y ago
Yes, RescueTime is really your main competitor. Let people like me know what you offer to get me to think about switching!
ivm 10y ago
Currently the differences are window tracking (RT only tracks apps afaik), chat tracking, instant feedback, and keeping the tracked data on your machine. Downsides compared to RT: no sync between devices (and it's not coming soon), no "offline time" (but it's temporary).
- peternicky 10y ago
  Thanks for this info, but I don't know what you mean by "instant feedback" and "chat tracking". Rescuetime does allow window tracking (unless I don't understand what that means). For me personally, the most essential Rescuetime features missing in your app are: - ability to install a client on gnu, OS X and Windows. - 95% of the time, it correctly categorizes my activities, requiring very little input from me. Looking forward to trying your app!
  - ivm 10y ago
    Instant feedback: to see your productivity in RT you need to go to its dashboard. Qbserve shows productivity score in the dock icon (with color) and in the menu bar (colors + percents). Chat tracking: Qbserve can look into Skype, Slack and Telegram Messenger apps and track your chat/team names as separate activities.

daemonk 10y ago

I really like the UI. Is it possible to implement keyboard/mouse movement activity tracking? I don't mean keylogging or anything, but something like key presses per minute while an app is focused or mouse movement in pixels per minute while an app in focused.

ivm 10y ago
Thanks for the idea! It should be possible since the app has accessibility access.
adiabatty 10y ago
I second this. I'd like to know if my keypresses are going into a text editor (productive!) or IRC (unproductive!). As someone who's fighting off RSI, knowing where my keypresses are going is more important than tracking where the time goes.

daemonk 10y ago

Just bought it. I really like it. One thing that would make this perfect for me is the ability to show stats for specific time ranges within a day. I use my laptop for both work and home. It would be nice to see a set of stats for just 9am-6pm everyday; or whatever ranges I want. I guess the time tracking works right now by just tallying up seconds for each category? And it isn't recording time stamps? Recording time stamps might end up taking up too much space?

ivm 10y ago
Thank you! The time range feature is on the roadmap already.
whoByFire 10y ago
You can avoid saving time stamps if you just do separate sums for preset time stamp ranges. It will add another dimension to the data but that dimension can be pretty roughly discretized. 99% of users would be perfectly happy with 15 minute, or even 30 minute discretization. 95% with 1 hour discretization.

danielparks 10y ago

I've only been using it for 30 minutes, but so far it's great! Being able to map a domain with all its subdomains to a category would be awesome. I access a whole bunch of hosts in an internal domain, and they're all productive.

r0m4n0 10y ago

What my employer thinks I'm doing: 8 hours on stackoverflow = 8 hours of research What I'm actually doing: earning reputation to improve my resume

xufi 10y ago

This is pretty cool. I'd love to use it to keep track of time since Itend to get distracted by looking at other tabs and I've been looking for a way to keep track of where im wasting most of my time

muhammadusman 10y ago

The UI is so much nicer than RescueTime, I love it!

billions 10y ago

Would be nice to compare productivity with others. Just purchased the full version.

Nemant 10y ago

Only 7MB! Good job! Product looks awesome. If it works well for the next 10 days I'm definitely buying it :)

weinzierl 10y ago

I installed the trial version and it looks awesome. Unfortunately the lack of Firefox support is a deal breaker for me as I spend a lot of time in Firefox. This would be my top feature request.

spark3k 10y ago

Timecamp have been at this for a while now. With syncing to project management apps.

kentt 10y ago

Congratulation on shipping!

aantix 10y ago

I love the alerts. I setup an alert for when I have been distracted for more than 30 minutes. Could you disable those distracting sites after 30 minutes? I'm only half-way kidding.. Still a fantastic app.

kkirsche 10y ago
I used to use an app, think it was called orange, to do this. Would love that functionality though to disable top distractions

ivan_k 10y ago

Wonderful tool! I can see myself using it every single day. Comment on usability: currently, different ports from the same domain name are recorded as different websites. I think it should be sufficient to group all the ports used with `localhost` as "productive". Thanks for the great work!

ivm 10y ago
Thank you! Yes, localhost special case would be a nice enhancement. Domains from different browsers probably will be grouped later by default.

kasperset 10y ago

I like this app as it is. New features would be welcome but I prefer lean and mean app. Simpler the better.

mrmondo 10y ago

Looks interesting! I have to ask: is it OS X native or is it some JavaScript thing?

ivm 10y ago
OS X native, 100% Objective-C and Cocoa. :)
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Lovely! You sir/madam are a hero!

pault 10y ago

I've been using Rescuetime for the last 8 years or so, and I will be purchasing this in the next few weeks to see if it will work as a replacement. From what I can see, it shouldn't be a problem. Congratulations on shipping!

maknz 10y ago

Damn this is good. I'll be buying.

elevenfist 10y ago

I love the idea of apps like these, but can people really not remember what they do all day? That thought is almost inconceivable.

imron 10y ago

Any possibility of Mavericks support?

ivm 10y ago
Sorry, it's not planned. We would like to support more systems but there are some UI rendering quirks that prevent smooth backwards compatibility.
- imron 10y ago
  Bummer.

r00fus 10y ago

I like how qotoqot.com shows up as "productive"

avivo 10y ago

I use ulogme which also records when you are typing, and is more customizable (and open source and free). Explanation and demo with screenshots: https://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivity/ https://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivi... Github URL: https://github.com/karpathy/ulogme https://github.com/karpathy/ulogme There are definitely some good ideas in it for inspiration when making a similar product.

ivm 10y ago
Awesome, thank you. My friend who uses Linux was interested in getting something like Qbserve there.

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jakobegger 10y ago

This is pretty misleading. From their product page: > All the tracked information is stored locally. From their privacy policy: > we are using third party service Firebase.com to collect it (...) So privacy is a selling point, but they have a lot of analytics in their app. Some of it can be turned off, some of it can't. If you claim your app stores all data locally, it's quite dishonest if it talks to a bunch of analytics services...

ivm 10y ago
Not "a lot" but 3 points (stated in the Privacy Policy): ping once a day (HockeyApp), OS version+language once a month, and opt-out uncategorized hosts/apps submissions. I don't see how it's not private and "misleading".
- jakobegger 10y ago
  Every domain you visit and every app you have installed is a lot of information. Information I don't want to share, even 'anonymously'. (It would be trivial to deanonymize that data) If you claim your app stores data locally, it better not share data like this. Otherwise your marketing copy is just the usual horseshit.
  - ivm 10y ago
    No way, we are not collecting this because we don't need it (and yes, it would be not very private). I probably should improve the phrasing in the Privacy Policy. Qbserve detects popular apps and sites automatically by matching them to the entries in the bundled database. If it can't find a match, it puts the app/site into "Uncategorized" category. Then when the user decides to assign it to some category, there's a checkbox with text "Submit domain + category" and hint "Send it to developers to improve Qbserve". You can disable this checkbox forever in the app's settings. Then we get somethings like { "host":"ycombinator.com", "category":"news" }, check if this site is really popular and add it to the bundled database in the next update.
    - 10y ago

phelm 10y ago

This looks very useful, I am preparing to be a little shocked by the results. I will probably be buying after the trial. One thing, this app seems to interact strangely with Spectacle (OSX Window controller) whereby browser windows move very slowly across the screen rather than the instant snap that I am used to.

florianletsch 10y ago
Have been running the trial for a few hours and am really satisfied so far. I see the same issues with Spectactle, though. Hope this can be addressed in a future version, as I'd love to have both apps running permanently.
ivm 10y ago
Yes, there're some issues with multiple application using accessibility. I'll see what can be done, thank you.

Tempest1981 10y ago

Is it $30 per machine, or per user, or per household?

ivm 10y ago
Per household, up to 5 machines.

DarthMader 10y ago

I assume this does not work with a vpn?

vyoming 10y ago

Any reason why you chose fastspring instead of stripe for payment processing ?

ivm 10y ago
I read many good reviews of Fastspring on HN, they also has CocoaFob integration. Plus I prefer older services to new ones doing the same thing.

fuzzythinker 10y ago

Does it really require Yosemite+ ? I think there's still quite a bit of people still holding on to Mavericks.

ivm 10y ago
I've run into some UI issues I can't even remember in the beginning of the development and decided to skip it for now. I can try to build it for Mavericks in a couple of months though.

arvinsim 10y ago

Is there an export feature?

ivm 10y ago
Not yet, but it's on the roadmap with a very high priority.