4 ms·
I was recently inspired by a post on HN: “An app can be a home-cooked meal” [1] and decided I was finally done putting up with time tracking apps that didn't su
by hamaluik 7y ago
I was recently inspired by a post on HN: “An app can be a home-cooked meal” [1] and decided I was finally done putting up with time tracking apps that didn't suit my own use case well enough.
I hate time-tracking, but it is a requirement of my job (grants that help pay for my job, really) and if I don't have an app handy, I tend to forget to record my time. I've tried numerous time-tracking apps on the app stores, but they've each fallen short for me in some way or another—many are too complicated, or don't _just work_, or cost more than I think is reasonable. Many necessitate sending data over the network for multi-device sync—a feature I have no need of, but can never disable.
Since time tracking is fairly simple, I decided to write my own app to scratch my own itch. I also decided to publish the app and use it as a learning experience—I've worked on parts of mobile apps before, and developed proof-of-concept mobile apps before, but I wanted to follow the process through from start to end. I also decided to localize it (using Google Translate) for the experience of doing so. My biggest take away from all of this is that the work required to create and manage a store presence (localization and especially localized screenshots) is almost an order of magnitude more work than programming the damned thing in the first place.
In any event, this is an app I made for myself. But if you want to use it or fork it for your own purposes, please do.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629
- rendall 7y agoAwesome! 0.79€ is a steal. Purchased!
- hamaluik 7y agoThanks for checking it out!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nileshtrivedi 7y ago> I decided to write my own app to scratch my own itch. I also decided to publish the app and use it as a learning experience. Strongly agree with this. I was fed up with all the messaging apps that compromise on security and privacy, so started building one just to be used within a family. Using this as a chance to learn Flutter and making it open-source with end-to-end encryption. Not yet ready for prime-time so PRs are welcome: https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/family https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/family
- hamaluik 7y agoLooks awesome! I will see if I can get some of my family to try it out.
- wtmt 7y agoI had a quick look and found it interesting. Do you have any writeup (on GitHub or elsewhere) on how people connect with each other (since phone numbers aren't used as identifiers) and also how the end-to-end encryption (mainly key exchange) works?
- nileshtrivedi 7y agoThe first member would create a group, and others can join that group by scanning a QR code. Strictly wanted to avoid any PII such as phone numbers. Need ideas on how to handle things like removing a person from a group (i.e. resetting the shared private key). For encryption, the idea was to keep things simple and have the QR code be the private key so that it's never transmitted. But another option is to use Matrix.org's E2E protocol which is a lot more work and requires a server.
- uoaei 7y agoLooks great and I'd love to try it. Does it record also the times that the timers are started / stopped, or only the duration of time that the timers are on?
- hamaluik 7y agoThe times that timers are started and stopped, it calculates the duration from that. If you would like a promo code you can email me and I’ll get you sorted.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]