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Show HN: We just released + open sourced our internal time tracking app Hours
- jurre 12y agoThe github project is over at https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours
- epaga 12y agoWould be helpful to have license information in the readme. What license is it under?
- jurre 12y agoYou're right, totally missed that! Let me double check at work in a few minutes but I'll probably add an MIT license with a disclaimer to please don't be a jerk and offer a paid hosted version yourself
- gokhan 12y agoSo you'll give us the permission to go commercial with your code and call us jerk if we actually go commercial?
- haar 12y agoHe grants the rights to go commercial with their code, but reserves the right to call us names for doing so. Still sounds like a good deal to me.
- rjtavares 12y agoName-calling rights are far too often forgotten in modern day contracts, I'm afraid...
- jenscow 12y agoI think that's one of the barriers that prevents code from being released: People (like myself) worried that others would take that code and compete with you.
- jakobbuis 12y agoThan use a different license that explicitly forbids that. Or force them to get your permission first. Using an open-source license is not mandatory
- mkohlmyr 12y agoDon't use a license you don't want people to exercise. In fact I don't quite understand why you would open source the project at all if you are going to actively discourage people from using the code in ways that are permitted by common open source licenses. If you don't want anyone else to make money from the project perhaps designing your application in clear parts and releasing them as open source libraries would have made more sense. Releasing the whole thing as open source, encouraging contributions while wanting to be the only one able to profit from said source seems wrong. Wordpress don't stop others making money from hosting.
- jurre 12y agoWe've added an MIT license without a disclaimer, people are free to do whatever they please with it.
- NicoJuicy 12y agoHaha, i noticed "Intern Overleg" on one of your screenshots. It's probably a strange word for non-dutch speakers ;) It looks okay though, but i haven't tested it just yet. Hello from Belgium ;)
- jurre 12y agoHaha yes you're right! It's a screenshot of our actual instance of Hours, maybe we should update it ^^
- fsiefken 12y agoIt's really nice that one can host it on their own server, what are the minimum requirements? For example, 1 GB ram? Gitlab, another rails app, for example is a bit better with more. Are there any features that Hours offers that Harvest doesn't?
- jurre 12y agoWe're hosting this on Heroku, I think you should be fine on their free instance which has 512mb I think? :)
- fsiefken 12y agoBUG report in trial: when i click on edit profile or categories i get signed out (latest Chrome on Linux). Probably the click is registered as a sign out.
- jurre 12y agoLooking into it, haven't seen that before! Thanks for letting me know!
- the-dude 12y agoHaha, this is funny. I interned 1 week at this company in 1991 as a 'snuffel-stage' while in high-school ( Kraneweg at the time ). Congrats on the App!
- jurre 12y agoThat's awesome! :D
- the-dude 12y agoIt was awesome, they really went out of their way and teamed me up with someone every other day: Monday: Desktop publishing with Ventura and LASER printers. Yes: laserprinters. Tuesday: Hit the road to install network at a client site with Coaxial cables. Wednesday & Thursday: Let me sit in with the dev guys: TurboPascal. Friday: Assembling PCs. Still wondering if they pulled a trick on me with the mystery customer showing up. Fond memories & have been in IT all my life.
- jurre 12y agoThat's exactly how I imagine that era, feel free to drop by for a coffee if you're ever around (we're @ zuiderpark now)
- aebersold 12y agoI'm sorry, but your app lacks a lot of required functionality. Even for a lightweight time tracking app. The statistics are very pretty but not very useful. The lacking of printable, full reports on project bases, is a dealbreaker for me. Also add a text field to the time entries, tags are often not sufficient. Also no date filtering? Only full hours, no half hours? The sidebar says I logged time for yesterday, if it was actually today. The edit userprofile link doesn't work. Haven't you tested your app at all?
- jurre 12y agoThanks for your feedback, yes we've been using it for about six months now and it's been working for us. Feel free to submit a pull request with anything you think is missing :) The sign out on edit is a new bug, we're tracking it here: https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/pull/131 https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/pull/131
- aebersold 12y agoI'm not going to help you build missing features, so you can profit of other people's work by hosting the paid app. What you have at the current state is not an MVP, it's a buggy prototype. Why should I use a time tracking app when I can't export my hours to write an invoice?
- jurre 12y agoInvoicing is not something that we personally need, if you do need that sort of functionality there are tons of alternatives out there :)
- linuskendall 12y agoThe code is MIT licensed, so your contributions would be too. Sure they can make money off it, but so can anybody else who feels like forking (or even just pulling) the code. If you find it a good base to work on, submit pull requests. If it's not for you, just move along.
- JazCE 12y agoOk so i'm trying your hosted version of the app. New user. I get taken to the New Entry page... I haven't got a project, i can't create a project on the new entry page so i have to go round the houses to add a project. I haven't got any categories... where do i add categories as i can't do it from the New Entry page... oh it's under my name... so round the houses to do that... once i have done that, adding an entry on todays date (the 8th) then shows a popup that says "Jared worked for 5 hours on blah yesterday" hmmm
- jurre 12y agoTotally agree that the onboarding experience sucks, we need to improve that Tracking this here: https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/132 https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/132
- bold 12y agoNo privacy policy at all? That's an absolute 'NO'.
- jurre 12y agoYou're right, tracking this here https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/135 https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours/issues/135
- bold 12y agoAlso noticed the two different icons being used (compare the 'clock' in the logo and the favicon), doesn't seem to a lot of thought is put into it. It's these little details that users like me - who are usually willing to pay for services like these - are put off because most probably these details are just the ones on the surface. I'll probably stick with http://www.tickspot.com http://www.tickspot.com
- jurre 12y agoOh that also looks great! :)
- timc3 12y agoI think this would have a lot more value if integrated with ticket tracking systems which already contain a little of interesting information - type of tickets, type of work, component etc..
- onion2k 12y agoThe problem with integrating time tracking with other business systems is that outside of software development the tools utterly suck for integrations. Integrating with calendaring apps or task management or CRM is either really hard because there isn't a public API or the tools are very basic because the API has to easy to use, or the system is expensive to develop for being the API is complex. Plus the API ends up dictating how you organise the data rather than the business choosing how to use the tool - eg 'every job must be part of a project that's owned by a client' .. that sort of limitation quickly makes the tool inflexible and hard to use. If you look at integrating with software development tools like ticketing or bug tracking you have to remember that in the majority of companies, even if you only look at software companies, most people aren't developers once you get to more than about 10 staff. You have sales and admin and managers. What that means is that you either end up with a time tracking tool that does very little outside of tracking time or a time tracking tool with a raft of features that don't apply to most of the people using it. Both of which are bad for some of the users. All of this is compounded by the fact that most people don't want their time to be tracked. Even if you love your job, having someone reviewing how you spent your time feels like you're being micromanaged and watched over. That just isn't a good feeling. Time tracking is a surprisingly hard problem to solve once you get past just a log of 'On A/B/C worker X worked on Y for Z hours'.
- davidkatz 12y agoFirst impression: feels undifferentiated. It doesn't seem to be particularly quick on the data entry, or particularly powerful on the analysis and reporting side. Perhaps there's something great about it, but if so at least I didn't get the message.
- Void_ 12y agoI don't understand why do people keep tracking time through web apps. I built Zone ( http://rinik.net/zone/ http://rinik.net/zone/ ) because I couldn't find any product where you could track time really quickly.
- jwrigh13 12y agoThis seems like it would be good use of the new heroku button: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/8/7/heroku-button https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/8/7/heroku-button I'm sure some people would like a one-click deploy of this app to their heroku account.
- mcnemesis 12y agoAchievo :http://www.achievo.org/ http://www.achievo.org/ We've been using Achievo daily since I joined my current employer in 2009. It's also web-based (residing on the intranet, but with a global hook). It might be worth checking it out as an alt + it's been Free for as long as I've known it. It Open Sources as well, and those with experience of ATK would easily join dev.
- mschulze 12y agoMy company also open sourced our time tracking application (it can do more, like vacation requests and invoices). Right now only the backend API is open source, you can find it here [1] and documentation here [2]. It is a REST API secured via OAuth. In the next few weeks we also want to open source our main client application, an AngularJS app. It is probably a little too much tailored to our needs to be used somewhere else. [1] https://github.com/techdev-solutions/trackr-backend https://github.com/techdev-solutions/trackr-backend [2] http://techdev-solutions.github.io/trackr-api-documentation/ http://techdev-solutions.github.io/trackr-api-documentation/
- jurre 12y agoOh that's also pretty cool! Props for open sourcing it
- perfunctory 12y ago"Time registration that doesn't suck" - is an oxymoron.
- aruggirello 12y agoI too am developing an automatic time tracking application (for the Linux desktop, but I think it might be made to work cross-platform): the idea is that, you just install it, you might then optionally choose apps or files to identify your project activities, and it will auto-detect time spent within those apps; it will come with a pre-populated database of known apps so that it can handle most common activities automatically. It works by monitoring current processes, and checking the title of the currently focused window, applying a number of regexes to identify an activity, and saving results to a database. It should be able to handle screen savers, visited URLs, and automatically take snapshots of unidentified windows so that you can later map them to a known activity. I envisioned this tool for personal use; however, it could be deployed to monitor employees in a centralized manner, though this might even be illegal in many countries.
- jurre 12y agoI can imagine that could be nice especially for freelancers or just to track your own productivity! Our use case was more that we have a lot of different projects and we didn't really have any insight on how we were spending time within those projects. For example we wanted to know if spending more time on prototyping would cut down on development time or why one project took a lot longer than another.
- welder 12y agoFor programmers this is a time tracker built into your text editor https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com