TimeTagger: Open-Source Time Tracker | Hacker News Reader

TimeTagger: Open-Source Time Tracker

timetagger.app

199 pointswilsonjohn116 comments

I really like that more and more developers are doing the open-source/paid service option(no idea what's the term for it). I personally think it's great for both developers and their customers/users.

Open source SAAS: OSSAAS?

OSAS? Open Source As Service?

Do you see open source + self hosting could drive more adoption among developers rather than customers? Looking forward to hear your thoughts. Do you see model like Ghost could be a strategy to grow Open Source SaaS products?

It is an interesting model, and developers seem to like it. TimeTagger is the successor to a similar product that is not open source, which I've posted about here, but never quite got a response like this :)

I love open source and maintain several open source projects. By making TimeTagger open source, I was hoping to find a niche of "tech" users. And if it fails, at least the code can be useful to someone else.

That was perhaps the most compelling landing page I've ever seen. When you mentioned the lack of cookie banner I found it strangely exciting.

I hope I'm in a salaried, non time tracking role for the foreseeable future, but if not I'll look into TimeTagger.

Hard to tell, but from my(developer) point of view I see it as a big benefit to be able to see the code. Plus it gives me the option, in case I like the service and it is discontinued for any reason, to just host it by myself. Also it adds another layer of trust and I have the feeling I can influence the product.

>Do you see model like Ghost could be a strategy to grow Open Source SaaS products?

Definitely, I think Ghost is a very good and successful example of Open Source SaaS.

I recently created a site to collect all the web services that are backed by an open source repository [1]. I'm happy to add timetagger to the collection:)

Hope there will be many more applications like this in the future. You can share your ideas in https://wintermute.app/ideas. Imho many services are missing, like a privacy first social network.

[1] https://wintermute.app/repositories

Thanks!

This is an impressive list. Adding tags, categories would help in browsing ideas and repo faster.

Thanks for the feedback. I thought about this earlier, but it requires to maintain this list manually. What do you think about fetching the tags from the Github repository and link once synchronized to wintermute?

that could be helpful. Are you looking at launching this on PH? I'm see people can contribute.

I would be glad about more people that contribute. But afaik launching this on PH would require to make it look more fancy. As you said tags and maybe screenshots. Otherwise I think the post will not get any attraction :)

How do I submit a repository?

You need to sign in with Github. Then you can add any Github repository https://wintermute.app/repositories/new.

Gotcha. Would love to see GitLab supported so I can submit the project I'm working on!

freemium?

That usually means that the premium version has more features, and doesn't imply libre/Open Source.

open core?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

I think the term is open-core

Tangent: I also want a coach & nudge app.

I have chemobrain (and other stuff, TMI). So my mind wanders. I need nudges to get back on track. Like a reverse pomodomo. I used to have a remarkable internal clock (always know time of day, track elapsed time, without looking at watch). Well, no more.

Example 1: An inactivity timer. Like the builtin reminder to standup and stretch. Once or twice a day, I just have to sit down. I'll pop some pain pills then veg until they kick in (30-45 min). I never remember to set a timer, alarm. I want my phone to notice I've been vegging for an hour and remind me to start moving.

Example 2: Time to stop. I'll start doing a mindless task, usually physical. Like weeding or picking up litter. It's super gratifying. But then I'll overdo it. I want my phone to notice I've been stuck on the same task for too long.

This is overkill for your example 1, but the apple watch has an inactivity tracker. It reminds you to get up and stand for a minute every hour if it notices you aren't moving. I've found it useful when I'm sitting around or working at a computer for long stretches.

For your time to stop alert, the only thing I've found that helps is throwing everything on my outlook calendar - it gives alerts 15 minutes in advance of the appointment and that's enough to make me realize that some task is coming up and I need to prepare for it.

I don't think I've seen an app per se that does exactly what you want

Possibly less overkill, I have a Garmin Vivosmart that has the same inactivity feature.

Thank you. I'm doing something wrong. I've dug thru all the settings, yup everything's enabled, and I don't ever recall getting a notification to stand up. I'll keep digging.

Though a bit narrow, I have found desktop (menubar) timers with ticking in the background to help a lot. As a matter of fact, I see mine counting down from the 5 min I allocated to check out YC and I can hear the ticking. What has surprised me most is that I haven't yet developed the ability to tune it out - so I always hear it. It also acts like a metronome and I believe it makes me work a bit faster.

Would you mind sharing what app you use?

You bet: It's called Timey 3. I got it off the ios app store. $3 USD! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timey-3-menu-bar-timer/id14211...

Thank you! A talking clock hadn't occurred to me. Sounds obvious now that you've suggested it. I was all but certain that Apple's assistive technology stuff had these kinds of features, but now can't find any clues. Eager to try out your solution.

May or may not be of interest, but I’ve been working on a platform for behavior management. It’s data, graph and rules based, which you define habits and objectives on top of (along with your reminders and likes). It has time tracking baked in (one of several data types). Web and app, API coming shortly along with Zapier support. Site is https://conjure.so with most progress updates and screenshots being posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/ConjureSo

Will mosdef check out. Thank you.

Meanwhile, FWIW, started monkeying with Siri Shortcuts. Now have voice transcription logger thingie, intending to keep a better daily journal. Now trying to figure out how to lash up Streaks.app reminders with Health.app's blood pressure data. (I know, I should just upgrade to a bluetooth enabled cuff. But I'm stubborn.)

I mention Shortcuts because I'm hoping it proves useful for the quantified self stuff.

Have you tried timed tasks in Streaks for those chores you only want to do for a specific amount of time?

>I never remember to set a timer, alarm. I want my phone to notice I've been vegging for an hour and remind me to start moving.

I built a 'Butt Pomodoro - A butt triggered pomodoro timer' to solve this problem[1], it gets triggered when I sit and reminds me to move after a scheduled interval, reminds me to get back after an interval and also reminds me take a long break after consecutive sessions.

It's very easy to build, just by changing the schedules it can do what you ask for.

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered-po...

You might look at TagTime (http://tagti.me). It periodically asks you what you're working on right now, for time-tracking purposes.

That periodic nudge to actually think about what you're doing and whether it's what you want to be doing could be what you need to keep yourself on track.

I like a good time tracker app. I appreciate this is open source too! Some feedback...

After playing with the demo, there is one thing that really jumps out to me I don't quite understand. It's looks like time get grouped into these little 'blocks' on the bar on the left. It's not immediately clear what forms a block though. Also, I don't quite understand the use case for being able to drag the blocks around? If you drag one, the start and stop times change for every task in the block? Weird.

This seems very fragile. What if I accidentally drag a block out of place, and don't remember the exact start time? Then I have effectively 'broken' my time logs for a whole block of work. To me it would make sense to have the blocks locked by default, and allow unlocking in the case you need to move a whole group. But I can't imagine ever needing to do this very often.

I will say, I really like the concept of the continuous scrolling main time bar on the left. Anyway, trying to offer constructive criticism, not trying to bash this project. Looks like the project is still young, and you've got a great start here! Keep it up!

Thanks for the feedback! The blocks on the left (in the timeline) represent the individual time records. These are indeed "glued together" when a new record starts right after another stops. You can only drag a record in the timeline when it's first selected, so it should be impossible to affect multiple at once. You can also move and zoom the timeline though, perhaps this is what was happening?

Nice work! I have no idea if this could fit into your roadmap (and this is probably the kind of feature request you should absolutely say no to) but my partner and I made a thing called TagTime that does time-tracking via random sampling (pinging you at random times) and I'm offering the domain tagtime.com to whoever subsumes the janky Perl-scripts-plus-Vim version we use and makes a proper TagTime-in-the-cloud. There's a pretty decent community of users to tap into but, again, it would probably entail a substantial pivot.

Sounds like a cool project, but I think I'll focus on my Python scrips for now :)

To clarify, by "subsume the janky Perl version" I did not mean touching any Perl code!

Nice. I see that you did this invite/offer first time in 2017. What is the main reason no one took you on it? What is the result of ttc tagging since then?

Good questions; I don't have good answers! Various people have taken a stab at it, suffered 90%-done syndrome, and, yeah. As for myself, I have 70 ttc pings (52.5 hours of work) pretty much exclusively on project management type stuff, like trying out people's betas or refining the rules of the offer or other writing. I suppose I'd count writing this comment if TagTime pinged me right now... (it didn't).

What I really care about is the time it takes to input tasks. The demo app link has a record button with a difficult to use form. Is there a faster way to start/stop the timer?

Hi, I'm the author of TimeTagger. Thanks for your feedback. Right now you can click the record button and since a description is optional, click start right away.

Could you please elaborate how you would want this to be faster? A one click option, or perhaps a keyboard shortcut to start a timer? I'm eager to learn about potential workflows to make the experience more smooth :)

> keyboard shortcut

Always a good start for any speed increase

Are you familiar with emacs and/or vi ?

Familiar as in I know them, and I occasionally use vi (over ssh), but not a proper user :) Anyway, I created an issue: https://github.com/almarklein/timetagger/issues/11

Improved support for using the keyboard, including keyboard shortcuts.

1. When you go to edit an existing task and just click a suggested tag the edit button does not activate and it does not save unless you enter a space first. 2. Clicking on a tag on the right should work as a filter on the tasks. 3. Export to csv should have the tags in every row

Well done on releasing and going open source, great achievement.

Thanks for the feedback. 1. Is indeed a bug, will fix! 2. It does that, right? 3. Not sure if I follow. ATM the tags are in one cell, delimited by spaces.

2. If I filter by client1 on the right I can still see client2 records on the left, it would be my preference that they filter but thats just me.

3. Each individual row does not have the associated tags, if i'm exporting to csv I'm probably going to be opening in Excel to generate a graph or report

Thanks for the clarification! I see what you mean now. 1. I think I'd go with graying-out records that do not match the selected tags. 2. The tags are part of the description, but indeed this is hard to process further. We should add a column for just the tags.

> Could you please elaborate how you would want this to be faster? A one click option, or perhaps a keyboard shortcut to start a timer? I'm eager to learn about potential workflows to make the experience more smooth :)

Something like ActivityWatch (open-source, non-functioning) or Timing (proprietary, functioning, for Mac): Keeps track of your app usage by app and app title and directory, automatically suggests tasks to make based on app usage.

Automated solutions like that seem really nice, but it's not possible for a web app to know much about what you're doing outside of the app itself.

Then don't make it a web app. Make a native app. Or a native app that sends the data to a web app via localhost websocket.

I'm the maintainer of ActivityWatch (happy to see it mentioned!) and automating the process of time tracking was why I started building it (along with frustrations I had with RescueTime).

Curious what you mean by 'non-functioning' here :)

This is a very interesting project and I'm looking forward to diving in over the coming weeks.

Why not immediately? Because I'm a happy user of ActivityWatch -- a fantastic similar tool, which, quoting the authors is " The best free and open-source automated time tracker. Cross-platform, extensible, privacy-focused."

I encourage you to check it out, if you haven't already. The pluggable and diverse watchers that AW uses are the true source of its power. It's under active development (donno why another comment claimed otherwise) and I've been using it on everything for 2 years now.

I can't wait to do a head between the two, and a writeup. I'm sure there are features that will "cross potentate" between the two projects

I'm the maintainer of ActivityWatch, and comments like this make me very happy!

Will check it out, and am looking forward to your writeup!

First of all this is quite interesting and I appreciate your effort, thanks!

And since I am currently looking for a lean time tracker which runs locally for a single user without any internet and cloud stuff, this is very useful.

I fully agree with earlier the feedback of r4tn4l (most importantly, that a delete button would be really helpful) And here are some additional comments:

- the dashed line indicating 'now' is really easy to overlook and it should be visually more prominent (other color, thicker, ...)

- In the overview (this week, this month, ...) the records should be display somehow. Indicating records visually in the overviews makes it easier to grasp the work distribution over longer periods of time. Additionally, if I mess up the month/year of a record (which I frequently do ;-) ) I have no chance to find it again except that I scroll through every day and look for it. So maybe assigning a separate color to each tag and display them in the big grey fields next to the time line would work... (edit: formatting)

Thanks for the feedback! Your suggestion about tag colors is interesting - my earlier timetracker (timeturtle.app) does exactly this, but I felt the colors were too distracting. Will think about how to bring back some of the info in the overviews. Perhaps by simply showing tags in a subtle color.

The interface matters a lot. I am using https://timeular.com/ (along with their neat physical tracker widget) and it has become the tracker interface to beat, as the UX is really solid. I use it every day and find it extremely productive in ensuring that I spent time coding/learning etc instead of too many meetings or other activities that can hijack your day.

Having said that, this is a good effort. I really like the continuing trend of useful software coming via Open Source, via a vibrant tech community.

Nice! When we chose a time tracker for consulting, having a paid option that is also open source would have been a major pro point (so we can rely on it not disappearing, and being able to fix blocking issues ourselves).

You mentioned here that you don't want to add tiered pricing, but I do recommend to add support for paying for a whole organisation in batch (N users, so that the individuals at an org don't have to manage billing separately and an admin take care of it -- the individual's time to manage billing costs much more than the monthly price).

Thanks, good point!

Make sure you have a robust plugin layer as people will want to integrate this into their existing systems, like SCMs, issue trackers, CRMs, reporting and billing systems, chat clients (Teams/Slack) etc.

I'm building something now that would fit in great with TimeTagger, but I don't see an API documented.

The API is not public yet. I plan to though. Out of interest, what are you building? Perhaps we should keep in touch :)

Not OP, but I also have a project that would slot in nicely.

I run a service that tracks work/sleep/exercise/meditation (along with a couple other data points that don't fit the duration model) via an SMS interface.

I text it when I start/stop these activities and then it sends me reminders based on when I normally do those things during the day if I haven't already.

It would be great to be able to push the data I collect into your service to have a unified view of how I spend my time, and also to pull events from your service to send reminders to do certain things via my bot.

That sounds cool!

The folks from Beeminder (a goal-motivation SaaS) created a pile of Perl scripts nearly a decade ago called TagTime (http://tagti.me), which shows pop-ups periodically (but randomly) asking what you're doing right now, and feeds that into a time tracker. That tackles one huge issue with time tracking: you have to either diligently switch up your tracker every time you context-switch, or retrospectively guess at what you actually did, and how long you think you spent on it all. Random stochastic sampling gives a solid great long-term approximation of your activities and cumulative time spent, without guesswork or discipline.

I love the idea, but I need this to work on my computer, and my phone, and my other computer, and..., so I'm heeding their call to build a cloud-based version of TagTime. It pings the user via various channels (SMS, Web Push, Slack, etc.) and feeds their responses into Beeminder, Toggl, and IFTTT.

I'd love to add TimeTagger to the list of supported integrations, since the demo app looks really compelling for the way I think about tracking time.

I really like this, I think this is a great foundation. I've pen and paper done this type of tracking to try and see how long I get to spend on task during a day, what sort of categories of work I'm doing, where am I losing the majority of my time etc. I do encourage it if you've got the sort of job where this is an issue.

I'm not sure its something I'd do long term, but it's nice to sample a few days and re-calibrate your time every now and then.

There's an issue with your cert. Getting SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN on Firefox.

Edit: seems to be working now.

I think it took a while for the cert to work on al continents, because of caching - the site has been up just a few hours :)

Congrats on launching. Page is only working intermittently for me, and the demo hasn't managed to load.

I've been tracking my own time for the last ~month using progressive versions of my own in-development app that has a similar reporting style but is meant to innovate on the data entry, making it much more flexible and convenient (for people who happen to think like me and want the kind of tracking I want, anyway!)

Hopefully I'll be "show hn"-ing it soon.

Have we hugged it to death already or is it something else?

I don't think my server has seen so much traffic in so little time. It seems to be holding up pretty well, but there are occasional requests that take a second or 2. I'm keeping an eye on the monitoring ...

There's something with your certificate. Getting an alert on Chrome.

Thanks for the heads-up. Weird, it uses Let's Encrypt, and I don't see any problems :/

The CN is "*.transip.nl" instead of "timetagger.app" for some reason.

Transip is the domain registrar I use. Could it be some sort of caching problem? The site (and it's cert) have only been up for a few hours ...

I’m just seeing a black screen with “demo” in the top left on mobile safari.

I would expect Safari to work, could you tell me what version of Safari that is?

It’s iOS 14.3

That's quite recent. I guess the app is broken for (Mobile) Safari then. Sorry about that. I will make an issue.

I see the same thing. I'm on iOS 14.3

This has been fixed!

This has been fixed now.

I didn't read all comments, just searched for "delete" and "remove" without success. My question is, if I can delete a record. I find that quite important, since I just created one called "bla" with nonsense, and then internally panicked slightly. If I try it tomorrow, I will just recycle my record for something useful, so a workaround exists. But I still think, deletion is somewhat crucial.

Apart from that, some other things I stumbled over: - The icon is hard to see on my background, because it contains (too thin) black lines and transparent pixels. Give me some contrast!

- The "House" for "Snap to now" feels unintuitive, but that is subjective. How about a text label, so you don't need an icon?

- That "Calendar" icon for "Select Timerange" as well.

- "Step forward" is one day forward. How about naming it.. more like what it is. A step is a generic thing that might be differently perceived, a day isn't (so much).

- "Start Record" and "New Record" are pretty similar features. I do understand the difference, but I would enjoy more, if those two were simplified into just one in an intelligent way.

- That burger menu is, pardon me, somewhat of a problem. There is so much information. I can see "Install App" in the installed App. "Export" happens there but also on the main screen. Which features belong where? Im missing a hierarchy here.

- Your hint text in the "Manage tags" dialog is too long. Please build it in a way, where I do have to read less words. More like 5 or so (currently there are around 50).

- Is that a refresh button next to the burger menu (left side)? I can click an empty button. Wait, what?

- I really do like that infinite scroll and stuff. Looks cool. On the other hand it is quite easy to get lost. Maybe some snapping on day-level (rather than hour-level) might help.

- Please don't require headings over button groups at all (and then even mix that with my initials!)

Thanks for the great feedback, very valuable indeed! At the moment, deleting a record is not implemented yet, but it's somewhere near the top of the todo list :)

If you use GNOME, take a look at:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(free_software)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Activity_Journal

Not sure who in your target audience can pay $2 but not $5/month but why not add a premium plan with as extra the priority support?

I figured I'd want to make it cheaper than Toggl et al., because people might feel they'd get less features. Plus there is no free plan, so the paid plans don't have to pay for the free users ;) - Anyway, I'm kinda done with multiple tiers, and like the idea of one simple price.

Once upon a time I had to do time tracking to 30 minute resolution; what I ended up doing was install an activity tracker, then at the end of the day or month based on what window was open I'd mark down work. It worked well enough for software development because my editor reported the currently open file to this tracker.

What did you do for meetings, testing, looking up documentation etc? I hope you billed for more than just time writing code.

Project Hamster provides an interesting option that runs locally.

http://projecthamster.org/ https://github.com/projecthamster/

Going off on a tangent, I want to thank you for this:

> Notice how there's no cookie banner on this site? This site does not track you. Nor does it make use of 3d party services that do.

It's a small thing, but shows you care about your users more than you care about peeking into every little vanity metric for growth hacking. Kudos.

Thanks, I'm glad someone actually takes notice. I really care about this, and would love more people to do too :)

> GPLv3

I'm curious: Why not AGPL, since this is intended as a web application?

Good point. I guess I just defaulted to GPL. At first glance, I think it does not matter since Aferro protects code that runs serverside, and the TimeTagger library is both server and client side code. Edit: but it would not hurt to consider this better...

Now that you're all here, I'm playing with the idea to create a CLI tool so that you can start and stop records from the command line. Would this be interesting to you or would it only be a gimmick?

Possible integrations with tools like Alfred (macOS app) is a good reason to have a CLI (IMO). I use Watson [1] to track time and mostly interact with it through Alfred.

[1] https://tailordev.github.io/Watson/

+1 for Watson

Org mode on emacs has some pretty nice clocking commands [1] that I find useful frequently. I guess a similar separate cli tool would be nice as well.

[1] https://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html

Interesting. I could see myself opening a terminal (or 10) to perform some small scope of work, starting the timer, and then closing the terminals and timer once that task is done.

yes, classic january stuff, but I was just thinking I could be doing with a daemon that I can control with rofi for tracking time, I could write some scripts to integrate it with freeagent and perhaps query how much money I made today and display it on i3status. with a CLI over your tool I would only be writing a few wee scripts, which would be ideal.

(p.s. if anyone reading this has a suggestion that isn't tied to a python script written by someone whose new year resolution is "Launch 12 products this year and blog about it next year" i would appreciate a pointer. This seems like something a gnu tool probably exists for. I just checked and this one has no API which makes it useless for me since the value is all the boring work is already done...)

It wouldn't be a gimmick, I imagine it would be a hard requirement for me to use the program at all.

The most useful feature (to me) in time tracker apps is the ability to let me know if I've been idle, and options to handle that. (Most apps in this space don't implement this feature)

We've experimented with idle tracking in https://usepunch.com/ - it will do three things:

Have a visible idle counter with suggestions of what to work on next (from your queue). Though we've worried this might frustrate anxious people.

Let you convert an idle block to a task (e.g., if you had forgotten to punch in).

Give you an indication of how much money you're leaving on the table by being idle (via your approximate hourly rate).

Thanks for this tool! However I think the UI is not really ready yet. I would love some transitions on the popup elements, as well as a keyboard control over the forms :)

Since I couldn't find any tool that did the job for me, I ended up creating a very simple (open source) timetracking tool that suited my needs: https://gist.github.com/corentinbettiol/634b6f95928ccb702ac7...

(pros: not in a browser, start when you start your work computer, can sort content with grep, can count hours of work on a task with grep + wc -l, cons: no fancy ui, fixed delay)

Typo on the front page under pricing: GLPv3 vs GPLv3

Thanks, fixed :)

I did build a web extension automatically asking you for what you are currently working on. Not open source, but you might find it handy: https://byrly.com/waywo/

Are there any open source time trackers for teams?

Kimai has a function for teams:

https://www.kimai.org/documentation/teams.html

You can check platform we are building, it includes time tracking for teams - https://github.com/ever-co/gauzy

+1 for the self hosting option!

The UI makes me want to vomit.

Thanks for the constructive feedback!

;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com