Active Timer for Mac

User Reviews

• Active Timer - the best things are free

  felixjpDecember 13, 2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I was looking and tried whatever there was on VersionTracker. Robert Chin's approach is by far the best. No learning curve, nothing to remember. You don't need to turn a timer ON or OFF and cannot forget it. Active Time lists the time you work for each program and even each window (that means file - as the window appears under the file name) in a program. <b>So I can work on different projects (I am a translator) and at the end of the week I just select those window/file names (by command click) in the list of program activities that I was working on for a specific client and the total time for the selected files appears.</b> If set in Preferences Active Timer doesn't count idle time longer than x minutes, doesn't count if the computor goes to sleep etc. The other timers I tried (commercial, share- or freeware) couldn't come close to what I wanted I timer to do (working in the background for weeks without any input from my side) and didn't give me the exact detailed information I expected in order to get the desired end result: the total time for all computer related activities for a specific project. Thank you very much Robert - you couldn't have done it better. <b>I wish I could pay for the program, but unfortunately it's free.</b>

  ---

• Very good app, but needs some improvements

  mmorales--2008January 15, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I like this little application quite a lot. The basic functionality works very well and is very useful for gathering this kind of information. Exporting to .csv is great for saving out those times for later. However, I see a lot of room for improvement here, if the author is willing to put in a little more work. For one. I would love to see some sort of exclusion function. For example, it would be nice to be able to say, exclude Finder, or maybe some other applications from being captured. We really don't need to see how long we spent in certain applications. But make it a user set preference on what to include and it'll be great. Also, why does the app capture itself in the timers? That seems silly. Why would I care how long I spent in the preferences of the application, or in the main window? It just clutters up the view. Also, it would be great if we could export only apps that we select, rather than the whole shebang. This function may not be necessary if we could exclude apps from being captured (point one above) Lastly, someone commented on making it a menu item, at least as an option. I think that would be good too, if it's possible to do with this kind of application. If the developer could do these things, I think I could even convince my company to buy licenses of it, even though it's currently offered for free. We've been looking for something that can do this, and this comes close, but is not quite close enough for us to pay for it yet.

  ---

• Active Timer

  jsndanAugust 16, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Nothing wrong with this app at all. It's simple, but does exactly what I was looking for. thanks!

  ---

• Hmm..

  lohengrin2November 19, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />tracks only itself or I missed how to add all other apps running. There was an app back in the days of OS 9 that did similar tasks, but also had a great statistics page, do not remember its name... needs lots of work, is more a 0.1 than a 1.0 version, maybe the author misspelled that. Nice idea, though...

  ---

• Show reviewsHide reviews
• Rate it