Now looking for beta testers
Oh, for time’s sake!
The time tracker that notices where your day went, so you don’t have to remember.
It sees which app, file and folder you’re working in on your Mac and gives the time to the right client. Your iPhone and Apple Watch take care of the calls and visits in between.
Join the beta Free for testers. Needs a Mac with macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
Each client’s work already lives in its own folder. Point Timesake at it once, and every document, Finder window and code project inside counts for that client, whichever app you open it in. Projects can sit under a client, so a website rebuild adds up into the client’s total.
A small clock in the menu bar notes the app, window, file and web page every few seconds. Step away and it stops counting. Come back and it asks whether the time away was a meeting or a phone call. At the end of the day the report shows what went where, ready to export for invoicing.
For a call or a site visit, start a timer on your iPhone and choose the client. Pause or stop it from your Apple Watch, or glance at it on your watch face. Wherever your Mac was already recording, the Mac’s record wins, so nothing is ever counted twice.
Time added away from your Mac always has a client, and pauses are never counted. The clients shown are made up.
Everything Timesake records stays on your Mac. When your iPhone and Watch share it, they’ll do so through your own iCloud account, so there are no accounts to make and no servers of mine holding your clients’ names. It never records keystrokes or takes screenshots, and this page sets no cookies.
If you use Timing, Timesake can bring across your projects, subprojects, colours and folder rules in one step, so you can try it on real work from the first morning.
You use a Mac, you bill or account for your time by the hour, and you juggle more than one client. Designers, developers, writers, architects, consultants and bookkeepers are all welcome. It helps if you use Toggl, Timing, Harvest or Clockify now, and it helps just as much if you’ve never tracked your time at all.
If you already use a time tracker, keep it running. Timesake works quietly alongside it, so you can compare the two at the end of each day and judge its accuracy for yourself.
The beta starts with the Mac app. The iPhone and Apple Watch apps join through Apple’s TestFlight a few weeks later.
This is an early beta, and Timesake will change from week to week. I’m looking for people who’d enjoy helping me build the plane as we speed down the runway.
Use it for real work for about six weeks, answer a five minute survey each week, and tell me whenever something breaks or annoys you. There’s a Send feedback button in the menu for exactly that.
I learn nothing about your clients or projects. Everything Timesake records stays on your Mac, and I never see a client’s name, a file or a web address. All that reaches me is what you choose to write in feedback and surveys, plus an optional summary of counts and percentages that you can read before it’s sent.
Answer the survey every week and tell me what’s missing, and you’ll earn a free perpetual licence when Timesake launches, with no monthly or yearly fees, and upgrades will always be free. You also get a real say in what it becomes. If it isn’t for you, the Uninstall button removes it completely.
Timesake is made by Craig Burdett, a web and app developer in New York City and former engineer, who has spent more than twenty years building websites and rescuing ones that have stopped working for their owners. His clients stretch from Texas to Thailand, and most have stayed with him for decades.
He has never been just one thing. He has edited and designed books, produced more than a hundred issues of a monthly magazine, mastered CDs, organised marketing conferences, and co-hosted the Viva Terlingua music and film festival in far west Texas. He has done pro bono work for the American Red Cross since 2004, and in what’s left of the week he’s a photographer, a cook and an adventurer.
Timesake grew out of that kind of week. With several clients’ work open at once, he wanted a time tracker that already knew which client every folder belonged to, so the hours added themselves up without anyone starting a timer. So he built one, and gave it a phone and a watch for the time away from the desk.
He has also been burned. More than once he bought a lifetime licence for a time tracker, only to watch the company get bought and the terms change. Any software sold as a service leaves its users at the whims of its developers, and sooner or later a vulture capitalist comes along wondering how to make more money from the same people. Timesake is the opposite of that. Craig wants it to earn just enough to fund its future development and distribution, and when he tires of maintaining it, he’ll give it freely to the community. And if he isn’t around to do it himself, the instruction to release its GitHub repository is already written into the papers his executors will follow.
You can see his work at craigburdett.net.
A few questions help me choose a good mix of testers. I’ll only use your email for the beta, and you can ask me to delete your answers at any time.
No. Timesake is made for the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, and it uses features those systems provide to see which file and folder you’re in. If it does well on the Mac, I’ll look at adding Windows and Linux. I’d love Timesake to be everywhere all at once, but finite resources are, well, finite.
The app in front, the title of its window, the file that window has open, the folder of that file’s code project if it has one, the folder a Finder window is showing and the address of your browser’s current tab. It never records what you type, and it never takes screenshots.
Yes, two. Accessibility lets it read window titles and open files, and Automation lets it ask your browser and Finder where they are. The app shows you where to turn each one on, and it works with just app names if you’d rather not.
Not for testers who see it through. Answer the survey each week and tell me what’s missing, and you’ll get a free perpetual licence when it launches, with no monthly or yearly fees, and upgrades will always be free. The price for everyone else hasn’t been set yet.
Your data is backed up every day and before any big change, and updates arrive inside the app, so a fix reaches you without reinstalling anything.