Feeling the Mac Love From Freshbooks
March 21st, 2008 (6:00am) Aliza Sherman 4 Comments
Freshbooks is sending out love to their Mac users via Mac Time Tracker widget for Apple’s OS X Dashboard. The press release says it gives users the ability to “link back to FreshBooks account whether they’re online or offline.”
First download the widget. Then go to Settings while in your Freshbook account on the Web and choose to Enable Freshbooks API. When you click to accept the terms, the site generates a “token” that you enter into the widget along with your Freshbooks URL.
The verdict? It works, running quietly and invisibly in the background while you’re working. Cute. Clever. Convenient. And when you’re done with the task, you just click on my Dashboard icon and it pops up with the timer still running until you click Stop. Then it sends the time logged to the respective project for the right client in your Freshbooks account.
I like things that work and that help me work. 
4 Comments Post your own comment
cgilkey1 says: March 21st, 2008 11:11am
Thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying to find a timing solution that works for me, and a lot of the online trackers neglect to have a way of tracking offline work. This is great!
Charlie Gilkey says: March 21st, 2008 11:14am
I just briefly mentioned that online trackers were bad about not giving a way to track offline behavior. I should have said that even desktop timers (Slife, RescueTime) don’t have ways to track time spent away from the computer, either. So this makes Freshbooks all the better.
Taavi Burns says: March 21st, 2008 2:15pm
Just to be clear, the widget allows you to start, stop, and edit your time and modify the notes field when you’re not on the ‘net. To do the initial load of projects and tasks, and to actually submit time, you naturally need an internet connection. :)
It also can’t tell when you’re away from the computer, as Dashboard widgets are really supposed to be out of your CPU’s mind when they’re off the screen. Other apps like Timepost advertise support for detecting when you’re not at the keyboard.
That being said, you can always click on the time readout to edit the value, for those times when you forget to start or stop at the appropriate time!
But you can start up as many widgets as you like when online, then be on the road and update them for later submission. The widget saves changes regularly, so they will survive reboots and crashes.
We’re really glad we could provide this widget to the community, and hope to widen it to other widget mechanisms in the future, so please let us know what you think!
(and thanks for the linkback, Aliza!)
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