However... It truly amazes me how bad design and UX on many cross-platform desktop apps are. They often are literally the 'Big Bang Theory' of showing that backend engineers are downright inept at design.
This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association. Few Bold fonts, poor padding, time stamps are mashed together and VERY hard to read. The home-view table has an extra col, the time column is too wide and the title col is not wide enough to read whole task names. Your site literally illustrates a font-weight bug in the Mac version.
I'm sure it has great features and works fine! But your competition makes incredibly good looking products that are incredibly glanceable. Notably, many of the platform specific companies make amazing looking products that are deeply integrated into their OS. (Notably placement in the task/menu bar) Look at how Clockify is doing almost everything you do...for free. Sure, you offer data privacy by being fully offline..but then again you don't sync anything and forget about phones, you aren't even there!
I mean this looks like something you might find buried in an open source project from 2008...for $16USD.
If I have a way to switch tasks by keyboard, I'm more likely to use the app. If I have to mouse-wrangle .. just, meh.
But this is a good point time trackers are a chore to use for some of us. Mainly because we hate tracking time. So good UX is everything for people like myself.
The only thing that really matters in a productivity tracker is whether the tracker can automatically record my activity without me having to manually enter new tasks or manually tell it I'm swapping to another activity.
I jump around between brower tabs, terminal windows, ide's, music player, etc so frequently there's no way I'll ever take the time to manually record every time I alt-tab. All I really want is a tracker that automatically records the window title or tab title every time the window focus changes, and the timestamp.
Afaik that's not possible since OS's don't allow one app to know about the others running alongside it. A time tracker would have to be integrated into the OS to do that. But if anyone ever figured out a way to do that, plus fully offline operation and zero-cloud data privacy, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
This is O/T. but is there a decently concise "best practices" resource to which someone could refer to learn this stuff?
A version is released when a new feature/a set of features is ready. This is actually the first public release, that's why there are no release dates online.
Does "cross platform" also carry this meaning for you?
Cross platform means works on multiple platforms (in this case Windows, Mac, Linux).
Seeing that this is a desktop app, I wonder if EU has a different sentiment than US market.
