It seems this market is becoming very popular and crowded, with a lot of apps bringing their own flavour to the game. Combining invoice creation with time tracking is a nice touch.

There are a few gripes I had, and a few suggestions though:

1. The website needs a lot of work. It looks horrible (in firefox 3.0b4 at least). The icons and images are tiny and badly degraded. The information is wrong (states that the download is 6.3MB, it is actually 7.4MB). I make a lot of decisions on what the website looks like (after all, a caring dev cares about how s/he is perceived).

2. The app is downloaded in a Zip file. What annoyed me here is that it comes in a folder, filled with a bunch of other files, which I don’t want or need. The problem here is that when I drag the app to the application folder, I still need to get rid of these other files. In a .dmg this is not an issue as I can just eject the dmg and I’m done. If you want to distribute all the files as it is, make it a dmg, or just the app in a zip file. Maybe I’m just being picky.

3. The icon. One thing I love about Mac OS X is the app icons. I like that sometimes they are just random (adium’s duck, Yojimbo’s whatever, coda’s leaf, tangerine’s square orange/tangerine), I like the detail in them (the text in TextEdit and ReferenceTracker, the book filled bookshelves inside the house in Papers). The icon for TaskTime is a little bland and lacking in detail (especially when you hit up coverflow and make the icons huge, pixelation is not pretty). I’d like to see some creativity put into the icon. Again, probably me being picky.

4. Love the First Time Instructions. Hate the entourage and address book icons. I would probably give up with the app at this point. Once something hits version 4, it should be extremely polished, especially when you pay for the app.

5. This is where I encountered my biggest problem. I could not do anything until I closed the First Time Instructions window. I added a few clients, which worked as expected. But then I could not create any projects. If I closed the app and reopened it, all my clients were gone. Once I closed the First Time Instructions window, I was able to do whatever and it was saved. I’d prefer to keep the instructions open until I decide I don’t need them.

6. Within the project view, the start button does not look that appropriate, considering you are using regular pause and stop buttons. It might be because all of the buttons being used look so very different from one another.

7. I love that you can keep the little window floating above all others to make it easier to pause/resume recording time. I would love to see a feature where you tie a specific task to an application, so that it can pause recording once the app is closed (notify the user using a growl or something). I didn’t see any easy way to go from the little controller window back to the full one (the green zoom button was missing). Make it work like the mini-mode in iTunes.

8. Different invoice templates. One size does not fit all.

9. Have recording immediately pause when the screensaver kicks in.

It’s a nice app, but I think it still needs a bit of work to compete in this very busy market. Also, take some inspiration from Slife when it comes keeping track of what users are doing.