TaskTime4 Review and Giveaway
I have this desire to become a consultant of sorts. I would love to be paid outrageous hourly rates to give a nod of approval or tell someone they’re doing whatever they’re doing totally wrong. At this point, I don’t have much to offer as a consultant. But when I become a guru of micromanagement, I know that all my billing needs will be taken care of.
TaskTime4 is a straightforward and simple to use Client/Project manager from ToThePoint Software. By generating a client list imported from Address Book, TaskTime4 allows the user to easily manage multiple projects, print or email custom invoices, and export projects to text or Excel as needed.
The project manager window is the main page of TaskTime4. You can look at the project list and quickly determine the status of each project.
With TaskTime4, you can import contact information from both Address Book and Entourage as well as input new contacts directly into the client manager. I like the client input window enough to input contacts in TaskTime4, and because of this, I wish that there was an option to sync my client list with Address Book.
Each project window tracks the time for each session. To add a session, you can either start the project timer or select “Add One” through the session menu. I would love to see an add button on the project window itself like the project manager window and the client manager.
Custom invoices can be created by uploading a header graphic in the preferences window. Invoices may be printed off or emailed as a pdf attachment. Though TaskTime4 is not a publisher, I like that it can generate a clean and professional invoice.
TaskTime4 has a few features that really stand out. First, it includes the ability to synchronize project folders. This means that you can use TaskTime4 on multiple computers and synchronize each folder for up to date project information. Second, each project window has a resources tray. You can organize and link to files related to the project and easily access them from the resource tray. Third, you can schedule regular backups of your projects through the preferences window, and you can restore projects just as easily as you have backed them up.
ToThePoint Software has hooked us up with two licenses to give away. To qualify, just download the demo and comment on a feature or improvement that you would like to see added to the next release. You must submit your entry by midnight EST on March 26th.
TaskTime4 is shareware and can be registered for $20.
I’m not a consultant and don’t really work for clients, but I’d like to see how I spend my time on different projects that I do work on and which ones are black holes for my productivity (you know, sucking it all in, giving none back).
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.
Just a note for my comment above, I don’t need a license to this app as it doesn’t apply to me, so count me out of the competition (if anyone wants to give me a license to, say, Slife or Hazel, I’d be very happy :P)
As the above said, I would like different invoice templates.
I would like to see some UI cleanup. I would also be interested in seeing the ability to export to Pages, Numbers, Word, or Excel.
I couldn’t add new projects in Leopard. Clicking the select client dropdown wouldn’t work, and neither did clicking several other inputs. Seems a bit buggy to be charging money for at this point.
I would like the ability to export to .csv for import into my finance program.
@Brad, I had the same issue. You have to close the little info window. Very bad design imho.
I loaded up the application and my MBP 2.5G CPU started whizing at 100%. Tasktime4 was hogging the whole processer. Watch this baby. Nice application though