
Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app - RoyalSloth
https://www.royalsloth.eu/products/slothtracker
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AgloeDreams
So don't take this too harshly, this looks well featured and I appreciate an
ad-free model that can be used anywhere....

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.

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RoyalSloth
The only way to improve is to hear such opinions. So thanks, will see what I
can do about the design. It's easy to get carried away with feature
development.

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fit2rule
Please make it usable from the keyboard. Nothing irks me more than to have to
mouse-wrangle things around to track my time, which I do in 6 minute
increments, so it can get frustrating.

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.

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RoyalSloth
Better keyboard support comes in next version. Do you mind telling me why do
you switch between tasks every 6 minutes?

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fit2rule
Pretty simple: 6 minutes is the minimum default for time tracking in my realm,
per contract. Clients don't want multiple entries for 30 seconds or 2 minutes
here and there - instead, we report in 10th's of an hour.

I quite often fix bugs in 2 or 3 minutes, or even less - on separate
tasks/projects.

However the minimum time allotment for these things (billing) is 6 minutes.
All time tracking (per contract) is rounded up to the next 6-minute (1/10th of
an hour) interval.

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RoyalSloth
The majority of the bugs I've been resolving take from 30min to a few hours
(if I know the codebase) - but they are usually complex distributed systems
issues.

What kind of bugs are those that could be fixed in 2 minutes?

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fit2rule
All kinds of things. Mis-configured project defaults, typo's, additional
formatting/UI tweaking, really a lot of productive things can be done in less
than 6 minutes.

Different strokes for different folks - just because you don't work that way,
shouldn't preclude thinking about folks who do. The world is a big use case.

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suyash
Nice to see JavaFX app - best cross platform technology out there that is not
very popular.

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spenvo
As someone who has built a stats app for macOS, I wish you the best! Cross
platform is a big deal and something I never got around to. I had trouble
finding a business model that worked - have my upvote!

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yitchelle
When I read "cross platform", it also implies that my data is available across
these these platform. For example, I log my time when I am on my desktop
writing, and I log my time on my phone when I am on the road visiting clients.
Both set of data are collected into the one database.

Does "cross platform" also carry this meaning for you?

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RoyalSloth
No the word you are looking for is: synchronization.

Cross platform means works on multiple platforms (in this case Windows, Mac,
Linux).

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ankit70
Learned about JavaFX. Why not Electron or other alternatives? Sorry if it
sounds too childish.

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hello_moto
Have you make any sales so far?

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RoyalSloth
Yes

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hello_moto
Congrats. Out of curiosity, what is your market segment breakdown (EU vs US)?

Seeing that this is a desktop app, I wonder if EU has a different sentiment
than US market.

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RoyalSloth
It didn't sell in such numbers that I could compare different markets and draw
any conclusions. Maybe next time.

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hello_moto
Do you mind if I PM you? I'd like to ask more questions regarding your thought
process going into this route (Desktop app, JavaFX, marketing, etc) which I
felt a bit unusual compare to the typical SaaS.

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RoyalSloth
Sure thing.

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hello_moto
Mind to drop me a line (please check my e-mail, I just update it) with your
e-mail?

Thank you very much!

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RoyalSloth
You can't see email on HN. Check the website posted above and find my email
there.

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hello_moto
Sent. I really appreciate your time!

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Brave-Steak
This looks interesting. I see that the license is only valid for a certain
version. How often are new versions released? I couldn't find any info on
release dates of previous/current versions.

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RoyalSloth
They are not bound to specific dates, as shipping to hit an arbitrary date
creates a buggy software.

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.

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Brave-Steak
I just feel it's hard to evaluate the price if I don't have a rough idea of
how often there might be updates. Is it a monthly thing? Every 4 months? 8?
Once a year? I don't know how much time passed between v1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2. I
don't even need exact dates. A statement like "We expect to push out a new
version every few weeks/months/once a year or so" makes it easier to reason
about the cost.

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RoyalSloth
You are right that was updated to free updates for one major version (e.g:
license 1.2.0 is also valid for 1.3.0, 1.4.0 but not for 2.0.0).

Thanks for suggestions

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thrownaway954
Minimum 2GB or RAM!!! Seriously... WTF?

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imperialdrive
I think it's a joke.

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thrownaway954
He's selling this thing so I would think you wouldn't want to joke about the
requirements.

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RoyalSloth
Whatever software you buy, there are usually some kind of minimum system
requirements listed so people don't run it on some ancient potato and complain
how it doesn't work.

It uses ~220Mb of RAM in total.

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imperialdrive
Roger that.

btw, I really dig the execution - all platforms covered,
simple/straightforward function. Nice work.

My only comment (and perhaps I simply missed the info) is it would be great to
have keyboard shortcuts available to tie into my keyboard program buttons or
Elgato deck.

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RoyalSloth
Here is the list of current shortcuts (not much I know):
[https://docs.royalsloth.eu/slothtracker/documentation/#keybo...](https://docs.royalsloth.eu/slothtracker/documentation/#keyboard-
shortcuts)

