
Show HN: A minimalist Mac app that helps track, allocate, and plan your time - aracena
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/effortless/id1368722917
======
reaperducer
I'm not in the market for this kind of app, but thank you for making it a
straight $9.99 purchase, instead of a $4.99/month SaaS (rental) scheme. Or
some bogus in-app purchase that gets negated somewhere along the way when the
app auto-updates and the previous in-app purchase is no longer available.

I can't tell if it syncs data with my other Apple devices, but if it does, it
would be great if it had the option of doing it through iCloud instead of
through some proprietary untrusted service that I have to create yet another
account for. (I' looking at you, Panic and Junecloud.)

~~~
flaque
I would much rather pay for a product over time.

When you pay upfront, the dev is not incentivized to try and keep you. So the
product gets worse and worse until it dies.

If you pay overtime, the whole game is “how can we make this person love the
shit out of this thing for as long as possible.”

~~~
reaperducer
_When you pay upfront, the dev is not incentivized to try and keep you. So the
product gets worse and worse until it dies._

This is not true.

When you pay up front, the developer has an incentive to make the product
right the first time; instead of releasing a buggy product because it can
always be patched later.

In the pay up front model, if the initial product is crap, then nobody buys
the next version. That is the incentive to release a quality program the first
time around.

Then the developer has an incentive to make the next version so much better
that people who like the first product will buy the new version.

 _If you pay overtime, the whole game is “how can we make this person love the
shit out of this thing for as long as possible.”_

No, if you pay over time, the whole game is "how can we keep this sucker on
the hook and milk him for monthly payments for bug fixes and things we should
have done the first time."

For example, millions of people pay repeatedly for WordPerfect from version to
version for decades because it just kept getting better. That's how it was
done until very recently, even with operating systems.

------
jpulgarin
Hey HN! My name is Julian, and I made Effortless with aracena to solve a
problem we were both having: how to focus on exactly one thing at a time.
Effortless displays my current task, and a countdown timer in the menu bar,
and although it sounds silly, it means that I have a constant visual reminder
of what I should be working on. Effortless was also a great excuse to learn
Swift and native Mac app development. I'm happy to answer any questions about
the app or the development process, although it's my birthday so I might be a
little slow to respond. If you have any feedback or want a trial code to test
Effortless out feel free to write me at julian@effortless.app . Thanks!

~~~
snazz
Specific question: are the keyboard shortcuts accessible from anywhere? If so,
using them would mean I couldn’t close a browser tab or reload a page, because
it would be forwarded to Effortless instead, right?

~~~
jpulgarin
There is one global keyboard shortcut that is available everywhere, and that
can be changed from the preferences window. You can change this shortcut to be
something that doesn't conflict with any of your existing shortcuts. The other
shortcuts only work once you've pressed the global shortcut. So for example,
if your global shortcut is (the default) ⌘E, to open the task list you would
press ⌘E and while still holding down command press F.

------
xwkd
This feels less like a "Show HN" and more like an advertisement.

~~~
duiker101
I mean... aren't all Show HN sort of adverts? How is this different?

~~~
sovande
It links directly to the Mac App Store which open MAS on my Mac. It's kind of
rude. Their web-page does not contain any text describing the product, there
is a simple video which could be linked instead. The product is at least 1
year old, judging from comments in the App Store. Usually a Show HN thing is a
bit fresher. I agree with OP, this feels less like a Show HN and more like "oh
by the way, we should post a Show HN the buy button".

~~~
dang
The general rule for Show HNs is that there has to be a way to try out the
product or project. That means different things in different contexts, since
e.g. hardware can't easily be "tried out", so we tend to adapt that rule some.
But I think you're right that there should be more information with a software
Show HN, even though it isn't a web app.

~~~
aracena
thank you for the information I didn't know that, We offered to many people
who asked to try the app to write us to h@effortless.app and we will give it
to them. Hopefully next time we will do a better show HN thank you

~~~
dang
Well, that's probably enough if you're willing to follow through on such
requests quickly. I'll restore the title.

~~~
aracena
Thank you so much!!!!

------
tobr
This looks brilliant in its simplicity. I’ve been using Tyke.app for a few
weeks as a task list, and it’s perhaps the first that seems to work for me.
Getting timers + fast task entry seems like a useful addition. Bought it, the
price is perfect.

Some feedback. Starting the task automatically when it’s added feels
stressful. Same when I restart the app - it starts ticking. Not sure how to
reset it either.

Would like to be able to add tasks without specifying a time too, and switch
to it without having a timer start - just as a reminder of what to focus on.

Can I turn off the active task somehow, and show the icon again? (i.e. have
access to the list from the menu, without explicitly selecting which one I’m
working on atm)

~~~
jpulgarin
Thanks a lot. We focused a lot on simplicity so I'm glad that shines through.

Your feedback is super useful to us. The ability to turn off the active task
is probably something we will incorporate in the next release. Having the
ability to add tasks without a timer needs to be thought through a bit more by
us since many users use their Effortless task list as a sort of notepad.
Please let me know if you have any more feedback!

~~~
tobr
One more thing - maybe I’m imagining this but I wonder if you might have a bug
that causes the alert sound to go off sometimes even when the tasks are
paused? I’ve heard an occasional ping from two different computers since
installing the app yesterday, and I can’t figure out what else would be
causing the sound.

~~~
aracena
I know what you mean, the idea is that if you pause the the task it will
remind you every 5 mins to resume the task. Basicly you have to compleat the
task or remove it. if this becomes a problem write me to h@effortless.co and
we will find a way to improve it

~~~
tobr
Huh. That’s not at all clear, and strikes me as weird. I think you’d have to
pair it with some visual indication...

~~~
jpulgarin
Thanks for the feedback - I can definitely understand it not being intuitive.
If you want to remove the alert for now you can do so from the preferences
window (it's the "Mute get back to work alert" option).

------
YCuN4M00v33odS
13.99 to show notifications from a list.

Come on

~~~
duiker101
It's worth what people are willing to pay. Seems like there's quite a few
people here happy with the price.

~~~
sovande
The app had a ranking of 50 in the productivity category June 8 and was out of
the MAS US list June 11. Thats all for the last 365 days. So I guess not many
is willing to pay. I salute the attempt fight the race to the bottom which the
App Store has become, but I agree with OP, this app is probably not the
standard-bearer. 9.99 for a TODO list (and judging from the video not very
good) is too much. I mean, iStat Menus is 9.99 although amputated on the MAS.

------
kendallpark
Many years back, a coworker and I were talking about how we wished pomodoro
apps had a "snooze" button. One of the limitations of using the pomodoro
technique with programming is that it can break you out of flow.

I wonder if there would be a way to pair this with an app like Cold Turkey...

------
hu3
Is there a blog post about development process or technologies used?

~~~
jpulgarin
No blog post yet but I'm happy to answer any specific questions here.
Effortless is a fairly simple app although there were some tricky edge cases
to handle like when the task name is too long for the menu bar (especially
when dealing with multiple monitors), and how to update the current task in
the menu bar when making large edits to the task list. Making the app simple
to use and cutting down the list of features to the bare essentials was also a
process that involved a lot of iterations and talking with early users.

I learned Swift and native Mac app development in order to develop Effortless
and have since fallen in love with Swift. It has replaced Python as my
language of choice for many tasks.

~~~
shibel
I for one would love to hear more about your transition as someone who’s been
with Python for a while now but struggling to make Swift stick (last attempt
was with SwiftUI, which is awesome but very young).

~~~
jpulgarin
Definitely! I got lucky in the sense that wanting to create Effortless forced
me to learn Swift. I wanted much more control than something like Electron or
BitBar could give me, and I wanted to make this app a reality. I had also been
working professionally with Python for the last few years, and the codebase at
my previous company was so large that I started to miss working in a
statically typed language.

I didn't do anything that special to learn it. I gave the _The Swift
Programming Language_ book (1) a read and then started to get my hands dirty,
using Google when needed. I had done some iOS development a long time ago,
which also helped. I almost immediately found it just as easy to write as
Python (and in some respects easier) but with a stronger type system. It also
has a lot of great tooling like Playgrounds. So I guess my advice would be to
give yourself a project which you want to use Swift for, ideally where you
have no other alternatives. I've also tinkered around with using Vapor to
create web servers using Swift, so that might be another option.

1\. [https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/](https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/)

------
rusinov
Mac nerds wouldn’t install an app with icon like this.

~~~
paultopia
Oh man, that's sad but true. I've been working on a couple of small
(hopefully) useful Mac apps myself, but can't draw or anything like that, and
this fact has seriously kept me from putting them on the app store altogether.

~~~
plufz
While I feel for you not feeling able to publish, is it really that sad that
we like good icons? Isn’t one of the important things about the platform that
we have high ui demands?

~~~
paultopia
I'd argue that UI is different from prettiness of icon. The skill of drawing
and the skill of understanding how to make an application easy to use are
different.

~~~
plufz
We are affected by aesthetics. Humans like things that look good, use those
objects more, find the objects easier to use, has a lower cognitive load on
us, etc. Atleast that is the results of the cognitive studies I know of (like
those 1990s studies from Hitatchi).

------
brandall10
The concept is similar to an app I used years ago called Zonebox. I loved the
idea but it was buggy and appeared to be abandoned by the developer.

[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zonebox/id597870795?mt=12](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zonebox/id597870795?mt=12)

Purchased and so far it looks pretty great.

~~~
jpulgarin
Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback.

------
n1000
Looks nice! I am a huge fan of [https://noteplan.co](https://noteplan.co).
They do many things right such as using iCloud for syncing with iOS and
markdown seems like a natural choice to me. What I am missing is just what you
offer. A focused task with a pomodoro timer... Maybe you should work together?

------
regnerba
Looks nice and simple. I recently went looking for a ToDo list app and landed
on TickTick. So far it has been really good. Specifically it is very focused
on lists, not notes, has a global keyboard shortcut for adding new items, and
just lots of nice little features to help make managing a bunch of lists
easier.

------
Dextro
It would be pretty cool if there was a way to add tasks straight from Alfred

~~~
jpulgarin
There's a quick add functionality which allows you to add a task with a
keyboard shortcut. Would Alfred integration still seem useful to you?

~~~
Dextro
I usually forget my shortcuts and rely heavily in tools like alfred (or the
Jetbrains find action shortcut). It reduces the amount of shortcuts I need to
remember. It also reduces the likelihood of shortcuts conflicting if I only
need a couple of them :)

------
simongr3dal
A bit Off topic but, why does the mac app store open automatically, is there
any way to turn that off?

No other kind of link in safari is allowed to open an app like that without
confirming it each time.

~~~
_underfl0w_
I wonder how hard Apple has fuzzed that "feature"

------
j-pb
Would love that for iOs, or an iPad Os widget. <3 I'm actually sad I do all my
dev stuff via blink.sh now :(

~~~
aracena
Hopefully, we will have it in the future

------
binjo
I used this for a while. I think the free version. Really loved using it.
Great job

------
matthewhartmans
This is a neat app! Really simple and straight to the point. Fantastic job
Julian!

~~~
jpulgarin
Thanks Matthew!

------
z5h
I've been wanting something like this. You have my $.

~~~
aracena
Thank you so much!!! It means a lot to us, if you have any feedback or any
question please write me to h@effortless.app

------
rvn1045
can i look at stats? how much time ive spend working on various tasks and also
the visualization of the time periods i have spent working?

~~~
jpulgarin
We're hoping to add analytics in a future update.

------
kleer001
Hmm, I could probably setup emacs to do something like this.

I'm on Linux these days so can't use it anyways :/

~~~
adminu
Well, that would be org-mode. If you set an time estimate [1] it will give you
a desktop notifiction when your time is over. Thanks to clocking in and out
[2] you can record your time. And, well, it's org-mode, you can do basically
everything if your are willing to learn it ;)

And at the end of the day you can generate a nice table that shows you, how
much time you spend with what.

[1] [https://orgmode.org/manual/Effort-
estimates.html](https://orgmode.org/manual/Effort-estimates.html) [2]
[https://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-
commands.html](https://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html)

------
edejong
Good (free) alternative, works across OSes and on iOS and Android, has browser
integration and a support team:

Toggl.io

~~~
tomcam
Website is now a Godaddy parking page

~~~
jen729w
Looks like they got [https://toggl.com](https://toggl.com)

This isn’t the same service at all, BTW. I use and like Toggl but the app
shown here serves a different purpose.

I like the idea, OP. I might give it a try when I’m on my Mac.

------
matchbok
iOS version planned? I'd love to chip in.

~~~
jpulgarin
It's definitely something we're thinking about. There have been many times
when I'm not at my computer that I'd wished I had access to my task list, or
had something like Effortless on my phone to keep me focused on some manual
task. Right now we're focused on improving the Mac version though as an iOS
version would also require us to write a backend to handle accounts/syncing,
etc...

~~~
jason_slack
I would use an iOS app. I like to keep my Mac as clutter free as possible/very
minimal.

Happy Birthday.

------
mfatica
"or are you done your task"

~~~
aracena
Hey thank you the feedback, can you please let me where did you see the error?
thank you

~~~
aportnoy
Notification in the last screenshot on the app store page.

~~~
aracena
I'm fixing it now, thank you!

~~~
myguysi
Also “notification” was spelt incorrectly on that screenshot too

~~~
aracena
Thank you so much I'm fixing that as well

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IloveHN84
No Linux or Windows version?

~~~
aracena
Not yet, sorry, but hopefully in the future

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IBCNU
Counterpoint: These apps never work, calendars are time prisons, we already
have advanced technology for managing time: our brains.

~~~
adminu
Despite the downvotes, I somewhat agree with you: It is not about the app you
use, but THAT YOU USE IT. It does take some commitment and I think, people
tend to hop from app to app instead of building the nessecary mindset. In
fact, a clock and a peace of paper can do the job just fine, if yout want it
to.

~~~
dalacv
and a pencil to right on the peace of paper with.

