
Ding.io - markmassie
https://ding.io
======
sthatipamala
A product tour/screenshots would be helpful in evaluating what this product
has to offer. Having that might increase your signup rates.

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GjermundG
Totally agree. We're working on a new promo page at the moment, and it'll show
off the actual product (w/screenshots) way better than this one.

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wavesounds
Right now it looks like $10 or $25 a month for a stop watch app. If I was a
customer this one would have scared me away. I'm on my phone if that makes a
difference.

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welder
They have a 45 day free trial[1]

Suggestion: add text below the green signup button saying, "Free 45 day trial,
no credit card required". I think that would also help increase signup rates.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246383)

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lugg
I'd suggest, if there isn't enough signups happening, free for solo usage,
cost for teams might be the way to go. Get people hooked using it for their
own time to the point they make work pay for it for the whole team.

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maxmcd
The homepage has no JS other than analytics and cloudflare, and css/html is
super clean. Quite a nice departure from the typical bootstrap+jquery combo.

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GjermundG
I love the fact that you inspected the code :)

We're fans of Bootstrap and jQuery ourselves, but believe in giving Ding the
custom treatment. Time tracking is a crowded space after all.

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dulse
Just downloaded, it looks great. Great design, really pleasing to use and look
at. Lots of small attention to detail that makes it feel nice (eg, calendar
picker with large trailing dates into future and past selected month).

One note: I'm interested in just using for time tracking for personal
productivity, but it feels more like it's built around use cases for
consultants / free lancers (eg, client name being required when creating
project). Not sure if my use case is your target, but if it is might be nice
to have a global setting to turn off the 'client / freelancing' features so i
get something a little more streamlined and limited to better capture how I
want to use it. Might diverge from what you're going for, but wanted to pass
along how I planned on using.

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masnick
+1 for this. There is not much out there for personal productivity time
tracking, especially with good design/UX.

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markbao
+1 on this one as well. I built a shell-based one that pipes out to Google
Calendar [0] and then started using Toggl [1]. Toggl works best since it's
mobile and web, and they sync with each other, but it's still not totally
great from a UI/UX perspective. Timely [2] is beautiful, but doesn't have
actual time-of-day data, which I'd like.

Nowadays, I simply plan out my day in my calendar, adjust as necessary, and
take that as the data. I don't get to do any crunching of the data like I used
to (like graphs and quantitative analysis of where my time is going), but it
does serve the purpose of making me aware of what exactly I did during the
day.

I'm working on something that will do this quantified-self-esque time tracking
built specifically for QS (instead of for freelancers) when I have free time,
because this awareness of how I spend my days has quite literally changed my
life.

[0] [https://github.com/markbao/vestige](https://github.com/markbao/vestige)
[1] [http://toggl.com](http://toggl.com) [2]
[http://timelyapp.com](http://timelyapp.com)

~~~
masnick
Totally agree re: Toggl (UX issues really bugged me -- time tracking can and
should be low friction) and Timely (pretty but flawed interface).

Also totally agree re: quantified-self time tracking and its usefulness.

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Walkman
The UI is nice, but I think nothing beats automation. I use RescueTime [1],
which is surprisingly _accurate_ measuring my time. I use it for years now and
I'm very satisfied with it. No need for "administrative overhead".

[1] [https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/)

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kbar13
Remember when someone posted their free-for-use stock photos of Apple products
and a lot of people talked a lot of smack about his photos? It's interesting
how I see them on a lot of product pages now.

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notduncansmith
I love Unsplash, who's talking shit?

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kbar13
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083)

:(

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GjermundG
Noticed a lot of activity from this link just now – exciting to see you guys
checking out our time tracking tool. We really appreciate feedback from the
community, so don't hesitate to comment here if you have feature requests or
thoughts on Ding.

Gjermund, Co-founder / Designer

~~~
masnick
Three quick thoughts on some details:

1) Please, PLEASE make sure it's quick/easy to enter time with the keyboard.
Right now the main log time interface doesn't let you tab to select the
project drop down. I feel like I should be able to tab to this field after the
optional comment field. Enter anywhere in the form (except maybe the optional
comment) should save the entry and get me ready to enter a new one. For your
target audience (devs), I think good keyboard-only support is key.

2) There should be an easy way to see the total time for each day, maybe just
next to the date on the Activity page. In any case, I shouldn't have to run a
query to see how much I've worked today.

3) Have queries (via the Overview tab) alter the URL so a query can be
bookmarked. Ideally this would be with relative dates so I could bookmark
[https://ding.io/overview?user=1&project=x&client=y&time=this...](https://ding.io/overview?user=1&project=x&client=y&time=this_week&billed=false).

This looks really good. Harvest is the de facto for time tracking with good
UX, but even their UX could use some refinement (my 3 comments above all apply
to Harvest also, I think). You're definitely giving them a run for their
money.

BTW, I really like having the client and project in one searchable drop down.
Separating these was one of my biggest annoyances with Harvest.

~~~
GjermundG
That's some great tips. Thanks!

1) Agreed. This has been up for discussion several times, and it's high on the
list. We'll post these kind of smaller tweaks on Twitter, so if you stick to
using Ding, keep an eye out there [0].

2) We've tried to get the most essential stats within the statistics panel on
the top, and let you quickly tab through these. The hours of the day is
usually pretty visible within the top of the activity feed, but I guess it is
less clear if there's several short intervals rather than two-three big ones.
I'll take a close look at it and see if there's a way to tweak this.

3) Another great idea – we'll see if we can move it further up the list.

We really appreciate all the great input, so thanks again. Our biggest
challenge is time as we're a small team, but we'll keep on truckin' :)

[0] [https://twitter.com/ding_io](https://twitter.com/ding_io)

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Noxchi
Would be useful if you included screenshots without having to sign up.

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GjermundG
Agreed. We're working on improving the promo page at the moment, and will make
sure we include several screenshots.

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nate_martin
The product itself looks really nice, but the pricing model doesn't really
seem like a good fit. I think a freemium model would work better than a
subscription based one.

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shawn-butler
Or include invoicing for the price. By itself time tracking isn't worth $10
month to me.

From the work so far, I look forward to what they could do to simplify
invoicing.

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GjermundG
I take that as a compliment, thanks. We have no plans of changing the price,
so every new feature we add will be included into the existing plan, giving
you more bang for the buck.

There's been quite a few requests regarding invoicing, and while I won't
promise anything in the short term, we'll work hard to make Ding better in the
future. People requested a start/stop-timer which we just implemented, so we
do listen and take your feedback seriously.

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dannib
It looks nice. I'm a user of freckle for some time so I recognize quite a lot
of the UI and features. Even if I don't use all features of freckle, some are
quite useful. As an example in freckle I use tags and the API to automatically
export all entries every month/week updates the client through email reports
or google sheet updates. It doesn't look like that would be possible with
ding.io yet (exkluding the manual csv download)? Also the dashboard display
priority seems a little off.

Money earned gets most space however is never the truth because of taxes,
expenses etc. I rather use my accounting software for seeing my actual
earnings.

Time logged is OK however Active projects for me isn't really necessary
information.

The activity stream and log time form should be of highest priority. Put the
activity stream in focus with better one-click-filtering on
clients/project/tags(?) would be great to quickly answer the clients questions
on what I did. :-)

In summary I think the design is great and looking at features I think when
comparing with freckle, which is relevant in my case, I feel like half the
price equals half the functions. Nothing wrong with that and your product will
of course mature with time. I'll keep an eye on it.

Great job!

~~~
svennis
Thanks for the kind words and thorough feedback!

You can export to both CSV and PDF. So you can still get reports for your
clients, although you'll have to do it manually. We have a pretty limited API
right now, built mostly to support our iOS app. As the API grows you should be
able to get the reports from it.

Money earned let's you see how much you can bill in a given period, so you can
quickly see if you're reaching your goal. We think it's useful despite not
accounting for taxes and expenses, and it's a nice moral boost to see the
money coming in.

You can filter on projects, clients, date etc. on the Overview page. It's
really fast to get filter out exactly the data you need.

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xorgar831
I use Harvest now, their OSX app actually tracks when I'm idle for too long
and will prompt me to roll back the amount of time I've been idle. It doesn't
remind me to turn on the timer though when I forget. ;-)

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vxxzy
I've been a happy subscriber of Toggl for some time now (2+ years). I find
Ding's pricing to be higher, and I don't see any integration with other
services (like FreshBooks, etc..). I see I can export data, but does anyone
know if they plan to integrate with other services?

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GjermundG
If we get numerous requests for a certain integration, we'll see what we can
do. Until now, there haven't really been much of this, so we've put our
efforts into the developing the product itself.

As for the price, I guess it's higher than some, and cheaper than others.
We've tried to set a price we thought was fair, and we continuously keep
making the product better to make sure you'll get more bang for your buck.

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krat0sprakhar
Congrats on the launch! This looks great! I started with something similar but
targeted more toward time tracking in organizations -
[https://github.com/prakhar1989/timelogger](https://github.com/prakhar1989/timelogger)

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artemradchenko
Good job! I like the interfaces. Haven't found option for piece-rate projects
though. Do you have any plans on the matter ? Another guess: I think some API
features would be extremely useful for such a service.

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svennis
Thanks for the feedback, I agree it would be useful to have the option to set
a fixed price for a project. We actually did some wireframes for this a while
back, but we never got around to implementing it. Maybe now would be a good
time to look at it again.

What API features are you thinking about? We have a pretty limited API that we
built for the iPhone app, but it's growing as we work on the next version of
the app. So over time it'll get more of the same features as the website.

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artemradchenko
Thank you for the answer! I see two directions for API: one is an integration
with existing services api such as RescueTime, and the other is own api to
give such opportunity to fellow developers. For example any task manager
service can use time-tracking and project/profit management functions at your
service via API.

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owenversteeg
I agree with the other people in this thread, this is a beautiful looking app.
I think one thing you may want to clarify is whether this is available in a
browser, as it seems that this is an app to download.

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lindig
I've just started using Harvest but I like what I see here, too. I'm not sure
there is enough of a difference (price, features) to make me switch but I see
potential and the price is competitive.

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GjermundG
You're more than welcome to give Ding a shot. It's free for the 45 first days,
so you have nothing to lose :) I think you'll appreciate its clean UI and
simple approach, and if there's anything keeping you from using it, shoot me
an email at gjermund@ding.io and I'll see what we can do.

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alexcason
This looks really fantastic. I love the design and after spending a few
minutes reading your blog it seems like you care a great deal about every
decision you make.

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svennis
Thank you! It's hard to compete on features alone, so we try to sweat the
details.

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rikf
I like the happy hippo behind the mba on the landing page :)

All in all its a great introduction to the service, really well put together.

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GjermundG
I'm glad to hear you like it. Thanks! The hippo is a Danish design classic
from 1955 made by Kay Bojesen: [http://www.kaybojesen-
denmark.com/](http://www.kaybojesen-denmark.com/)

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lemonberry
Just signed up. Looks nice. But kind of creepy that I had a profile pic on the
site without having to upload one.

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jimktrains2
Gravatar maybe?

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lemonberry
Yes. Thanks. Completely forgot about that.

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kawera
Well done. Any plans for an Android app?

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GjermundG
Thanks! Making native apps is a pretty costly thing for a small team like us,
and to be honest, we don't have much experience with Android development. So I
can't promise anything at the moment, but we'll make sure to keep improving
the responsive web. It's definitely on the wish list though.

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erichurkman
Props for not promising that it's "coming soon" \-- vaporware sucks.

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GjermundG
Haha, we actually have a rule of never using the 'coming soon' phrase :) We've
done it in the past, and it always looks bad if you don't deliver on the
promise.

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hacliff
Really nice! Very simply and clean. Integration with an invoicing system would
be a great win.

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GjermundG
So nice to hear, thank you! What kind of invoice integration would you want?

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JeremyMorgan
Love the idea. It is dead simple and works well. Going to show to a few
freelancer friends.

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gdiocarez
kudos, the site has a clean interface. Though I have no idea how to use the
site properly. Is there any tour guide to the side or a simple welcome page on
how to use it?

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GjermundG
I'm glad you like it. Thanks!

I agree that a "get started" page could be a neat thing, and the onboarding
experience is something we're planning to overhaul. Ding should however be
quite simple: create a project and log time. As you log your hours, you can
easily see the time spent and the money made.

If you want to filter out and export your time entries, it's possible in the
Overview section.

I hope you'll give it a shot. If you're stuck, shoot me an email at
gjermund@ding.io and I'll get to you asap.

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bryceneal
Nice idea. Very clean looking website too.

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coin
Grr, no pinchzoom across their website

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nader
looks very promising!

