I’ve downloaded at least a dozen time-tracker apps, and this is the only one I’ve found that does what I need: It asks me what I'm doing every XX minutes, which helps keep me on track as I work. It also records how much time I spent on each activity (I’ve learned to keep the descriptions broad, so I get XX hours on this job, YY hours on that job, and ZZ hours "personal," etc.), which is exactly what I need to determine how much desk time I’m really spending on work.
Since it’s the only app I’ve found that just asks me what I’m doing, rather than helping me *schedule* work or giving me data that will help me bill clients, I’ve ponied up for the subscription, even though I think it’s a bit pricy for what it does. But I’ve definitely felt my productivity slip since my 30-day trial ran out, so it’s worth the price for now. In a year, I’ll probably feel I’ve gotten my $9.99 worth, and will re-up.
Having said that, there are several significant shortcomings:
1) For everything but the “what are you doing now” prompt, the UI is not very intuitive. After a month of using the app, I still don’t know what some of the icons are in the main screen, and when you mouse over them, they’re replaced by different content. I know there’s a tutorial, but I’ve looked at it several times, and I still can’t memorize what’s what. (Also, it’s impossible to quit the tutorial, so every time I forget something that is on Slide 2, I have to click through the whole thing.)
2) Creating entries manually is not all that intuitive either. To enter that you’ve been doing something for an hour and 15 minutes, the prompt says to enter “1h 15m.” You *can* enter “1:15” and it knows what to do with that, but it’s not clear at all that this is possible.
3) If you ever want to trim down the number of different “activities” the app has saved, you can’t delete activity titles without deleting *every entry you ever made* with that activity title.
4) It’s not immediately clear how to delete an activity you added accidentally. For example, if you’re prompted for what you’re doing and you answer “Project A,” but you’re really working on “Project B,” it’s *very* difficult to fix that mistake. You can’t change the *name* of the activity. Instead you have to change the *duration* to “0” (to make that entry go away) then manually create a *new* activity for “Project B,” and because you’re entering this one manually, this time you have to also manually enter the duration.
5) The app has the ability to pause, which is great for presentations (so it doesn’t pop up), or periods of non-work activity (if you don’t want to track those too), but instead of just having a pause tracking/resume tracking button, it has “Silent mode” and “Registration mode” — which is not only a confusing term, but it also doesn’t turn off when in “Silent Mode,” so I don’t understand what “Registration mode” means (and this is a topic *not* explained in the tutorial).
6) This is the big one: It’s impossible to set your own definition of what constitutes a “day.” I work late into the night, but Daily ends every day at midnight, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So it’s never possible for me to see what my actual workday looks like. When I get up in the morning, Daily thinks I’ve already “worked" several hours because it started counting “today” before I quit working yesterday. I want my “day” to cycle at 06:00, when I’m most definately never at my desk. (If the developer fixed this one thing alone, I could live with the rest, and would never have hesitated to subscribe.)
Even given all my complaints, Daily is still far and away the best time-tracking app for my particular needs — keeping myself focused and tracking, for my own purposes, the hours I spend on each activity.