#Qbserve app review for mac
#Qbserve app review install
#Qbserve app review pro
#Qbserve app review mac

The hardest phase was before the launch, where we spent weeks on writing and rewriting various texts, building a landing page, setting up a reseller account, running a beta test and doing all the other prerelease things. I also manually categorized thousands of popular sites and apps, so that Qbserve could automatically sort them into 'productive,' 'neutral,' and 'distracting' buckets. Instead, I focused on easy UX wins, like the dynamic icons whose angry red color shames you into working, or flexible tracking settings that weren't hard to implement but allow users to adapt the app for their individual workflows. I also knew that some customers with multiple Macs were going to ask for data synchronization, but I lacked the experience necessary for this level of complexity, so I didn't even try to plan the app's architecture for working with a server. For example, I had anticipated that by-project tracking would be important for many customers, but the goal of the minimum viable product was to compete in the less busy niche of personal productivity tracking. This was of course longer than I had expected, despite trying to prevent overengineering and feature creep. It's hard to estimate the time spent in parallel with freelancing (if only I had had Qbserve back then to track it!), but I think it was about half a year of full-time work in total.

#Qbserve app review mac

This is also the reason why Qbserve is not present on the Mac App Store - Apple requires a restrictive sandbox for the apps that are sold there. Unfortunately, being so close to the unique features of macOS means the app is unportable to other operating systems, including iOS that doesn't allow app tracking for security reasons. The tracking itself relies heavily on macOS screen-reading APIs for persons with disabilities. Qbserve is a native app built with Objective-C and SQLite. What went into building the initial product? I knew that RescueTime was popular, so I didn't research the market much and just boldly assumed that I could get a part of their audience by providing a better user experience. At worst, I would get a product I had always wanted and a first app in my portfolio. At best, this project would finally achieve my dream of self-employment. But I had always dreamed of a better alternative, and figured now was the perfect time to give it a go. And of course it creeped me out that there was no self-hosted solution - sending all my browsing history to their servers made me pretty uncomfortable. Their weekly productivity reports only made us feel slightly guilty about the wasted time.

#Qbserve app review pro

We had both previously used RescueTime and even paid for the pro version for a year, but found that it didn’t help much. I decided to move to desktop and mobile applications to leverage my knowledge of Objective-C and C#.īefore the startup, we had been working in cycles of client and independent projects for five years, so building some new product was inevitable. What motivated you to get started with Qbserve?Īfter our gaming startup closed in December 2014, we started looking for freelance work to build up a new financial cushion outside of the game development space, which had become too crowded and offered scarce remote jobs.

After two and a half years, Qbserve earns around $2,000 each month and has over 4,000 users.

#Qbserve app review install

So the app's core audience is individuals who want to track their productivity or work hours privately - and not because their boss ordered them to install tracking software. The other important distinction is privacy: Qbserve logs all your browsing and document history, but none of this ever leaves your Mac. Unlike a majority of our competitors, the app doesn't have any team features and instead focuses on providing the best individual time-tracking experience.

#Qbserve app review for mac

Qbserve ('cube-serve') is an automatic time tracker for Mac that gives you real-time productivity feedback, tracks project time automatically, and then generates timesheets and invoices. Petersburg, Russia, but nowadays live in Valdivia, a small city in southern Chile. Hi! I'm Ivan Mir, and I'm running a small company called QotoQot with my co-founder and wife, Irina. Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?