Introducing Desktop Timers!

It has been almost two years since we first outlined our vision for a desktop app for Accelo that would make it easy to keep track of the time you're spending on various tasks. While other priorities fought their way ahead of this vision over the intervening period, we are now excited to announce that we now have native desktop timers application available for all major operating systems.

When we initially mooted our desktop timer feature we were planning on releasing it as a Chrome App - with almost 80 percent of our users already using Chrome, creating an installable app using Chrome seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, as our engineers got deeper into the details over the last few months, we found a few serious limitations.

While we had always intended to release a more native desktop application and not require our users to run Chrome to get it, the tech limitations presented with Chrome meant we had to jump into a native app sooner than expected.

What can the Desktop App do?

We've deliberately made the first release of our Desktop App fast and lightweight: our focus is very much on timers and making it easy for our users to have a stopwatch-style companion on the desktop to keep track of the work they're doing without having to always return to the clutter and distraction of their browser window.

1. Sync in real-time with the web app and mobile app.

• When you first log in to the Desktop App, you’ll see your current timers loaded up, so you can continue working from where you left off. This also means that if you left a timer running in the Desktop App, you can easily find it in the Accelo Mobile App and pause or edit from there.

2. Simple UI for pausing, editing and deleting timers.

3. Create timers faster than ever.

• New feature: We’ve included your list of Current Tasks as you create a timer, making it easy to link timers with the tasks they most likely belong to.

• Of course you can still search for another object to link your timer to, or link the timer later on.
• Plus, we've included some handy buttons for quickly editing the elapsed time.

4. Completing a timer automatically opens the Create Activity window so you can add as much detail as�needed.

Where can I get it? What OSes does it run on?

The Desktop Timer app supports all major operating systems - Windows, Mac and even Linux (Ubuntu).

To download the app, simply head over to our new Downloads page at www.accelo.com/resources/downloads.

The Windows and Mac platforms support automatic updates (there'll be a few of them - we're just getting started), and we're finalizing channels for automatic package updates for the primary Linux desktop platforms.

Can you tell me more about the tech?

Our first desktop apps were built with the incredible Electron project released by the team over at Github. The Electron project (formerly known as the Atom Shell) combines the many things that are awesome about browser-based frameworks (Node.js, browser rendering of HTML and CSS) with a cross-platform native desktop experience (signed installers, auto-updates, etc.).

As a result, our apps come with a WebKit browser platform, which ensures that security is included from the ground up and all of the traffic that goes between your desktop and our servers is SSL encrypted and authenticated via Oauth2 keys (which you can see, and importantly, revoke at any time in your Accelo account). The other advantage is a high degree of compatibility between operating systems and the ability to support rapid and agile development and enhancement.

What are your plans for the future?

For the time being, we're focusing our application development efforts on our mobile apps (since desktops have a pretty powerful and fully featured app interface in the form of a web browser) but we're certainly open to ideas and requests about valuable ways desktop apps can make it easier for our users to manage and track their work going forward.

Do you have an idea to contribute? Visit ideas.accelo.com and share it with our community.

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