The Fastest Way to Invoice Your Clients

After much eager anticipation and endless waiting, the FreshBooks time tracking widget for Mac OS X is complete!

FreshBooks Time Tracking widget for Mac OS X

This widget means you can track time worked for your clients with a click of a button, without logging in, and even when you’re on the road without an Internet connection — though you will need one to actually submit the time to your FreshBooks account, of course.

Download it now »

Attention Windows Users: You may wish to check out TimerSync, a 3rd party time tracking application that’s received good feedback from our customers!

40 Comments (add comment)

Mar 19/08
11:52 am
Ben says:

Mac users might also want to check out Timepost, a FreshBooks-integrated time-tracking app that also tracks your idle time.

Mar 19/08
11:57 am
Brandon says:

Let me be the first to say… hell yeah :)

Mar 19/08
1:12 pm

I’ve been wanting something like this since I first used the Start/Stop timer. Thanks!!

Mar 19/08
2:06 pm

[...] Read up on it. [...]

Mar 19/08
2:57 pm

Grrr…
Was waiting on the Mac OS X Freshbooks widget for about 4 months now. Turns out that anything less than OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will not work.

So, I have a decision to make. I either need to upgrade to Leopard or not become a customer ;-)

Mar 19/08
3:19 pm

Nah… waiting just a little longer is all you’ll need to do — turned out Tiger was coughing on a last-minute change, and we’re just testing the fix now.

Mar 19/08
3:29 pm

And….It’s fixed! Thanks to everyone for their collective patience through this bugridden time. ;)

Mar 19/08
3:30 pm

Nice! Then I guess my decision will be easy. Thanks for the quick update.

Mar 19/08
4:12 pm
Mr. Flanders says:

Thank you, Mr. Burns.

Mar 19/08
4:57 pm

Come hither Smithers. It’s time to invoice Simpson! Heheee…

Mar 19/08
9:36 pm
rob says:

you guys need to port this for yahoo widgets because paying for a widget like timersync sucks…

Mar 20/08
8:36 am
Kyle says:

any reason it imports all projects - including archived ones?

Mar 20/08
10:46 am

rob: We do plan to port it around! Consider the Mac users as the guinea pigs, letting us know what Really Counts in a widget like this.

Kyle: It’s actually a matter of not being able to tell the difference via the API. Sorry that it’s different behaviour from the main app. Now that we’re building out, and people are noticing, it lights a fire for us to get a move on enhancing the API. Thanks for the feedback!

Mar 20/08
12:37 pm
Brandon says:

Kyle, that’s the one gripe I’ve noticed as well. I’ve got a ton of archived projects so its a pain to scroll through them to find what I’m looking for.

Mar 20/08
3:11 pm

I run a Mac consulting firm in CT, and it would be nice to have my technicians log their hours via the widget. As it sits now, the widget is global and doesn’t allow the time tracking of specific staff. If the login was the user name and password instead of the API token that would make more sense in the “staff” scenario. As a single user the API is fine.
Additionally, only the projects assigned to a staff member would appear in the widget to make the list shorter.

While writing this response, I’ve come up with a Mac, Leopard 10.5 solution. I’ve made a web clip of the Start/Stop timer. This works brilliantly. As long as a staff member is logged in to freshbooks via a browser (perhaps Safari only have not tested with firefox), You can use the start/stop as a widget and get all projects relative to your staff account.

You also need to UNcheck the “Play sound only in Dashboard” as the timer will stop when you hide the webclip if you leave this box checked.

But keep working on that widget! Better yet, how bout an iPhone webapp that’s a timer!

Jeremy

Mar 20/08
3:20 pm

Update: This webclip method works if you are in your browser or not. And the box that needs to be UNCHECKED on the webclip widget is “Only Play Audio in Dashboard”. I you do not hit the “i” button on the widget and uncheck the box, every time you hide the widget it will stop tracking your time.

Mar 20/08
3:24 pm

ah yes, was not so thorough in my testing. Seems the webclip will not refresh after a restart or logout. One must Check and UNCheck the “Only Play Audio in Dashboard” as it seems to reload from the web by doing that.
Not perfect but nice for those with Staff.

Mar 22/08
11:30 am

This is a great. I’ve been using it since the launch and it works perfectly. It even saves the clock after a reboot.

Nice work!

Mar 22/08
7:20 pm

[...] a tiny application as timerSync. First I ignored his comment, but now after FreshBooks released their timer widget for Mac and announced the soon release of a Yahoo widget for Vista, it got me [...]

Mar 23/08
8:15 am
Jonathan Mitchell says:

Great, glad to see this at last. Been using it for a few days, and just missing one thing, a clear/reset button.

Otherwise, great work.

Mar 24/08
10:49 am

Jeremy: Yeah, unfortunately we don’t have Staff support in the API yet. When that comes out, you can expect the widget to support Staff access!

Jonathan: Just click on the time readout to edit the value. It’s not quite as straightforward as a single reset button, but it definitely does the job (without cluttering the interface). :)

Mar 24/08
3:02 pm

Not to mention it prevents the accidental click of a “reset” button, or an otherwise necessary “are you sure?” dialog. I thought it too, but the reasons for *not* putting it there are actually pretty good. :)

Mar 24/08
6:35 pm
Jonathan Mitchell says:

That’s cool, but: selecting and deleting the whole time entry (including “:”s) results in a glitched readout (NaN:NaN:NaN). Pressing Start afterwards doesn’t do anything. A further click re-zeroes it, though. Not a big deal, for sure, just bringing it to your attention.

Mar 25/08
6:42 am
sebstr says:

It’s really slick… However… I’m probably doing something wrong.

We’ve got about 15 members of staff working on many projects. How do we get our own unique API token as using the widget just logs hours to the Admin account. As we are trailing using freshbooks this week. It would be really useful to know how to do this ASAP. Any ideas? thanks

Mar 25/08
9:03 am

Yeah, unfortunately we don’t yet have a method for staff members to generate their own unique API tokens and interact with the system. It’ll require some pretty major changes; that said, it’s coming. Just not tomorrow, unfortunately.

Mar 25/08
3:23 pm

Jonathan: HAH. So that’s how people are getting NaN:NaN:NaN! *hangs head in shame* I’ve got a fix in place, keep tuned for updates…

Mar 25/08
5:31 pm

I’ve just uploaded version 1.0.2 of the widget. That should fix the NaNs and make & show up properly in task and project names. :)

Mar 28/08
7:33 am
Jonathan Mitchell says:

Great, thanks for the fast response. Seems to be fine now.

Mar 30/08
6:15 pm
Jonathan Mitchell says:

Guh, sorry to report another problem, but:

After I submit hours, and the widget is both zero’d and not active, if i come back say 1 hour later and invoke Dashboard, the widget will be running, and showing the time since last invoke.

Mar 31/08
9:25 am

[...] Tracking Widgets. We recently launched our own Mac OS X widget fpr tracking time, and pointed out that Goran – a FreshBooks community member – has built a [...]

Apr 1/08
4:55 pm

Ouch! Ok, I managed to reproduce this one now. Nice edge case!

Apr 4/08
6:41 pm
Kristin says:

For some reason, the widget will not flip so that I can input the API info on the back. Any suggestions? (Tiger user)

Apr 4/08
6:51 pm

Hello Kristin! I haven’t seen that before. What version of the widget are you using? There were a couple of issues with 1.0.0 in Tiger which were patched up quickly.

The most recent release is 1.0.3, which just came out this morning. If it’s causing problems, I’ll definitely take a closer look. Thanks!

Apr 4/08
7:26 pm
Kristin says:

Yep, that’s the one. 1.0.3. Thanks!

Apr 7/08
11:05 am
Eric says:

Has anyone else notice that the freshbooks widget is using a lot of CPU? when I remove it the problem goes away. If I reinstall, after a few hours the problem is back. It’s possible that the problem only arises after I sleep my macbook, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

Thanks for the great widget!

Apr 7/08
12:12 pm

Kristin: I’ve just released version 1.0.4 of the widget, which you can download at the link above in the original post. This should fix the Tiger problem.

Eric: I sent you private email, but for the record, no, I haven’t seen that behaviour. I guess I should try on my MacBook at home, too. :) Are you also on Tiger, or on Leopard?

Apr 8/08
3:49 pm
Kristin says:

Wow. You are awesome. Thank you so very much.

Jul 30/08
8:47 pm
katherine says:

This is fantastic! Thank you !!! Freshbooks keeps getting better and better.

Aug 12/08
3:19 pm
Doug says:

Hi guys - any E.T.A. update on when a new API with support for using desktop widgets for staff is coming? We are just in the process of setting up an integrated Freshbooks/Basecamp combo and for me the selling point on the Freshbooks piece was the sexy timetracking widget that might mean I can finally get my whole team on board with a simple, elegant time tracking solution. Woe is me to discover that I can currently only dump all hours into one user id. I see from earlier posts that it wasn’t a “tomorrow” kind of thing as of March, but if you can give any guidance on whether this is weeks, months or years out, it would be very helpful.

Aug 25/08
11:08 am

Hey Doug,

We implemented staff API tokens in May. Read the announcement!
http://developers.freshbooks.com/blog/2008/05/15/freshbooks-api-for-staff-time-tracking-is-here-and-more/

If you have any problems with it, please let us know. Thanks!


Leave a Comment

*
* (not published)

*
* required

What is FreshBooks?

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that helps professionals in over 100 countries save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do — their work. Read our 2007 customer survey results — 99% recommend FreshBooks. FreshBooks users are served by a tight-knit team of 27 dedicated individuals based in Toronto, Canada who've been at this since 2003.
Learn More or Sign Up For FREE

Get Blog Posts