New: Design tweaks to the popup timer
With this mornings release, a few design tweaks were added to the FreshBooks popup timer — in fact, the popup timer has a totally new look. We felt the old popup timer design was very outdated and we wanted a fresher look — more like our iPhone Time Tracker app. Take a look at some before and after shots below:
As you can see, several key components of the timer have been enlarged. First, the font of the running timer has been increased making it easier to read (now you can keep an eye on your timer while you’re standing over by the water cooler 
). Second, the Start/Stop button was made bigger and is now front and center making it more obvious and easier to click. The Reset button is now on its own and we hope this will prevent people from accidentally clearing out their hours (I know I’ve done this before).
Thanks to popular demand, you’ll also notice a new button was added allowing you to switch the time format from hours (e.g. 1.5 hrs) to hours:minutes:seconds (e.g. 01:30:00). Both formats increment at the same time, but keep in mind that when you log your hours the timesheet only displays in the hours format (e.g. 1.5 hrs).
I thought I’d wrap up with a little known fact: did you know you can enter time into the Hours field in the format of hours:minutes, and FreshBooks will automatically convert that into hours in decimal format? It’s a useful feature that not many people know about so I thought I’d share. This can be done on the timer and on the FreshBooks timesheets.
We hope you enjoy the shiny new timer, as always please send us your feedback by commenting below.
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4:10 pm
Window does not resize wide enough in Firefox 3.5.
4:12 pm
…actually, window may be wide enough – but content is not centered (too far right).
7:50 pm
Man, I LOVE the new look of the timer! No more post-it yellow!
But…I still can’t see the entire line of each item. I put a pricing code at the end of each line, to help me determine the level of talent I should charge for, and it cannot be seen. Took a screenshot, maybe I’ll get around to sending that to you.
Thanks.
3:26 pm
Is there any way of preventing a page refresh on the timer window? I’ve had to stop using the web based timer because (as a web developer) I’m constantly refreshing the browser. On occasion I inadvertently focus the timer window and hit the Apple+R thus wiping the timer. I also accidentally quit the browser sometimes. Apple+W and Apple+Q are too close! The dashboard widget negates this issue of course but I was just wondering if anyone else suffers from this and if it was fixable.
5:32 am
Is there any way of preventing a page refresh on the timer
4:03 pm
I recently just complained about the popup timer. They need an embeded solution too so you can just have 1 window open (tab) for freshbooks.
I did come up with a great work around for those of you using Google Chrome (like myself). You can right click on the popup window frame, then select “Convert to tab” then, drag the tab out of the mini window into the window with the rest of your tabs.
This is by far my favorite feature of Google chrome and helps to keep down the clutter freshbooks creates.
6:38 am
Nice new design, but no new features. There are some requests in the forum to enable to user to add a start and finish time manually here, it would be nice if you could do that as well as the funky redesign.
Cheers
Phil
10:44 am
Yes, the whole time out/ auto log out thing is not working for me either. When I then log back in to FreshBooks, I loose my time, and my notes!
Doh!
10:50 am
Can the timer be customized with the user brand colors like it did before?
3:16 pm
Shame you couldn’t add a feature to allow you start the timer at some time in the past (I always forget to start it till I’ve been working for an hour or so which makes it almost useless for me).
4:22 pm
I just started using this too, and so far it’s meeting my needs. I second the opinions above. What would really replace my old system is the ability to back-date a time, and have start and stop fields.
To make it work like a desktop app, like @RM, I use Chrome, go to the Control the Current Page icon (top right), Create Application Shortcuts. Two alternatives could be making the timer an Adobe Air app, or I also just found this old article on using Firefox Prism. I have no experience with the latter 2, but thought I’d throw that out there for comments.
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2008/04/08/run-freshbooks-like-a-desktop-ap/
5:12 pm
It would be nice if you implemented multiple timers like the Minibooks iPhone app. I jump back and forth between tasks so much I don’t bother using the timer a lot of the time.
9:05 pm
I still wish you could load it in the sidebar of Firefox, so it could double as a timebox’er for a given project/task. Your JavaScript link of spawning the window (and apparently the session id) keeps that from happening.
Looks good though.
8:32 am
I second “Bill” and Bill Smithem.
The timer keeps justifying to the right of the pop-up window (Firefox 3.5) and I always have to re-size the window.
Also, multiple timers woudl be nice as I do run multiple tasks at times and it’s frustrating having to use both the FB timer and another one I’ve got bookmarked.