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hamaluik / timecop

A time tracking app that respects your privacy and the gets the job done without being fancy.
https://timecop.app/
Apache License 2.0
830 stars 155 forks source link

A couple more questions/suggestions #24

Open drawtheliner opened 4 years ago

drawtheliner commented 4 years ago

(This is the last one, I swear!)

  1. Why is there a cumulative timer at the top of the Running Timers section? How is that number useful? It seems to me it could be removed to decrease clutter.

  2. Why do the task actions (swipe right = Delete; swipe left = Play/Stop) require an additional step (tapping the actual buttons)? Could you add an option in the Settings for users that would like the actions to be triggered only by swiping?

  3. Why does the Play button at the bottom right change to a Stopwatch once more than one task is active? It is a bit counter-intuitive (due to the location of that button, it will always seem like it refers to the text field to its left). If the only reason this happens is as a way to allow for the "Stop all tasks" action, I'd suggest not having it (since it doesn't seem like it would be much used). Or have this "Stop all tasks" action be triggered in a different way - maybe left swiping the top part of the "Running Timers" section could cause all active timers to swipe left, with only 1 STOP button showing on the right, suggesting that this action applies to all active tasks).

Thanks!

hamaluik commented 4 years ago
  1. I just copied the code for displaying things from the stopped timers section and didn't really think about it. I think I agree with you and that it can be removed.
  2. The library I'm using for these swipes is built that way (essentially to allow having multiple buttons available. I think right now the only place I use multiple buttons on one side is when swiping on a timer's end time when editing it). I could probably change this to be just straight swiping with a bit of work. It would probably be more "slick", though there is something to be said about having to "confirm" an input by clicking after swiping. Right now this is a low priority for me, but I'll keep it on the radar.
  3. This was added after my wife started using and testing the app for me. Without knowing about the swiping, by default it appears that if you have multiple timers running, you cannot stop any of them. This is partially mitigated by the addition of a setting allowing only one timer to be active at a time, which turns the button into a stop button when a timer is running. I settled on the "speed dial" popup menu in order to move things along, but I'm still not happy with it—I believe it plasters over a deeper problem in that the swiping isn't really discoverable. I want to keep the swiping but I need to find a way to make it more discoverable, which probably means adding a "tutorial" at the first launch of the app, which I simply haven't gotten around to yet. I like your idea about swiping the running timers section to keep the "stop all timers" functionality, but that still doesn't get around the discoverability issue.

The app is definitely very much a work in progress; unfortunately I just haven't had much time to work on it lately.

drawtheliner commented 4 years ago

  1. Makes sense! I figured that was the reason. Besides the suggestion I gave (to give users the choice to enable an "Action on Swipe" option in Settings), another way would be for the action to be triggered by a "long swipe". Anyways, I agree it's low priority!

  2. Happy to know there will be an option to disable simultaneous timers. I'd even suggest inverting it - make it "Allow simultaneous timers", and disabled by default. I might be wrong, but it seems to be a rare use case.

About discoverability for the swipe, so many apps use it now that I didn't even consider it could be an issue. Especially because new users can't even stop their first timer without using the swipe (I think?)