Minco 1.0 Beta 1 – A Lightweight Time Tracker for Mac OS X

We are proud to announce Minco our second commercial application for Mac OS X.

Minco is a lightweight application for tracking the daily time used working on the Mac.

We were using Minco internally  since long and decided to make it public as it turns out to be a useful tool.

Yes, there are some other time tracker for Mac OS X on the market, but we did not find one matching our needs.

We were looking for an application which allowed us work off iCal tasks and write time logs in simple csv files in the file system for universal use. Most of the time tracking applications we found were too heavy and complex for our needs.

Minco comes with an elegant and easy to use user interface and it’s really fun to work with it.

I like to open the main panel with the huge display in the revenue mode to see the income for a task, the day,  the month or the year.

A switch to iCal and I get a detailed overview where the time from the day is gone. To visualize the day is really useful and helpful to optimize my day. But the most important feature of Minco  is the customizable file system adapter which allows to write time records for each work time. I import the files in other applications to see how effective I was working on a project and to have time sheets for our clients.

The workflow we are getting with Minco is very efficient:

• A mail with work instructions arrive from a client.
• I outline the request and create To Do’s in Mail.
• The To Do’s can be directly customized and assigned to the corresponding calendar which I use to assign projects and clients.
• To Do’s are immediately listed in the task list of Minco and ready for work off.
• When I start working, I simply select the task in Minco and start logging.
• Once in a while I check in Minco how long I work on a task and which revenue I have already earned.
• To get more information on a task I press the info button and Minco open to original mail or any other documents attached to the task.
• Occasionally I check the daily routine in iCal to see what I was working on.
• If I have completed a task or decide to pause and continue late I press stop or flag the task as done.
• The generated files are used for calculations, invoicing or direct transfer to a client.

This is a ongoing process and hereby also include changes of priority, the setting of due dates and the adding of own upcoming To Do’s.

Minco is currently announced as beta as we have changed a lot UI, adapter flexibility and error handling.

To give it a try you can download Minco here.

Don’t forget to give us feedback to optimize and improve Minco and let us know if you like or not.

Marc