My only complaint is that I absolutely hate the name. I don't even know how to pronounce it. "Cube-serv?" "Queue Observe?" Don't make me think. Also, I'd be embarrassed to try to say the word to someone else when telling them about it. "Looks like a really cool app! What's it called?" "Oh, it's um... Q... Uh... Cube..., uh I don't know. I have to go." And even if I could pronounce it, trying to spell it for someone so they can look it up. Ugh. Forget about it.
It's cube-serve in my opinion, an observing cube. Well, I'm not a native English speaker... :)
Seems trivial, but this has happened to me before with new, "nice to have but not essential" software.
Obviously, once users use it enough they'll remember. But during the trial they may forget about it.
If I'm on github.com/mycompany/* it's productive, if I'm on github.com/someuser/somerandomlibrary it's probably neutral/slightly distracting. If I'm on github.com/donatj/* I'm probably distracted with personal projects I shouldn't be poking at work.
Would be nice if you'd do a PR to get your app into Homebrew. It's just much easier to find, install and update apps with Cask.
(I'm one of the maintainers of Homebrew Cask)
I was able to figure out all the features simply by experimentation, but a tour might be helpful to guide through the process of adding a new category/website/app. There are obviously going to be niche cases that you can't get information on with this app (I might be working on a personal project and there would be no way of knowing), but for 99% of people this seems to be what they would need. I second the suggestion below about allowing more detailed domain name matching, since github.com/mycompany is productive while github.com/anythingelse is usually not.
Overall it's a beautiful product and well-executed idea, I appreciate the 10 day trial and I'll definitely be purchasing it. I fell to 19% productivity as I was writing this comment so I'm going to get back to work :)
I'm listing to Spotify all day while writing code, listening to playlists like "Discover Weekly" or the "Radio". I find that some songs often make me much more productive than others. With all the data you collect, you could easily determine what songs are playing while I'm "productive" --such as while an editor (Atom) is open for a period of time. Then, those songs could get added to a "productive" playlist that I can use later when I need to really focus.
The problem currently is that we don't know what songs are playing when we are super productive because the truly great songs making us productive don't distract us, and thus never get added to a playlist as "productive" songs; they just keep playing in the background acting as a muse.
We will have export in future and you will be able to match data from Qbserve and data from Spotify to see which tracks create the flow for you.
I love your dock icon as well. I was trying to build a custom version of that but for my tmux line, but rescuetime's API doesn't provide realtime info.
Will you open up some APIs for the data? I'd love to be able to do my own analysis and build my own tools. I'd also like to backup the data to s3
In case somebody would like to export the tracked information: it's stored in SQLite in the ~/Library/Application\ Support/Qbserve/ and has a very simple scheme of HistoryLog tables for each month that refer to Activities table that refer to Categories and Apps tables.
Great to hear you're considering data export. I'd love to display time usage in a tool like Gyroscope (https://gyrosco.pe/), which already integrates with RescueTime and a variety of other activity-specific trackers. Visualizations and stats in Qbserve are great for diving into the details of time spent on the computer, while exports to more generalized tools help show how the big pieces of life fit together.
A built in console/scripting engine would also be a nice to have but not necessary if the data can be exported/extracted.
That being said, I'll be buying it. It's a great app and well worth the price.
Ugh, smells like marketing tactics. Whenever I see leading yet vague language, I become a lot more likely to close the tab.
As far as marketing if you decide you'd like to just get it in front of a lot of possible seats you might consider picking one or more of the application bundles, particularly "productivity" focused ones, and see about getting it in there. You won't make much money on it directly, but it is a good way to get a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily risk it otherwise to give it a spin without actually giving it away for free, and in turn sell paid upgrades from there. I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing that vs pure organic, at least not for a while, and how much economic sense that'll make for you depends on existing sales and what sort of major upgrade schedule you're considering. It's an option to consider though and can be one of the better forms of advertising, in that it goes right to a naturally more targeted, self-selected audience for low outlay. Qbserve certainly looks plenty quality enough to fit in. Best of luck to you!
Edit to add: While you specifically contrast this to business software for controlling employees, nevertheless I think a number of small businesses in particular might find this interesting, more from the employee empowerment/knowledge point of view rather then control. To that end some form of basic multiseat discounts might earn you some more bulk orders (doesn't even have to be much, 5% off 5-10, 12% off 10-50, etc, or whatever makes sense to you). Similarly, things like Educational/Non-profit discounts and Family seats are tried and true ways to get people on the train.
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Also a small bit of extra kudos postscript: thank you so much for going to the trouble to actually choose a distinct, unique non-word name for your software. The trend of picking single standard words for application names (acknowledging that modern Apple is the originator of evil here) has been incredibly irritating as it makes searching and discussion entirely unnecessarily more difficult.
OT: The app looks great at first glance, and is timely as I'm ramping up my independent development work. You might put "cube-serve" as a pronunciation guide somewhere on the page, although that was my first guess; I'm still trying to work out how to pronounce "Qotoqot", though...
Under OS X in modern times? Absolutely. They've made it standard practice for nearly every piece of first party software they make that doesn't have significant legacy or isn't specifically aimed at developers.
>At least Apple had the decency to put the letter "i" in front of everything
If only. That went away a long time ago however for non-legacy. "iMail", "iPages", "iNumbers", "iPhotos", "iMessages" etc would obviously not be the most creative or exciting names, but they would fulfill the fundamental core purpose of a trademark brand name in terms of being trivially, reasonably (wouldn't be surprised if there are some collisions mixed in there) uniquely identifiable. Apple has not done that, and in fact in many cases actively moved away from that (iMessage was a thing, now it's just "Messages"). They do this constantly and they've encouraged it in the MAS.
Apple themselves can somewhat get away with it by virtue of size. Doing a search for "Apple Mail" is reasonably on target for Mail.app, though conversely if you want to search for something related to Apple and mail that isn't Mail.app (notice how just here in discussing it I have to use a made up, but very common user invented name just to distinguish what I'm talking about) you will have more difficulty. Even for major examples like that though it's still worse then where Apple actually still has something more specific, like GarageBand or FaceTime. And when it's some random small 3rd party? Argh.
Specificity in names is good and easy, this isn't some huge burden. It's irritating it's even an issue that has to be talked about at all. Qbserve is an excellent example: it's a small, focused niche app that's very new, but the name is simple and memorable,and a search for "Qbserve" is all about the product.
It's 'kotokot' and means cat-o-cat in Russian.
I will definitely consider the small business option. We now have educational discounts and the license is also works for the whole family (up to 5 machines).
Tried it out, bought a copy :)
The thing i'm noticing most (and i can hack around this probably) is that there are some things that are productive in certain contexts (monitoring twitter after launching/announcing a thing) and not in others not (twtittering while i'm supposed to be writing code, or letting myself get distracted by twitter while waiting for something to build).
Would you consider some notion of rule sets scoped to some notion of "what i'm supposed to be doing"?
It will be hard to implement since the "smallest tracking unit" is activity - a website or a window. I also can't see how to implement it without making everything too complex (the app's UX is too complex already in my opinion).
You can try to use a different browser since domains are bound to browsers. Like using productive Twitter in Safari and distracting Twitter in Opera.
So, I honestly wouldn't change anything about the interface, except to wrap the entire thing in an outer shell with something that represents what GTD software might call a context.
And depending on context, different rule sets apply. Anyway, that's just a suggestion, don't mean to stomp on your notion of product, what you've got is a great start and a neat coupling of product experience and interesting engineering!
I especially like the ambient info display in the app icon. Seeing whether the app is bordered in green or blue every time i tab up the app switcher is a great piece of design.
Unrecognized domains and apps are sent by users on categorization but you can opt-out by unchecking "Submit..." or disable it completely (in Settings). Check out the help and privacy policy for more details: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/help/
> Can we tag applications & websites in "Neural" tab as productive or distracting?
You can add any site, application and even windows to any category. Select the activity you'd like to change in the Details tab to see the popover with settings for this activity.
So far I think it looks pretty good for version 1.0. Will probably have more feedback after a few days.
Would be nice if we could set the idle to < 5 min. Also sorting the columns when clicking as well
A desktop app with no server component doesn't necessarily need aggressive monetisation because at a certain point it reaches feature maturity and doesn't need much more work. It sells itself while the developer works on other things.
Of course if you're looking to go beyond a "micro-isv/lifestyle" business and want huge growth it's a different sorry.
Very soon having a big monthly software bill will be seen as normal. This makes me sad. Don't we have enough recurring bills as it is?
If it's missing from there then it's probably a bug.
If it still fails to get the tabs, please contact me: https://qotoqot.com/contact/
I tried RescueTime before but it was too expensive for its functionality ($72-108/year) and also collected all my tracked data on their servers. There is standalone ManicTime on Windows but OS X standalone trackers lack features and most of them are not automatic.
So I started to play with OS X accessibility and got promising results pretty fast. Then there were about 14 months of writing some code once in a week or two and 3 months of almost full time polishing and gathering feedback.
Now it's marketing time. Qbserve did well on PH but almost no other sites picked it from there. This week I pitched about 70 journalists and bloggers who write about Mac or productivity apps but the results are not clear yet.
I'll be very grateful for advices on how to promote it better and overall feedback. Thank you!