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SlimTimer and Prism, a Case Study

In my new incarnation as an independent software development consultant (read: programmer who works in his pajamas), I need to track the hours that I spend working for my clients. I’ve been using SlimTimer, a simple but wholly sufficient web app (highly recommended). It displays a nifty floating browser window with a list of my active tasks; click once on a task to start the timer and again to stop it.

Immediately, problems with running a tool so vital to my work inside my normal Firefox instance became apparent. Not insignificantly, I had to right-click on the Firefox dock icon and select the right window every time I wanted to call up the timer. When you’re doing something potentially dozens of times a day, every little bit of superfluous effort starts to get on your nerves. More importantly, I sometimes restart Firefox, which causes the timer to stop (costing me money, or at least mental effort as I try to reconstruct my hours forensically after the fact).

Today it dawned on me that I should serve myself a heaping portion of my tasty dog food, so I fired up Prism and entered the SlimTimer URL. Maybe it ain’t rocket science, but a minute later it was running as a standalone application in its own process. This means that it can be accessed with a single click on the dock icon (even when it isn’t running since I’ve configured it to leave the icon in the dock).

I’m biased, of course, so let me make it clear that similar products like Fluid and Bubbles would doubtless yield the same results. But anyone who says that single-site browsers are just like other web browsers with a bunch of useful stuff stripped out are plain wrong. For web apps that you use a lot, this type of desktop integration is of great value. My next task is to implement a dock badge that shows me state of the timer for the active task, in real time (which should involve nothing more than a short snippet of JavaScript).