FreelanceStation

This release was mostly about changes to make FreelanceStation more flexible, as requested in several occasions by multiple users. There are still many rough spots that I need to work on to make the app better. That will take time, but is necessary to shape the future of FreelanceStation and make it the go-to app for time tracking and invoicing on the Mac.

This release took time to get ready with several improvements that were scheduled for the previous release but didn’t make it. So they carried over to 1.4.

I’m experimenting with AppStore Optimization to see if background color change in screenshots has any measurable effect in store page views.

This is a bug fix release. Mostly cosmetic changes and improvements:

• Fixed: Improved energy usage of the timer.
• Fixed: Onboarding screen image had wrong resolution.
• Changed: Minor UI improvements.

I wanted to fix this issues before focusing on version 1.4, which should be released around October.

This version adds several changes that make FreelanceStation easier to use and includes some changes requested by users.

• New: Add time to any task manually.
• New: An onboarding window will appear when first running the application to help new users setup FreelanceStation.
• New: Invoices can now be deleted.
• New: Idle detection. Automatically stops the timer after a configured threshold, and resumes when activity is detected.
• Changed: Task durations now support duration in minutes.
• Changed: Labour unit name in documents can now be modified to other than “Hour”.
• Fixed: A crash that occurred when deleting the last activity while the Summary view was selected.
• Fixed: An issue with automatic timer start/stop when receiving wake, sleep, lock and unlock events.
• Fixed: Minor UI bugs.

The feature backlog is still long, but I’ll slowly implement all them missing functionality in the following release. :)

Today I released FreelanceStation 1.2, with the following changes:

• New: Export project tasks to Apple Calendar as new events.
• New: Document numbers now can have a custom prefix.
• New: You can set a starting number for documents when you create a new activity.
• New: Task progress can now be shown as a circular progress in the dock icon. It is active by default but can be disabled from Preferences.
• New: Added translation to Spanish.
• Fixed: A bug in the UI appearing only when running on macOS Catalina.
• Fixed: Minor UI inconsistencies.

I still have plenty of features left to implement in the next versions, but slowly it is shaping to what I wanted it to be since the beginning.

After doing a very limited marketing campaign on Reddit and HN and publishing FreelanceStation on MacUpdate, I found some nice person had acquired the first license for the app. I couldn’t believe it! I hope this is just the first of many and not an isolated incident.

Today I got the app approved by Apple and published. The process was really quick and effortless, without any troubles. I expected a quick reject after reading all the bad stories out there. Instead, I got approved in less than a day.

I started doing some social advertising to get some tracktion. I hope I can get some people to like it.

I started working on FreelanceStation (then it was called Timelancer, but some other guy came first and took the name) on the first days of July. My wife was pregnant and my son was about to born the 4th. I wanted a way out of my job and a better future.

I worked hard on my free time while also tending to my wife and son.