mac.iLounge

Lawyers do it. Creatives do, too. Now you can automatically track the time you’ve spent working on projects with Time Track Pro ($5), an inexpensive new tool from Italy’s Bloop. Install it using the Mac App Store and a little ruler icon will appear on the top right of your screen. Click it whenever you need to see a breakdown of how you’ve spent your time, app by app. If you want to focus solely on one aspect of how your Mac’s been used throughout the day, you can turn off its ability to track certain apps and web sites; Time Track Pro keeps a daily log that you can analyze by the day, week, or month as you prefer. Reports are easy to read and accompanied by simple bar graphs.

The good news: Time Track Pro is built to handle granular document by document, and web domain by domain tracking of your activities, with support for Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple productivity software and three different web browsers—more to come. Bad news: in several days of testing, Time Track Pro properly tracked foreground app use, but didn’t provide that sort of document- or domain-based detail in any consistent way, even with document and web tracking enabled. Our guess is that bug fixes will make this app better over time, but for now, it offers the tantalizing prospect of eliminating the need to keep a stopwatch by the computer for projects. And the price is right, too.