New in Timen: apps, extensions, themes, and a way to chip in
For most of its life Timen has been a browser tab. That works when you are at your desk with the tab open, and it works badly the moment you are at a client site, deep in a Jira ticket, or coming out of a call having forgotten the timer was ever running.
Over the past few weeks that changed. The timer now runs on your phone, next to the task you already have open in your browser, and in your Mac menu bar. The app also learned to change colour, and there is finally a way to pay us, which you do not have to and which unlocks nothing.
Everything below is out now and free:
- iPhone and Android apps - track, edit and review hours away from your desk, including offline.
- Chrome and Firefox extensions - a start button inside more than a hundred tools.
- A Mac menu bar app - built and open sourced by a Timen user.
- Four colour themes - so the app can look like the tracker you came from.
- Support Timen - an optional, pay what you like contribution.
Timen on your phone
There are now native apps for iPhone and iPad and for Android. Both are the real thing rather than a wrapped website: a timer you start and stop, manual entries for work you did earlier, including entries that run past midnight, and the usual project, client, tags and billable switch on each one.
The calendar shows daily totals across the month, which is the quickest way to spot the Wednesday you forgot. Reports group your time by day, project, client, person, description or tag, in summary or entry by entry, and team reports work on the phone too.
Both work with no connection. You can track, edit entries and even create projects and clients on a flight or at a site with no signal, and it all syncs when you are back online. Invoicing, exports and team management stayed on the web, where there is room for them.
Get them from the App Store (iOS 18 or later) or Google Play (Android 9 or later). Both speak English, German, French and Spanish.
A start button on the task you already have open
The browser extension is out for Chrome and, as of this week, Firefox. It puts a start button inside the tools you already work in - Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp, Basecamp, Todoist, Zendesk, Wrike, Teamwork and about a hundred more.
Press it and the entry arrives already filled in: the title of the task, issue or card, plus a project or client name and labels where the tool exposes them. An editor opens next to the button so you can reword the description, switch the project, add tags or mark it billable without leaving the page.
Calls, meetings and everything else that never had a task page start from the extension's own window instead. Click the toolbar icon and you get the timer, today's and this week's hours, and your recent work one click from starting again. Ctrl+Shift+E starts and stops without opening even that.
The part we care most about is what it is not allowed to do. It installs with permission for Timen's own domain and nothing else. Every tool in the list is switched off until you turn it on, and your browser asks you to approve that specific site when you do. On a site you have not turned on, the extension does not run, does not read the page and does not know you are there. If you run a self-hosted Jira, GitLab or Redmine, add your own address under Custom domains and it behaves like the hosted one.
Add it from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons. Chromium browsers like Edge take the Chrome build. The Firefox add-on needs Firefox 140 or later on desktop, there is no Firefox for Android build, and Safari is not done yet.
The timer in your Mac menu bar
TimenBar came from a Timen user rather than from us. Eric Carmichael at CKCollab wanted the timer within reach all day, built a Mac menu bar app for it, and then open sourced it under the MIT licence so everyone else could have it too. It connects to your account through the same public connector our AI assistant integration uses, which is exactly what that connector is there for. We have been running it ourselves since.
The menu bar item is a play or pause button next to the running time. Click the time and the main window drops down: your week across the top with a total under each day, the entries for whichever day you pick, a form for starting or backdating work, and favourites for the projects you live in.
Walk away and it notices: after ten minutes with no keypress or mouse move it asks whether to keep the time, trim the idle stretch, or carry on, and the timer keeps running while it asks.
It needs macOS 14 or newer and lives at timenbar.ckcollab.com. There is a longer look at it in the TimenBar write-up. If you have built something else on the connector, tell us and we will write about that too.
Pick the colours you already know
Open Profile and there are now four themes: Timen, Purple, Blue and Orange. Pick one and the whole app recolours immediately, no reload and no save button.
The reason is switching costs. Moving from one time tracker to another is mostly muscle memory, and the first week is spent not finding things because everything is the wrong colour in the wrong place. If the app you left was purple, make this one purple. The themes are named after their own colour rather than after the products the palettes were read from, because which tracker inspired which swatch is our business, not yours.
Your theme is saved on your own profile, so it follows you across devices and changes nothing for your teammates. And the default is untouched: if you like Timen the way it looks, doing nothing leaves it pixel for pixel as it was.
Timen is free. Now there is a way to chip in
Timen is free, with every feature included, and that is not changing. What was missing was any way for the people who wanted to pay something to actually do it. Settings now has a Support Timen tab.
You choose the amount, not us: $5, $10, $25, $50 and $100 are there as buttons, or type anything from $1 to $10,000. Then pick monthly or a single one-time payment. Stripe handles the payment, and invoices, your payment method and cancelling monthly support all live in the Stripe billing portal, one click away from the same tab.
Two things worth being blunt about. It unlocks nothing. There is no supporter tier, no badge, no feature that appears, and nothing anywhere in Timen is gated behind a payment - contributing changes what we can afford, not what you can do. And anyone on the team can do it, not just the owner or an admin, because being the person who pays for the tools is rarely the same as being the person with the billing permission.
If Timen is doing a job for you and you would rather it kept existing, that tab is how. If not, keep using it. That is genuinely fine, and the details are on the pricing page.
All of it is out now and all of it is free. Install whichever pieces match where you work and ignore the rest - it is the same account and the same time entries either way.