Meet TimenBar: a community-built Mac menu bar app for Timen
If you track time on a Mac, the Timen timer now has a home outside the browser. TimenBar is a small menu bar app that shows your running timer at the top of the screen, starts and stops it with one click, and lets you see and fix your week without opening a tab.
It comes from Eric Carmichael at CKCollab, a Timen user who wanted the timer within reach all day, built it, and then open sourced it so the rest of us could have it too. It plugs straight into your account through the same connector our AI assistant integration uses. We have been running it ourselves and liked it enough to want everyone on a Mac to know about it.
Everything you do in it lands in Timen straight away. Start a timer from the menu bar and it is running on the timer page; fix an entry and the reports update. Same data, same account, just closer to hand.
One click in the menu bar
The menu bar item is a small pill in two halves. The left half is a play or pause button: click it and the timer starts or stops, with no window opening. The right half is the time on the running timer, ticking up. It goes back to 0:00 when a new day starts.
Play picks up whatever you were last working on, so getting back to the thing you were doing after a call is one click, not a search.
Your week at a glance
Click the time and the panel opens. Across the top is the week, Monday to Sunday, with a total under each day, so you can see that Tuesday was 3:30 and Friday was nothing without going near a report. Pick a day and its entries appear below: project, note, tags and duration, each with a play button to pick that work back up.
Starting a timer
New timer opens a form with the fields you know from Timen: project, tags and a note. The project picker searches by project or by client and groups projects under their client, so typing Riverside gets you every Riverside project at once.
Star a project and it becomes a favourite: a chip at the top of the panel that starts that work with no form at all. Pick a past date instead of today and the form swaps the live clock for a duration box, so the hour you forgot on Wednesday takes about five seconds to add.
Fixing an entry
Click an entry and it opens in the same form, with start and stop times you can correct and a delete button that asks first. Edits go straight to Timen and show up in the web app immediately. There is no separate copy of your time anywhere.
If you walk away
Leave the Mac with a timer running and, after ten minutes without a keypress or a mouse move, TimenBar asks what to do: keep the time and stop, remove time, or carry on. Remove time gives you two choices, trim off the idle stretch or delete the whole entry. The timer keeps running while it asks, so if you were just thinking, nothing is lost.
The ten minutes is adjustable, from five up to sixty, and you can switch it off. It works by asking macOS how long it has been since the last input. It does not need accessibility permission, and it has no idea what you were doing, only that you were away.
How it signs in
Press Connect and your browser opens Timen's normal sign-in page, where you can sign in with Google or your email and password, exactly as usual. TimenBar never sees your password. It gets a token back and keeps it in the macOS Keychain, and Disconnect in its settings forgets your account and clears everything it had cached.
Good to know
- Open source, built by a Timen user: Eric maintains it on GitHub under the MIT licence, so the code is there for anyone to read or improve. If you hit a bug, open an issue there or tell us and we will pass it along.
- Everything it logs is billable: If some of your work is not, mark it non-billable in Timen afterwards. That includes entries you edit from the menu bar.
- Changes need a connection: Offline you can still read the week, but starting, stopping and editing wait until you are back online. Nothing is queued, so nothing lands wrong later.
- Projects, clients and tags are made in Timen: TimenBar picks from what already exists.
- Mac only, macOS 14 or newer: Sonoma and up.
Get it
Download it from timenbar.ckcollab.com, open it, press Connect. It lives only in the menu bar, with no Dock icon and no window. Turn on Start on login in its settings so it is there tomorrow, and updates arrive on their own after that.
If something looks off, open an issue on GitHub or drop us a line and we will make sure it gets to Eric. And if you have built something else on the Timen connector, tell us - we would love to write about that too. Thanks, Eric.