What we’re building
Our current project is tt, a time tracker for iPhone and Apple Watch built around a single idea: switching what you are doing should cost one tap.
In development · private beta
The problem
Most time trackers are built around reviewing data. Opening the app, finding a category, expanding a group, pressing start — four or five interactions before anything is recorded. That is acceptable once a day. It is not acceptable a dozen times a day, which is how often a working day actually changes shape.
The result is predictable: people stop logging, the data develops holes, and the holes make the data not worth reviewing. The reporting features were never the bottleneck. The switch was.
The approach
tt treats time tracking as a launcher. The whole screen is a grid of tiles. Each tile is an activity. Tapping one stops whatever was running and starts that one — a single tap, from a cold launch, with no navigation in between.
One tap to switch
A four-column tile grid. Tap to start, long-press for a secondary timer, drag a group tile to reach its sub-activities without leaving the screen.
Arrange it like a home screen
Tiles hold fixed positions. Rename them, recolour them, choose an icon from a large offline library, leave gaps where you want gaps.
Counters
Some things are counted, not timed. Counters answer “how many times” with goals, periods, carry-over of what you missed, and carry-back of what you overshot.
A timeline, not a report
A vertical view of what actually happened today, including the gaps. Tap a gap to fill it in. Nested timers indent under their parent.
Where you were
An optional location timeline that reconstructs where you stayed and how you travelled between places — computed on device, stored on device.
On the wrist
Start a timer or add to a counter from Apple Watch with one tap and no confirmation dialog. Credentials never live on the watch.
Principles we’re holding to
The first screen is the product
From tapping the icon to being able to tap a tile, we allow no network request and no bulk history loading. Everything else — icon libraries, older history, remote data — is deferred. If the first screen is slow, the rest of the app does not get used.
Offline is the normal case
Tapping a tile changes the interface immediately; the write goes to a queue behind it. You can work through a flight and a tunnel and a dead battery on the router, and the records reconcile afterwards. Writes that the server refuses are not silently dropped — they are held where you can see them, described in plain language, and retried or abandoned on purpose.
Data stays where it was made
Location and movement data never leaves the device. Tile arrangement, icons, colours, counters and their history are local. Where synchronisation between your own devices is wanted, it runs through storage you control, not ours. We operate no cloud backend for this product and we collect no analytics from it.
Status
tt is in active development and currently in private beta on iOS and watchOS. It is not yet available publicly. If you would like to hear when it is, or you are working on something adjacent, write to hello@duocene.com.