Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed (opens in new tab)

As the world has moved to everything online, I've gotten sick and tired of having to create a new account for every single service I might want to use. At the same time, I hate the idea of logging in with an account of one of the big leechers so that they can profile me even better.

I get that there are some things where it makes sense to have a personal account. But a lot of smaller stuff out there really has no excuse for forcing me to create an account - and I'm so annoyed by it that I mostly just don't even bother trying out something I otherwise would.

I built https://reframe.canine.sh as a tool for managing dashboards of little apps then set it as my new tab page to quickly access a notepad and kanban board

This is the one I use: https://reframe.canine.sh/czhu12

This actually seems useful enough that I’d consider replacing my pomodoro timer with it

The main feature missing for me (the one I wanted to build first if I ever started) is a dashboard with all (start/pause) buttons with current tasks ready to be clicked. Let's say I'm working on ticket TICK-123 and also "customer care". Then I would love to have a dashboard with a start/pause button for TICK-123, "customer care" and a "new task" one that behaves like the "Start stopwatch" you have. That way start/pause is one click away and tracking time is less in the way of what I'm currently doing.

I created a keyboard-based local storage based time and to-do tracker 3 years ago.

I was starting out in web dev and wrote it for my own use but moved on to other stuff - don't think I even wrote any media queries. I think the codebase since, but just remembered I had it deployed on an internal site for testing - hackily removed a few things from it from the compiled JS and put it on Github.

Try it out here: https://trackey-beige.vercel.app/

https://github.com/sateeshsai/trackey (compiled JS from a Svelte 3 codebase I lost to time)

Some suggestions:

- Have the option to round the times when reporting (for example, at my work we log in 15m increments).

- Have the option to see the combined total grouped by description/tag, e.g. if I'm working on a ticket ABC-123 and I log multiple entries throughout the day, it would be nice to see the total time spent on the ticket without having to manually calculate.

- It could also be useful to add a button to copy the description/tags, for example if you needed to transfer your times to an internal system.

Unfortunately for me the website is very slow due to the animations. When I hover a button it takes 1 second before the background color changes.

I love this approach of local-first webapp, with optional sync afterwards. I've been working on a journaling/note-taking app with a similar approach, but finishing pet projects on limited free time is hard.

Could you share a bit more about the stack and your experience building it? What was challenging?

But a feature I would love, is a journaling prompt: whenever I stop the timer, I would be prompted to quickly jot down what I've done since I started the timer.