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Requested design updates to the Upwork Desktop App

lenaellis
Community Member

We’ve made several improvements to the Upwork Desktop app to help you stay organized and provide more insight into the Time Tracker’s processes by displaying more notifications about what the app is doing on the backend. Let us know if you have any questions on the updates below.

 

Time Tracker Layout and Settings-

 

  • “Time today” - shows billable time tracked in your local time zone, not in UTC. However, “Time this week” still shows the weekly billable time in UTC because our weekly billing is calculated in the UTC time zone.
  • There is a connection status above the ON/OFF toggle informing you if the Time Tracker is online or offline.
  • We removed the elapsed timer which increased each minute, and replaced it with a timer which increases in 10 minute intervals after a screen capture is taken and the time is registered as billable.

TImetracker2.png

  • At top of the time tracker, we are now showing the contract name, contact person and client company.
  • Because your time tracked is now showing in your local time on the main page, when a new billing week is approaching (in UTC) and after a new billing week has started, we are showing a notification to avoid confusion.

TImetracker3.png

 

Improvements in offline tracking:

 

  • If the app loses connection with the server, the app will now display a notification on the screen until you dismiss it or until the connection is back.

Timetracker4.png

Timetracker5.png

  • When you’re approaching the caching limit, you will see a notification.

Timetracker7.png

  • And once the app is back online, we show a notification and start uploading the cached screen captures.

Timetracker8.png



111 Comments
trumanb
Community Member

Petra,

 

Now you know what I ment when  opened this thread. This new time tracker is like taking two steps back. I also work for big Enterprise client and would like to know what they think about it. Being unable to see how much I worked in my last session makes following internal contract rules more difficult.

david_gregory
Community Member

The time tracker isn't working right now for me either. It's offline but is still taking screenshots.

 

Having the tracker go off line perfectly illustrates why we need to be able to keep track of the amount of time we work in a current session.

 

I am getting close to the time limit on one of my contracts. Since the tracker is off line, the amount of time I have left in the contract is not being updated. With the old tracker, this was not such a problem because I could easily figure out how much time I had worked by looking at the time in the current session.

 

Since you took this away, I can no longer do this and have to guess at how much time I've actually worked and hope I don't go over my time limit.

 

Please give us back UTC time (with the option to change it to local time or UTC time) and the timer for the current session.

 

 

 

VladimirG
Community Manager

Hi all,

 

Please note that we're currently having issues with our website, which is affecting your use of the Desktop app. We apologize for the inconvenience, please check the update Goran just posted here.

 

Please do continue logging time since the app's cache was expanded to hold 12 hours of cached time in the latest version and do not clear cache or restart your app to avoid deleting the cached time. Our team is working on fixing the root cause of the issue as soon as possible and we'll post an update on the thread linked above once we receive a confirmation that the issue has been resolved. 

gukandrew
Community Member

Tracker just forced me to update version, so my tracking cache could be gone?

And I really do not like that you remove actual timer output as it was in older version. So if tracker is offline (regarding issues on your service like todays big sync issue or something), it shows me ZERO instead of work time!

 
andriylavrys
Community Member

Same here.

Time Tracker just does not expose cached time and shows zero when connection is lost.

Very inconvenient.

mellisatolentino
Community Member

I wish you guys didn't change the visibility of the total time per week. It used to be very prominent, now it's too small. Anyway, please fix the desktop app. It's currently not working. It won't let me log in. It keeps saying "An unknown error has occurred." And before that, it wasn't tracking my time for 3 hours. Please fix this, thanks!

afifield
Community Member

One issue I have had so far is the program wouldn't let me resize it and so I couldn't see the boxes to enter my login information. I just closed it and restarted, but that was weird. I hope my time tracked for me when I was tracking yesterday. 

david_mac
Community Member

The recent update to the Desktop tracking app has clearly highlighted some fundamental omissions in design, it is cleatly a step backwards.

 

No current session timer.

 

When the server stops responding, so does the app. It should lock the times, and then show the cached time as well.  Today, it went from 30 hours to 0, and then counted in the background without displaying anything it was doing for hours, remaining at zero the whole time. At the very least it should tell me to stop working when the 12 hour cache is filled up. At present it gives no indication at all.

 

It should also give me more meaning full error messages.  Unknown Error is bull**bleep**. Someone somewhere had to raise this error and should give it a meaningful name.

 

I have lost a lot of trust in the tracking app in just a few days since it updated. I am seriously looking elsewhere for work because my time is valuable, and you need to start taking that seriously.

 

If I had built this software, I would fully expect the client to ask for their money back, it clearly does not work well enough for all us freelancers to be depending on it.

 

Does anyone else have any suggestions for improvements?  Companies pay big money to design their apps, and here we are giving advice for free; it seems to be the latest theme, working for free on Upwork.

david_mac
Community Member

You keep going on about the 12 hours of cache, but we cannot see it, we cannot see how much is left, we cannot see anything working.....

david_mac
Community Member

Is started this thread with a reasonable question to others.  Now you've pushed my message down the page. Please put it at the top where it should be.