There are questions that, as an app developer, you just don’t want to face. No, I don’t mean financing for a startup or the lightning fast development that’s so unique to our industry. That’s all part of the business and is fun to do, otherwise we wouldn’t have been developing timr for the last 6+ years.
One of the most agonizing questions you can ask yourself and that you have to ask yourself is, “What’s annoying about our app, and how do we turn it into a really useful feature as fast as possible?”
In the case of the timr apps, it was synchronizing the time records and the associated wait time when opening the app – and we’ve made sure to take care of that.
The result: timr Offline
timr Offline isn’t just a new function we developed; with it, we’ve created a whole new generation of the timr app.
Wait times are a thing of the past with the new timr Offline app, which started on Android a few weeks ago and is available for iOS starting today.
timr Offline allows you to start recording your working hours anywhere and everywhere, without delay. And it makes no difference whether you happen to have a wireless signal or not.
As soon as your smartphone connects with a network again, timr Offline starts synchronizing the data in the background, without you having to do anything.
No more waiting for synchronization. Start. Stop. Bill.
What do I get out of it?
On the train – Some of our timr customers travel a lot by train. Wireless signal reception on board the train and weak WiFi are already enough of a headache. timr Offline will help calm nerves and save bandwidth if you’re in this situation.
In the countryside – Our entire development team lives in the countryside and knows just how nervewracking a weak internet connection can be. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and have a customer, timr Offline lets you record your working hours with no interruption.
In an underground car park – You want to turn on your driving log as soon as you get in the car, not when you’re back on the street and have a signal. timr Offline lets you do this while keeping your hands on the steering wheel where they belong.
Anything else?
Why, yes, there is. Thanks to a complete development overhaul and a long beta phase, the timr app is now much more stable, with a wonderfully appealing design to top things off.
Separate Team Tracking Android App
For team leaders, there’s another notable change. The team tracking function has been spun off into a separate app. For you, this means it’s easier to switch between your personal timesheet and recording time for your team, i.e. the two are separated more clearly.
The team tracking app is not currently offline-capable. But we’ve already firmly penciled in a revision on our roadmap, so no worries.
GPS mileage tracking on iOS devices
As already announced at the launch of the Tour app, we took the GPS mileage tracking to a new level with Tour and outsourced it to a separate app. Integrating Tour and timr will soon be finished. Thus, the trips detected by Tour are automatcally stored in timr.
The release of timr Offline for Windows phones is planned for first half-year 2016.
There will be no timr Offline for BlackBerry 7 and older versions – sorry, dear BlackBerry users.
We keep a close eye on the development of the new BlackBerry Priv. It looks like BlackBerry is going to replace the operating system. In this case the existing timr Android Offline app can be used. Depending on this development, we will make a decision in the next few months. The first reviews are certainly look very promising.
Of course, the existing timr BlackBerry apps can still be used on all BlackBerry devices.
Resolving Offline Conflicts
By using the offline app, the timr App’s and the timr Web application are not necessarily in sync any more. If you edit a running record in the App, while your device is offline, and you edit the same record in the timr web application, it may result in a conflict which the app can not resolve automatically.
