“Watching a long video without touching anything will show as idle — that’s honest, not a bug.”

That sentence was in the Timex FAQ from day one. It was honest. It was also wrong for calls.

Spend an hour listening in Zoom and Timex saw two minutes of silence, closed the segment, and produced a record that did not match your day. Honesty about a limitation does not make it good.

Timex 1.3.0 fixes that, then goes after every other place where an automatic tracker needs your judgment rather than its own.

Calls count now

The 120-second idle gate stays. Walk away and Timex stops counting. But it now checks audio and microphone activity in the app in front. If Zoom, Meet, FaceTime, a browser video, or another frontmost app is playing audio or using the microphone, its clock keeps running.

The check is frontmost-app-only by design. Background Spotify cannot turn an afternoon away into “active time.” Timex records no audio and needs no new permission.

There are ceilings I cannot code around honestly. Background-tab video does not keep the front app active. Safari exposes less tab and privacy state than Chromium browsers and Firefox. Timex uses real signals; it does not guess.

“Three hours in Chrome” tells you nothing

An app total stops helping when most work happens in one app. Three hours in Chrome could be client research, YouTube, documentation, or banking. Timex already kept the URL and window title locally. Now they can become rules.

Right-click in Today, create a keyword rule from a title or URL, assign a category, and optionally limit it to one app. Website rules cover subdomains, so moving from app.example.com to docs.example.com does not break it.

The important part is that you write the rule. Timex does not label a website “productive” or decide what client it belongs to. Your rubric, no verdict.

The meeting you forgot

Automatic tracking has a blind spot: work away from the keyboard. A meeting room, phone call, notebook, or useful walk.

After five minutes away, Today shows Away 25 min · 10:05–10:30 → Add time…. Choose a category, adjust the interval, and the gap becomes a manual entry—or dismiss it. Meetings, calls, and offline work can also be added directly.

Manual entries do not count against the 100-hour trial. The trial measures what Timex tracks, not what you correct.

CSV where the invoice starts

The full SQLite ZIP export stays in Settings. That is still the “give me everything” exit.

For ordinary work, export starts in the Today header. Any visible range becomes a daily summary grouped by day × category × app × site, or a detailed log of the intervals. The first suits billing; the second explains a total.

No separate report database, no upload, no special paid tier. It is the range you are looking at, written to a file.

Alerts, after saying no nagging

I have been loud about Timex not being a productivity coach. Version 1.3 adds daily category limits, one total-time limit, and an end-of-day digest anyway.

The distinction is who sets the standard. Alerts are off by default; you choose every category and number. They are normal macOS notifications and the digest arrives once. No email, streak, red screen, or score judging your day.

Sometimes “tell me when I have spent 90 minutes in Admin” is useful. It does not need to become a philosophy of work.

Track less, deliberately

You can exclude apps, skip private windows in Chromium browsers and Firefox, and set a weekly schedule: personal browser, password manager, evenings, weekends—without guarding every boundary with Pause.

Safari does not expose a reliable private-window marker to other apps. Timex cannot automatically skip what Safari will not identify. If that boundary matters, exclude Safari or pause tracking. I would rather put that sentence here than pretend every browser offers the same contract.

Seven chances not to lose the week

One review haunts nearly every tracker: “I lost all my hours the week I had to invoice.” A local file is ownership, but ownership needs a safety net.

Timex now makes a daily backup beside the database and keeps seven. Restore means quit Timex and swap the file. It does not replace a Mac backup, but covers a bad migration, accidental edit, or damaged database without a cloud account.

And your AI can ask

Timex 1.3.0 also ships a local MCP server. Turn it on in Settings → Integrations, then add it to Claude Desktop in one click or copy the config for Claude Code, Cursor, Zed, or VS Code.

Ask how much Zoom took this week, what happened Tuesday afternoon, or tell it to make github.com count as focus. The 16 tools read summaries and activity, search, manage rules and entries, export CSV, pause tracking, handle breaks, and list backups — the same local data the UI uses.

The server is off by default, binds to 127.0.0.1:41741 unless you change it, and requires a bearer token. Nothing is uploaded, but the boundary is real: a client you connect can read window titles and URLs.

That’s 1.3.0. Still one file. Still one-time purchase. Still nothing leaving your Mac. Now the record survives a quiet call, follows your rules, returns the time it missed, and exports what you need to bill.

Timex requires macOS 15 or later and Apple Silicon. If that is your Mac, download the latest version.

— DK