Project Moonlight

Today we officially launched Moonlight for iOS and macOS. Both are live, version 2.0.

Moonlight is a complete rebranding of one of our most popular apps, TimeTrakkr. It is a freelance project tracker for handling all your tasks, timers, and now expense document scanning (images), mileage tracking, notes, and invoicing.*

It's been about one and half months since I decided to rewrite Moonlight (both iOS and macOS), but the total development time probably works out to be about a week. This was definitely a side project hustle, but it's an app that I consistently use to track my time when I freelance for clients that don't require 3rd party tracking (Upwork macOS app, Hubstaff macOS app). So it was definitely worthwhile to improve it and add a bunch of features (and UI improvements) that I will actually use, like expense tracking and automatic invoice writing for Freshbooks.

The rewrite coincided with a decent uptick in the amount of downloads/upgrades for both the iOS and macOS versions of TimeTrakkr. iTunes Connect is telling me in the past 30 days (Jan 3 to Feb 1) TimeTrakkr macOS is up +63% (-12% past 90 days), while iOS is up +60% past 30 (+34% past 90). I haven't updated the apps at all in that timespan, so I'm not sure exactly what I can attribute that to. My other apps are also doing better, especially this month, when I took the time to write minor updates for almost all of them. Hopefully this means that these new customers (that still have it installed) will update and see that Moonlight is worthy of the IAP upgrade.

Regardless, I'm confident that I will see a steady increase of revenue from Moonlight. To be perfectly honest, when I first wrote TimeTracker back in fall 2015, it was one of the first apps I launched under Arbor Apps. I created it because I had a need- to track project time for invoicing my clients. Sure, I could've found something out there to do it for me. But it was a learning experience to write it myself. It wasn't my best code, but it was at the time. Now, again, its been updated to where i'm at in my career and some of my best code to date.

Moonlight isn't overly complex. It doesn't need to be- at its core its merely a timekeeper. But the newly added features, performance improvements, and UI overhaul, will hopefully be useful for other freelancers. I know they will be for me.

*some features iOS-only at the time of writing this