Eggscellent: The Next Big Thing for Time Tracking?

A couple weeks ago we got to talk with Kyle Kinkade, the developer behind a now extinct productivity app called Pomodorable, and he told us about his plans to revive it and turn it into something different called Eggscellent.

The beta for it came out recently and we’ve had the chance to try it. If you are into the Pomodoro Technique, or into managing your tasks and timing yourself to stay on track, you might be interested in it as well. Let’s check it out.

Pomodorable

Pomodorable was a short-lived app that, despite its short life, caught the attention of many of us. It was a simple timer app that worked with the Pomodoro Technique, and ran in your menu bar, making it really easy to start new tasks and check your current progress.

The best thing about it was its “reward” aspect. When you had an active timer, it would be displayed in a floating window that included an animation of a very cool tomato. As you got closer to the end of your “pomodoro” (working time unit), it ripened and grew until it was finally ready by the time your timer was done. It certainly made it more fun to work with this productivity technique, and that’s what so many people loved about it.

Due to copyright trouble with the founder of the Pomodoro Technique, Pomodorable had to be removed from the App Store, something that we covered in our recent interview. However, that’s not the end for this app.

Enter Eggscellent

Eggscellent is the successor of Pomodorable, and you can definitely tell that’s the case since they’re both very similar in a lot of aspects, the most noticeable one being the visuals. Instead of the dark theme of the previous app, Eggscellent uses lighter colors such as white and orange which make it seem much cleaner.

The classic tomato has also been replaced with a timer egg, that spins around and cracks when the timer’s done to reveal an animation of a chicken coming out of it. It certainly still keeps the fun element of the app while avoiding infringement issues. But about the functionality…

How It Works

In this early beta release, the app has kept most of the key concepts from the Pomodoro Technique, although it’s more flexible about them this time around, letting you adjust the specific time that tasks, breaks, and a pause feature must have.

Your tasks live inside the menu bar window in a list where the top ones are the most recent ones. Tasks are marked as completed just by clicking a button next to the name of the task, which will mark it with a red tick. When you add a new task or set one as the active one, a drop down submenu will show up letting you adjust the expected time units to completion, and increase or decrease distractions (internal or external).

When a task is selected, hitting the “Start” button at the bottom of the window will start it up and the hover window with the egg will pop up marking your progress on the current unit.

Features

Besides the basic time tracking functionality, Eggscellent has a few other tricks up its sleeve. It differentiates itself from the competition by being quite customizable. Aside from the already mentioned adjusts to the time that tasks and breaks should last, Eggscellent also lets you automate your tasks by telling it to automatically start breaks, restart activities, mark tasks as done, and move to the next activity based on your expected units and your list of tasks.

Customizable shortcuts for displaying the app’s window, marking interruptions, and stopping timers are also available. There’s audio feedback for a ticking timer, completing a task and/or a break. And if you’d like to set a status message for your IM client when you are working, you can do that as well (with Adium, Skype, and Messages).

Then there’s the most famous feature of Pomodorable, its integration with several to-do apps. It’s still here in Eggscellent, working with Things, Omnifocus and Reminders. If set up, the app will bring over your to-dos and mark them as complete when you do so inside either of them. This feature reportedly had some bugs in the previous app, but it now seems to be more stable and the dev assures us it’s been completely re-done.

Conclusion

Although Eggscellent works pretty well right now, it is still in a very early beta and as the developer told us in a recent interview, there are plenty of new things coming to the app, including an iOS app in the near future and new mechanics for managing tasks and getting things done.

As of now not much has changed since Pomodorable, but that’s a good thing because in its past life that one used to be a pretty great app. We’ll see what Eggscellent has in mind for us later on, and we’ll keep you posted. Right now, you can go and check the open beta for yourself here. It’s free and it works great. And let us know what you think!