Thanks to Aptonic and Dropzone for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’ve been a Dropzone fan for as long as I can remember, and yes, I use it every day. It’s a wonderfully extensible tool that’s always available for things like sharing files, processing images, and opening apps. I’ve also gotten really used to using it’s drop drawer as a way to collect files, and even started incorporating the command line tool for all kinds of automation.

Dropzone is a menu bar productivity tool that gives you a faster way to move, copy, and share files, launch apps, and trigger all sorts of time-saving drag-and-drop actions without breaking your flow.

The newly released Dropzone 5 is a substantial update and has been redesigned for macOS Tahoe with a cleaner interface, smoother animations and support for Liquid Glass.

The update also adds several workflow-focused improvements. Multiple grids make it easy to separate actions by project or context, deeper grid customization gives you more control over categories, columns, and layout, and folder-based actions can now display the custom icons and colors you’ve assigned in Finder, which makes it easier to identify your folders in Dropzone at a glance.

If you like to automate from the command line, Dropzone 5 includes a powerful command line tool for Terminal integration too. You can run actions, manage files in Drop Bar, and switch between grids via the command line tool, making Dropzone 5 a better fit for scripted workflows than ever before.

Dropzone 5 is available as a free download from Aptonic, with a Pro upgrade available that adds more advanced features.

For a limited time, the Pro upgrade is available at a 30% discount with the coupon code LAUNCH.

Visit Aptonic’s website to learn more and download Dropzone 5.

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Big update for doing: a lot of quality-of-life work since my last post, plus some genuinely useful time-reporting features.

If you want the full docs, start with the wiki.

Time Budgets

You can now set time budgets per tag and see how much you have left as you track work.

doing budget dev 100h
doing budget meetings 10h
doing budget
doing budget dev --remove

Totals output now shows remaining budget per tag and an overall “total budgets left” footer when budgets are configured. The byday export also includes budget info in daily and grand totals.

More Flexible Totals Grouping

Totals can now be grouped by tags or sections, and you can repeat grouping flags to control output order.

doing show --totals --by section --by tags
doing show --totals --by tags --by section

There are also aliases for section grouping (project, p), so this works too:

doing show --totals --by project

New Totals Formats, Including Averages

You can now pick the totals time format directly from the command line with --totals_format.

doing show --totals --totals_format hmclock
doing show --totals --totals_format natural

There is also a new averages mode that appends hours/minutes and average hours per day to the total line.

doing show --totals --totals_format averages

That gives you output in the spirit of:

Total tracked: 26:03 (26h 3 min, 8.12h/day)

You can set a default with the totals_format config key and still override it per command when needed.

Better Export Consistency

Totals grouping now carries through exports more consistently, including HTML, Markdown, JSON, Day One, template, and wiki outputs. JSON totals also gained budget-related fields (budget, remaining, remaining_formatted) for each tag, which makes downstream automation easier.

For details on output and display options, see wiki pages like Displaying Entries, Time Tracking, and Configuration.

Other Stuff

• Ruby 4 compatibility improved by falling back to reline when readline is unavailable.
• Dashed aliases now work for underscore flags and subcommands (--only-timed, --tag-sort, doing tag-dir, etc.).
• Interactive finish handling was fixed for section filters that can resolve to multiple values.
• Time range parsing and normalization got several fixes (done --from, noon/12pm edge cases, and reset formatting issues).
• Non-interactive runs no longer reopen /dev/tty for defaults.
• Human totals box formatting and table alignment were cleaned up.
• A few config and test harness rough edges were fixed.

As usual, if you run into anything odd, open an issue or PR. This was a nice round of polish plus some features that should make time reporting much more useful day to day.

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