The "VS", "FI", "NO" chips meant you had to know the list to read it. Chronos now shows each app's actual icon, falling back to the coloured chip when there's no executable — a website, an uninstalled app, a session from another device.
youtube.com, github.com and reddit.com showed "YC", "GC", "RC": the second letter was the domain extension, the same for everyone. Chips meant to tell things apart made them interchangeable.
A grid of days rather than a timeline — at thirty columns, each session would be a few pixels wide. A month answers a different question: which days were heavy? Click a cell to open that day.
Four points: where your data lives, that blocks are disarmed until you arm them, that the browser extension is optional, and that window titles are recorded. Without it, you could write rules for an hour and wonder why nothing was stopped.
A public changelog is only useful if you can tell which version you're running.
It stepped forward thirty days: from 31 January you landed on 2 March.
The sidebar said "tracking active" even when nothing was being recorded. For a screen time app that's the worst possible failure: an empty day and dead tracking look exactly the same on screen. A status dot now shows four states — stopped, active, degraded, interrupted — established by an independent check every minute that takes over when tracking drifts.
It's the most telling thing Chronos keeps — it's what separates "3h in Word" from "3h on the same document", and therefore the most sensitive. A panel in "My data" shows it, counts it, and lets you erase the ones already recorded without touching durations or apps.
A "load a demo day" button wrote fictional activity into the real database, the one all your totals come from. It now only exists in development builds.
Idleness was measured by keyboard alone: forty minutes of video without touching the mouse evaporated from the dashboard. Chronos now listens for sound coming out of the computer — a keystroke and a sound mean the same thing: someone is there.
A muted video isn't seen. Music left looping in an empty room counts as presence.
The dashboard only showed a rolling seven days. Three scales now, with a comparison to the previous period.
Choose how long Chronos keeps your history: a week, a month, a year, or forever. Past that it deletes itself. Deletion, not archiving. Full export to JSON or CSV first, if you want to keep it.
The overlay covered the title bar, so the window couldn't be pushed aside. It's now draggable across its whole surface and carries the window with it, without exposing anything of the blocked app.
A button on the block screen closes the app cleanly, with confirmation. If it asks you to save, the block steps aside for thirty seconds — long enough to read and answer.
You choose to wait ten minutes before lifting a block. But opening settings and switching the rule off got you out instantly — there were six doors like that. Loosening a block now costs exactly what bypassing it costs, on the same countdown: if you already waited at the block screen, you don't pay twice. On strict, it's a refusal, not a wait.
Blocking one app used to black out the entire monitor: the window you were working in got punished for the one distracting you. The overlay now matches the blocked window to the pixel. And Chronos stays reachable while a block is up — that was the bare minimum.
Chronos recorded your unlocks but never the blocks themselves: you could see how often you overrode a rule, never how often it did its job.
Chronos checks its database before opening it. If something is wrong, it sets the file aside instead of writing over it, and tells you on screen. Nothing is ever deleted without you.
A notification when a quota is running out. Being cut off with no warning makes a rule feel like a crash; being warned makes it a deadline.
App and website tracking, day timeline, dashboard, groups, blocking rules, browser extension, Windows installer.