--- title: "Automated Time Tracker for Mac and Windows: One App, No Timers" description: "Orma tracks every app, window title and coding session automatically on macOS and Windows. Here is how it works on each platform and what the combined dashboard gives you." date: "2026-10-19" app: orma category: "developer-productivity" readingTime: "6 min read" image: "/img/build/orma/dashboard-app-usage.jpg" imageAlt: "Orma's App Usage dashboard showing total time, categories and top apps" --- An automated time tracker is supposed to run silently, capture everything, and hand you a clear picture of your day without any timers to start or tags to apply. Orma does this on both macOS and Windows — native apps on each platform, one dashboard for all of it, free during early access. This post covers how the tracking works on each platform, what it captures beyond app names, and what the combined view looks like when you use both machines. ## The case for native on both platforms Most cross-platform productivity tools solve the compatibility problem with a web app or an Electron wrapper. That approach has a real cost: the tracking has to go through the browser or the app's own runtime, so it can only see what happens inside that container. Switch to your terminal, your email client, or your PDF viewer and the tracker goes dark. Automatic tracking that covers your full day has to sit at the OS level. That means separate code for macOS and Windows — there is no shared API for watching the frontmost window across both platforms. Orma ships two native apps, one for each, built with the platform's own UI and system APIs. The advantage is that both apps can watch everything, not just what happens inside a particular app. ## How it works on macOS Orma runs as a menu bar app on macOS 14 and later, on Apple silicon and Intel. It watches the active application continuously: every time focus moves to a new app, the session for the previous app is closed and a new one opens. App name, bundle identifier, and window title are all recorded. Window titles are where the useful signal lives. Tracking that you spent time in Chrome tells you very little. Tracking that the Chrome window was titled "github.com/orma pull requests" or "stackoverflow.com — how to debounce in swift" gives you the actual content of that session. Orma parses browser window titles to extract the domain, so your browser time breaks down by site rather than collapsing into a single bucket. For editors like VS Code, Cursor, Xcode, and others, window titles typically contain the file name and project path. Orma parses those to attribute time to the right project. It also handles idle time. When the computer sits unused, the tracker pauses rather than crediting the last active app with time you were not actually at your desk. ![Orma's App Usage dashboard showing total time, categories and top apps](/img/build/orma/dashboard-app-usage.jpg) *The App Usage dashboard shows total time, app count, category breakdown, and top apps for the selected date range.* ## How it works on Windows The Windows app runs on Windows 10 and 11, in the system tray. It tracks the active application and window title continuously, applying the same session logic as the macOS side. The category system is identical on both platforms: Development, Productivity, Communication, Browsing, Entertainment, Design, Writing, System, and Uncategorized. Orma auto-classifies apps by name on first run. If something lands in Uncategorized, you can remap it, and that mapping applies everywhere. This means data from a Windows machine and a macOS machine lives in the same account, with the same category labels and the same time format, and shows up as a unified view in the dashboard. If you split your day between a MacBook and a desktop Windows workstation, the breakdown accounts for both without any manual reconciliation. ## Coding time has its own layer App-level tracking tells you that VS Code was in front. It does not tell you which project you were in, what language you were working in, or whether you were actively writing code or reading a file without touching the keyboard. The VS Code and Cursor extension adds that layer. It sends heartbeats to Orma keyed to the file you have open, the project directory, and the language. This works on both macOS and Windows. The result is a separate coding dashboard that shows hours by project and language independently of which editor or terminal window was frontmost. There is also a Claude Code hook that records time spent in Claude Code agentic sessions. If you are spending an increasing share of your development time in an agent loop rather than an editor, that shows up as its own category rather than being absorbed into a generic terminal bucket. ![Orma's Coding dashboard showing coding time by project, language, and editor](/img/build/orma/dashboard-coding.jpg) *The Coding dashboard showing coding time by project, language, and editor.* GitHub activity — commits, merged pull requests, and code reviews — syncs daily via OAuth and appears on its own page. This lets you see whether the time you tracked as "development" actually resulted in shipped code, or whether it was mostly context-switching and meetings dressed as deep work. ## What the dashboard gives you The web dashboard has 24 or more pages: app usage, coding, GitHub, Spotify listening history, health metrics if you use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor or the iOS companion app, and a correlations page that auto-computes 19 relationships between your metrics. There is also an AI weekly digest that summarises the week and flags patterns in the data. You can use Orma across up to five devices, so a multi-machine setup works without any extra configuration. Export is available in CSV and JSON. There is a public API with OAuth scopes and a remote MCP server, which lets tools like Claude Desktop or Claude Code query your time data directly. The product was called xeve until September 2026, so if you have seen mentions of xeve in older posts or on GitHub, it is the same app. ## Getting started Download the macOS or Windows app from [orma.xeve.io](https://orma.xeve.io). Sign in with Google or email, grant the accessibility and screen recording permissions the installer asks for, and tracking starts. There is no timer to start and no project to select. Orma figures out what you are doing. Orma is free during early access, with no credit card required and no usage limits.