Nexus

The Problem

A workday scatters across a dozen small activities, and by evening it’s hard to say where the time actually went — meetings, focused work, email all blur together without something running in the background to mark the boundaries as they happen. Most time trackers either want a subscription and a cloud account, or ask for a timesheet filled in after the fact, once you’ve already forgotten.

What it does

A small always-on-top desktop widget: pick a category, hit play, and it tracks that block of time — with a note attached if you want one — until you stop or switch categories. Week and month views turn those sessions into simple analytics, so the split is something you can actually see, not just estimate at the end of the day.

How it is built

A Python backend (pywebview) opens a native window around a small local HTTP server that serves a plain HTML/CSS/JS UI — no browser, no Electron, just Python and the OS’s own webview. Every action goes through a tiny local API (add a session, rename a category, resize the window) that reads and writes one JSON file on disk. There’s no network call anywhere in the app, and everything typed in — category names, colors, notes — is validated and length-capped on the Python side before it’s written, not just in the UI.

A simple tech stack workflow to understand

Launch Start Time Widget.bat
   → pywebview opens a native window
   → a local HTTP server serves ui/ (HTML/CSS/JS)
   → hit play on a category → session recorded
   → every read/write goes through the local API
   → data/time_data.json
   → week/month views compute analytics from that same file

Nothing here leaves the machine — the “backend” is a loopback server talking to a JSON file, not a cloud service.

Where it stands

Source on GitHub. Runs locally on Windows with no install beyond Python and one dependency (pywebview); tracked time is never part of the repo.