Kawaii Time Garden has picked up two substantial features since it landed on the Chrome Web Store, plus a pile of smaller sharpening. The short version: your playground can now optionally catch fire, and the tracker no longer stops caring the moment you alt-tab into Excel. The project page has the full field guide.
An optional apocalypse
There is now a four-step chaos dial in Settings, and it is entirely cosmetic. Clear is the playground as it was. Smouldering parks a dented dumpster in the corner, gently smoking, which nobody acknowledges. Dumpster Fire sets it properly alight — ember-red sky, embers drifting up instead of rain, critters scattering. END TIMES adds a flying saucer that drifts overhead while an alien leans out of the window shouting untranslatable nonsense, heat-ray flashes, red weed creeping in from the edges, and falling ash.
Throughout all of it, exactly one critter sits perfectly still with a small cup of coffee, calmly insisting that this is fine.
Why the fire is deliberately disconnected from your data
This was the one design decision worth being careful about. It would have been easy — and, on the surface, clever — to make the dumpster ignite when you rack up three hours of YouTube. I decided against it, firmly, and enforced that decision in code rather than by convention.
A fire that appears because of what you did is an accusation. It turns a tool that is supposed to just tell you where your hours went into something that has an opinion about them, and this extension has never been that. So the chaos level is a decoration you pick, never a verdict it reaches. The module that draws it has no access to your totals, your categories, or your entries — there is an automated test that fails the build if a reference to any of them ever appears in that file. The joke stays a joke.
Time that doesn’t stop at the browser edge
The most common gap in any browser-based time tracker is obvious once you hit it: you spend forty minutes in Acrobat or Excel and the tracker records nothing, because it cannot see outside the browser. That limit is real and no extension can remove it — there is no API that reveals which desktop applications you are running, and anyone claiming otherwise in a Chrome extension is guessing.
What is detectable is narrower but genuinely useful. Chrome’s idle signal is system-wide, not browser-only, so three states can be told apart: Chrome focused and you are typing; Chrome unfocused but your machine is still receiving input; and no input at all. That middle state means you are at your computer, working in something else.
So the new Away From Chrome feature watches for that middle state and, when you come back, offers to log it: “You were away from Chrome for 23 minutes, but your computer was still in use. Log that as desktop time?” You pick the category, or you discard it.
Three guardrails, because this is the one feature that could quietly invent timesheet data. It is off unless you turn it on. It never writes anything without your confirmation — the prompt converts an inference into a decision you actually made. And gaps longer than 45 minutes are not offered at all, because that is far likelier to be a forgotten laptop than a work session. Going idle mid-gap truncates the suggestion to the active portion, so a lunch break doesn’t come back as an hour of “desktop work”.
Smaller things
- Daily totals are now labelled directly above each bar in the history chart, with the label size and rotation adapting to how many days are on screen
- Custom date ranges now drive the charts, not just the exports, with an Apply button — previously picking dates changed the exported file and nothing you could see
- The Focus tab surfaces your session count and streak
- An Ignore button for unsorted sites you never want to categorise
- CSV exports are hardened against spreadsheet formula injection, so a mischievous category name can’t execute when the file is opened in Excel
- A dedicated privacy policy
FAQ
Does the dumpster fire mean I’ve been browsing badly?
No. The chaos level is a setting you choose, and it has no connection whatsoever to your tracked time. That separation is enforced by an automated test, not just by good intentions.
Can it tell that I was specifically in Excel?
No, and neither can any other browser extension. It knows only “not Chrome, but your computer is active”. The category is your choice, never a detected fact, and it always asks before logging anything.
Does the weather use my location?
No. There is no location access and no weather service. The rain, snow and sparkle are generated on your own machine from a random source and, at most, your device clock. The extension still makes zero network requests of any kind.