More updates..

Even though I haven’t posted anything here for a couple of weeks, that doesn’t mean nothing has happened to ClockingIT.

I’ve implemented fragment caching across the most used pages, meaning you’ll see a more responsive application as Rails was taking forever generating everything everytime on large projects. My own Tasks page was taking over 6 seconds of pure render time. Even if the fragment caching did bring the render time down to 0.2 seconds, it was still taking forever to refresh the page, which brings me to the next change.

Always having Drag and Drop enabled seemed like a good idea to begin with, but on large projects you’d get a ~10 second pause as the Drag and Drop was initialized. I’ve made Drag and Drop a triggered action now, and that means projects with loads of tasks (200+) render pretty much instantly again. I’m going to look into making Drag and Drop lazy-loaded later on, but for now this was the most logical solution.

I also keep track of who from your company are online, showing an online users count up in the information bar, and a status per user on the Users page.The next update will be a good one, I just need to handle a few more edge-cases and it’ll go live.

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Busy day today..

I implemented a new report, Tasks by Date, which shows how much work has been performed on a task based on a date range. You can choose between this week, last week, this month, last month, this year, last year and a custom time range. Quite useful if you’re doing billable work and need a starting point for your invoices.

Also, I managed to squeeze in project access restrictions, meaning you can disable access to a project for different users, and the project will be hidden from them on all pages. This is just a temporary solution while I work on some more problems before starting on the fine grained role based permissions system I have planned.

Estimating time..

Time estimates for tasks are no longer limited to hours, as you can write “2h 30m” or even “4w 3d 5h 25m” if you’d like. This should make the calculated Task List estimates a bit more on the spot, although it’s quite fun completing a task with 7m / 1h spent. If you enter just a number into the estimate field, it will be interpreted as hours, like it was before.

Get your priorities straight…

I’ve added simple priorities to tasks. The different priorities change the left-border of the tasks display, and will be used more extensively once I create the new Activities/Dashboard page I’ve got planned. At least Critical and Low priority tasks will be more easily spotted on the tasklist making it even easier to decide what to work on next.

Showing Tooltips..

.. has been made into an option on the Preferences page, as they might be a bit overkill once you get into the application.

MoMB: Clocking IT

MoMB: Clocking IT

Museum of Modern betas has somehow added us,  seems the word is spreading. I just hope people can find a use for ClockingIT and that we’re not dugg or slashdotted. 😉

ClockingIT, gestionando proyectos

ClockingIT, gestionando proyectos
A spanish site has also written a short review of our small site, wish I was multi-lingual. Reading stuff about our application through BabelFish isn’t quite the same as the real thing, unfortunately.

Clocking IT in France?

Clocking IT – BaseCamp a du souci a se faire – AccessOWeb le Blog

Someone has blogged about ClockingIT in a french blog, and I don’t understand a word. Hope it was a positive review. 🙂

activeCollab

TechCrunch has a post about a PHP based Basecamp ‘clone’ called activeCollab and the whole thing turned into a rather interesting discussion on what would happen with 37Signals now that Basecamp has a free alternative. There are loads and loads of project management / collaboration applications out there on the internet, so Basecamp has had loads of competition all the time. Including my own pet project Clocking IT. I’m sure Basecamp will be successful for years to come, those guys are extremely good at marketing their products and creating a buzz.

Feeling kinda chatty…

Over the weekend, I’ve added a simple chat-box to ClockingIT which seems to work alright. It’s sorta hard to test everything when you’re the sole developer, and it’s a multi-user application.

I’ve also started reworking the whole reports system, and the first report type is functionable. It lets you show who worked how much on each task, filtered by project, time or user. It’s way better than the old placeholder report that was there, as it’s actually showing useful information. The look will be improved once I’ve nailed all the functionality that I want in place.