Well, almost. So the purpose of this blog post is to let you know I missed another internal deadline. There have been a few new problems that arose with TimeTable. A couple were technical related, a few real life delays, and then there is the matter of me wanting to have  every feature I could think of in the product.

So let me give you a small update on TimeTable itself before I talk about shipping.
I’m so proud of this product.  I went back to RC2 the other day just to see how much work I’ve actually done and I was blown away. Some companies would ship RC2 as a finished 1.0 product and the GM I’ve got running as version 2.0. So the first thing I did that the user will love is updated the deadline picker. When you select the deadline for a project you can now use the text date picker control, or the calendar view.

The next thing noticeable is the interface improvements. I’ve gone ahead and added a boarder around the top of windows in order to make them stand out from the background below them. This means I can essentially remove most of the unneeded dark HUD windows in favor of a more consistent interface. Small things like a auto-completing textfield was added. So when you assign a client to a particular project you no longer have to type the name perfectly. I also added some hooks in the application for account renewal. So basically when you login and your account is about to expire you get alerted. You’ve also got a way to renew your account from within the application.

A lot of work has gone into the tables themselves. Your projects and clients are not re-orderable. So you can simply drag a project or client from the sidebar and change the order of it. I’ve gone above and beyond that though! You can also drag work time and expenses to different projects thereby moving it! The same holds true for clients too. If you drag a project from the clients view to another client the project is then associated with the new client. The behavior is a bit difficult to describe, but it’s very intuitive once you see it. With drag and drop there is also sorting. Your projects, work data, and expenses are now sortable by clicking the header for each column. In addition to sorting there is also resizing. If you need more or less room to display your data the tables are all user resizable.

Obviously the point of this release is to focus on bug fixes, and that’s all I’m going to focus on for now.

What you probably care about most is the shipment date though, so lets talk about that. I was ready to ship TimeTable 2 weeks ago until I found one bug in the latest builds that I can’t live with. Once that is fixed I’m shipping the product. I hope to also ship with a series of screencasts to help you, the users, easily jump in and start using TimeTable. So what about a rock solid date? I simply can’t give one. I’m pushing for the end of March at the latest, but it’s up in the error.

I really want to get the new Gold Master in the hands of the users, but with the renewal system tied in I simply can’t do that.

Thank you all for the support.
-Randy Luecke

Tags: 1.0, advanced, applications, apps, beta, bottleneck, future, TimeTable, User Interface, V1.0

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 3:18 pm and is filed under TimeTable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.