Not too long ago I was able to pridefully ship the first alpha of TimeTable. This is a major feat because of all the rework that I’ve had to do on it the past summer. I’m happy to say that last night I was able to complete the seconds alpha and am currently in the process of prepping it for shipment.
So without further ado here are the additions to TimeTable in the alpha 2 release.
Preferences. That was my focus for the 2nd alpha. I’ve added the preferences window to TimeTable to give you even more control over your projects and your data. There are also preferences for your account and for the personal/contact information that will be seen by clients when you create read-only links and invoices. Probably the most exciting preference is the ability to set a “auto sync”; a feature that will keep your data in the cloud up to date without you having to sync it manually. I’m currently experimenting on time intervals to see which works best. The options currently are to auto sync every 30 seconds, every minute, or every five minutes.
Data persistency was something that was required before I was willing to ship the first alpha. It seems a little pointless to ship a product that doesn’t retain its data. With the first alpha you were required to go to the “File” menu and save your data manually before you left the page. One issue with this is that you had to actually remember that your data needed saving. With the addition of autosyncing in Alpha 2 I have also added an alert when you try to leave the page while there is data that has not been updated in the cloud. The solution isn’t the most elegant, but it is probably about all I can do given the limitations of running the application inside the browser. Nevertheless I’ll continue to research and see what more I can do to improve the user experience.
In Alpha 1 I was so excited to get it out to the public that I hacked together I login system, the downside to this is that I didn’t create any way for user to change their password. With alpha 2 I created a rudimentary system for changing your password. This will be a huge focus for the beta releases when they ship providing a consistent user interface through the application.
You can now download a TimeTable file with all your data from the file menu. Over the course of the testing process I’ll add the ability to re-upload this file. This is a feature provided for ease of mind, so you don’t have to trust the beta/alpha servers with your data; I should make it clear that before I ship a new release I do extensive testing on the data storage system making sure this feature will likely never need to be used for backup purposes.
The last feature that was added with the 2nd alpha was a visual representation of urgent projects. In your preferences you have the ability to set when a project becomes urgent. For example if you set the value to seven days TimeTable will change the display of the project in the sidebar to let you know that the deadline for your project is less than seven days away. This of course only displays for “work in progress” projects, and will return to normal once you mark the project as complete.
This is a very exciting release, and I’ve already got big plans for the 3rd alpha.
As a bit of a teaser, alpha 3 will focus on the clients half of the application.
I few new alpha invites will be going out this week. I hope you all enjoy TimeTable and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Tags: 1.0, alpha, bottleneck, Cappuccino, restrictions, TimeTable, User Interface