Posts Tagged ‘bottleneck’

3… 2… 1… SHIP!

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

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

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Shipping RC1

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Wow, can you believe this product is almost here? I for one still find myself in a little big of disbelief. I wasn’t originally planning to ship the Release Candidate (RC) this soon, I wanted to ship out he third beta first. Problem came when I got caught up in new feature after new feature and found no reason to ship a 3rd beta. So without further ado lets list some of the new features.

  • Customizable Invoices
    • This is a huge feature. Inside of your preferences you’ll see a new tab for invoices. From here you can now upload your company logo, change the invoice colors, and set the invoice number.
    • I’ve also made the “generated by TimeTable” logo less prevalent at the bottom. You’ll have an option to remove this when TimeTable 1.0 ships.
  • Email-able invoices
    • In the previous builds this feature was disabled. This isn’t as perfect as I would like. The TimeTable email template is applied to the emails and I would rather the emails be sent in a more generic fashion. I’ll be experimenting with some options for this.
  • Invoice numbering
    • Inside your preferences I’ve added the ability to set the invoice number. This number is displayed on the invoice below your name and address.
  • Help
    • By popular request I have added documentation to TimeTable. From within the help menu you can learn about all the ins and outs of the application. It might be nice to search through this, but for the time being it is organized as is.
    • I’ll be adding more to this help over time. – feedback is more than welcome
  • Inline work data deletion
    • In past builds the only way to delete work items was to select them and hit the delete key on your keyboard. In this release I added a button next to each work item and expense item so that you can easily delete them if needed.
  • Resizing fields
    • I’ve fixed the regression with the multiline textfields. The “details” field and “notes” field from the project and clients section respectively both resize themselves if you go beyond the bounds of the field to prevent them from cutting off.
  • Client address field
    • I’ve added the ability to set the client’s mailing address.
    • My original plan was to give users driving directions via google maps using either your current location or the location you’ve supplied in your personal preferences to the client’s address. I ran into licensing issues with Google maps. For this reason I have removed this feature from this release. If you’re interested in seeing a feature like this please let me know and I’ll work harder to get it integrated. The code is basically already in place, it’s simply a matter of licensing Google Maps for a commercial product.
  • Mark clients as a company
    • If your client is a company not an individual there is now a checkbox for this. This will prevent the name order from changing on your company names if you have your preferences set to display the last name first.
  • Label bubbles next to client name
    • In the clients list it now shows a little bubble next to each client name. This bubble can be set to show either the total number of projects for a client, the total number of incomplete projects for a client, or the number of urgent projects for a client (this is default).
  • Upload Data files
    • You’ve been able to download TimeTable data files for quite a while, until now you could never re-upload them. One thing to note is that old TimeTable Data files will no longer work, you’ll have to download a new one.

There have of course been many bug fixes so I look forward to hearing your feedback. To send me feedback just use the feedback menu within the application, of you can tweet me at @timetableapp I’m not going to list any bugs for this release, bug please submit them as you see them. Remember that your feedback will give you a huge discount on the product when it ships. This will be one of the last release that will give you a discount on the product so keep it coming. The more feedback you send the greater the discount.

Thank you all for your support,
Randy

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Shipping Alpha 2

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

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.

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The Future of Applications

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Applications have come a long way in the last 30 years. From punch cards, to a simple command line interface, to the first graphical user interfaces, to high end editing of photographs and videos. We said “wow” when we watched Steve Jobs introduce the Macintosh in 1984 and we said “wow” when we saw Steve Jobs demo the iPhone in 2007. What makes hardware great is not how fast the processor runs or how shiny the box is. Software makes hardware worth spending money on. Software engineers have been through it all: punch cards, the command line (we’re still there), the mouse, pretty animations. It really is amazing how quickly things have changed but what’s even more amazing is how quickly things are still changing; it’s exciting! So where is the future of applications? Why is the future so exciting? What does the future have in store for individuals, businesses, and enterprises?

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