Sunday, June 28, 2009

New beta with idle-time detection

Quite often, we will walk away from our desktops perhaps to answer a phone call or attend an impromptu meeting. The last thing we would remember to do is to stop our timer on the current task.

Well, now you no longer need to remember! The new beta of Worklog Assistant automatically detects when you are away from your machine and stops the timer on the active task. On your return, Worklog Assistant will tell you how long you were away for and ask whether you want to apply the away time to a JIRA task. This works great for those persistent little interruptions.

You can see the workflow in action here.

I think this is quite possibly the coolest new feature, especially the workflow upon return, and I would be very happy with feedback.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

New release (1.0.1105)

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. The main changes are technical with a couple of bug fixes.

My favourite long-time issue has finally been solved: http://gsfn.us/t/3xak . Now Worklog Assistant will correctly detect multiple instances and prompt you. However, as always, this can still be improved further. One such improvement is here: http://gsfn.us/t/8oln . Basically, don't prompt at all, just launch the original instance. If you would like this, please add a vote!

A special thanks to some adventurous users for testing last week's beta. Although no issues were reported, I would not have been able to be as confident as I am now. So, thanks again :-)

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

Monday, June 22, 2009

New beta (could use some eyes)

Hey all, a new beta is available. There are behind-the-scenes changes which I had been working on all week that should make some cool new stuff possible. As a bonus, Worklog Assistant now correctly detects multiple instances!

Please download it and report bugs if you find any.

There will be no stable release this week as I work on stabilizing the beta.

A little story

As I was doing my final testing (ahem, after publishing the beta) I noticed that the Mac version had become completely messed up due to some minor but tedious misconfiguration. As a result, it would work just fine on my test machine, but not for anyone else! I stayed up till ~2am fixing it and uploaded a new beta.

This morning, my wife said she was sorry that I had to stay up late working on it. I told her that this is what dreams are made of! I have created something that whole companies use regularly and users that actually seem to care**.

For me, it was a thank you to those customers and users. For me, software development is less about software and more about solving problems. I would like to avoid all serious problems for my users if I can help it. Indeed, I was not even tired afterward and found it hard to fall asleep.

This has been my best month so far (2x anything else) so that was an added motivator. But I'd like to think I have not changed from the month where I had a single lonely sale, at least in how I approach solving problems for customers.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

** Some users don't care about what it's called but really care that it works. For example, one user calls it "Weblog Assistant" in multiple, unrelated emails. I thought that is so awesome!

Sunday, June 14, 2009

New release (1.0.1103)

A new release is available. This release fixes some issues experienced when the certificate revocation list (CRL) cannot be retrieved on Windows. Previously, you would be blamed with a message like: "Hey, you didn't enable the SOAP API!" Now, you are asked whether you wish to continue even though the CRL could not be downloaded.

There is also a rewrite of how the project and issue links were being rendered to fix a small bug. I think I've stomped out all the bugs with the rendering but if you have any issues, please let me know ASAP, preferably with steps to reproduce.

The tray icon and tray icon context menu have also had a bit of a revamp. Please let me know if you like :-)

As always, happy time tracking and have a good week!

Monday, June 1, 2009

New release (1.0.1011)

This is a bug fix release, please see the release notes for changes.

Thanks and have a good week!

About this blog

We strongly believe that tracking your time properly is the first step to deterministic software development. If you feel that you have been guessing or you can't be bothered to remember to log time, Worklog Assistant might be for you!

Give it a try!

Please download a free 30-day trial today by clicking on the link below: Download