Minuteglass Blog

We just pushed our biggest deployment yet to the live server. Below you can find a list of improvements.

1. Notes you write on time entries are now automatically saved. Previously, if you were to navigate away from that page, or select another category the note you had just written would be lost.
2. Improvements to Manual Time Entry. It is now easier to enter a duration, rather than having to select a start and end time.
3. Time entry notes are now associated with a specific category. This means that when you switch between categories Minuteglass will remember the note you last used in that category.
4. A number of minor bugs were solved. This includes a bug that caused time entries in certain circumstances to be a negative amount.
5. Export of CSV files is now working properly. Previously, CSV exports did not include the “.csv” file extension. Also, exporting all of your time entries as one CSV file is now possible on the Settings / Account page.
6. The “Default Billing Rate” setting was not working correctly for some users and is now fixed.
7. We’ve released our first version of inline editing on Recorded Time. Now, you can click once on a row and have options to edit an entry. You can also use your keyboard up and down arrows to adjust time.
8. Our API is partially complete. Our full API will be released and documented at a later date.

Thanks to all of our beta testers for providing feedback!

Minuteglass is in private beta at the moment, and our team is rapidly making progress towards a full public launch in 2010.

In software development there is this concept of a minimum viable product. We’re there, but we’ve decided to tweak some features before we expand our beta further. Our initial set of beta testers have given us a lot of great feedback and we are grateful for their support.

Some of the feedback we’ve received:

• People have had problems with our CSV exports, and we’re addressing these problems (they’ll be fixed with our next deployment).
• People want better reports, including multi-day reports… this is in the works!
• Minor confusion about our upgrade process and how the categories work. We are working on improvements that should help ease the learning curve.

More progress:

• Our promotional web site is all designed and will be ready to be rolled live as soon as we expand our beta.
• Our API is mostly complete and will be released in early 2010.
• We’ve been working on our desktop widget and it is about 50% complete. It is being build using Adobe AIR, and will be released on multiple platforms.
• Inline editing on previously recorded time entries is in the works.
• A number of bug fixes and minor visual improvements will be deployed soon.

BIG THANK YOU to our beta testers who have and continue to send us feedback, it is much appreciated.

We are now officially in beta mode!

September 1st marks the culmination of several years of planning, and very hard work over the last 6 months. We’ve sent out the first batch of beta invite codes.

Next week a larger batch of invite codes will be sent out. We’re working this week to track down remaining bugs and solve some minor user interface issues.

Launching a product has been everything I thought it would be, and at the same time brought so many unexpected twists. Despite all of the planning in the world you will never be fully prepared for the rush of launching until you’ve done it.

I’d like to personally thank all of the people who have been and are involved with Minuteglass. Beginning with co-founder Tom Chapin who is instrumental in many of the ideas that make Minuteglass great (and he came up with the name). Kent Downer, who is key to  dozens of user interface design choices and plays a major part in front end development. Andrew Smith plays a vital role in coding the JavaScript and HTML for various features. The folks at Flatterline for their expert Ruby on Rails and database skills — they are Curtis Miller and Chris Chandler

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention several other key people who have helped get us where we are today. Andy Ferra has been helpful with both development, and providing ideas and insight that helped to make this product what it is. Gary Smith for his expert Adobe Illustrator skills. Justin Crossman for his assistance early on in the project with development.

Thank you, all.

You can register for a Minuteglass account now, and if you don’t have a beta invite code (you’ll need one) please email chris at minuteglass.com and ask for one.

We are rapidly approaching our private beta release and have passed some major milestones:

1. We actually have a Basecamp To-Do list called “Beta Launch Tasks.”
2. We set up another slice for our “Live” site in addition to our “Production” slice. We’re going to be hosting the application on Slicehost initially, and might move to Amazon EC2 eventually.
3. Bought our Wildcard SSL Certificate. Every account on Minuteglass, even our free plan customers will be able to use SSL.
4. Filled out most of the paperwork for our payment gateway. We’re signing up with Braintree Payment Solutions. We have heard nothing but good things from developers and friends.
5. Lastly, and probably most important. There’s a bottle of champagne in the fridge waiting for launch.

Thanks to our tremendous design and development team for their great work.

If you haven’t signed up for our beta, there’s still time. More news as it happens on Twitter.

Just a quick post to update all of our readers. Development has been continuing at a steady clip, and we have most of the core functionality built. We’re working on some extra features, a few things we decided to change at the last moment, and also working on our promotional site. Stay tuned for the beta this summer.

In the past month we’ve made significant progress on development and have some great new developers working with our team on the project (I’ll make that introduction in a later post). We’re gearing up for our public beta (still a few months from now) and if you’re not signed up already, go to our homepage and sign up!

We received our first batch of stickers (1,000) from Stickerobot and made some shirts. Check out how cool they look. If you’d like a sticker just let us know.

And check out the great looking shirt. We don’t have any more shirts at this time, but will order some more after we launch our product.

Tom Chapin (partner at Tornado Design and co-founder of Minuteglass) will be in Austin, TX this week for SXSW Interactive. If you see him, say hello and ask him about Minuteglass.

Tom Chapin, our lead developer (and Minuteglass co-founder) just upgraded to the newest MacBook Pro! It’s his first Mac and so we’re all rooting for him as he switches away from Windows (at least for Ruby on Rails development work). It’s the new 17″ matte screen. So far so good!

In case you aren’t aware, we’re building a time tracking tool and actively developing it right now. It’s called Minuteglass and you can sign up for beta at Minuteglass.com.

Alongside of main application, we are now working on a desktop widget for Minuteglass! It is being developed in Adobe AIR and we’re pretty excited about the prospects. We designed everything in Photoshop first to get a feel for how it would work.

We’re realizing quickly that the widget will be a major part of our application’s success. Because it’s in Adobe AIR, we will be able to roll it out on all the major platforms and at the same time.

Screenshot: Widget sign in page.

As we get closer to launching Minuteglass we’ll show you the rest of the widget. It has two major features: a stopwatch mode and a manual time entry mode. But you’ll always be able to use the web based tools as well.

Feature Lockdown

For about 6 months now we’ve been in a bit of a “feature lockdown” meaning no new feature is added if we think it will take an extra day of work. This allows us to concentrate on launching our product, and keeping our code debt to a minimum.

In the world of web startups they say “launch early” for a reason. The longer you work on your application the more details and ideas you have. Before you know it your simple idea has turned into the next bloated version of Windows.

We’ve recently picked up a lot of development momentum (5 people now working on it). We don’t have a launch date yet, but we’re really excited about our progress.