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.

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.

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.

So last Friday we launched our new coming soon page — check it out at Minuteglass.com. The goal of the new signup page is to attract interest and get people to sign up for our beta invite list. Five days later we’re sitting at about 60 new subscriptions and they’re still coming in! That’s a significant increase since the site had almost zero traffic beforehand.

Anyways, thanks to One Page Love, Dailyhoopla, and CSS Based for featuring us!

That’s why we encourage you to check out TimeTrackingResources.com where we currently have links to over 50 time tracking apps — from software to web. We’ll be maintaining this list and adding new apps whenever we spot a new one. Thanks!

But what if you want to track your non-billable time or don’t need a whole “project” just to track a few hours here and there? That’s where these tools break down. If you want to track time for trivial tasks like “Email” or “Writing Proposals” you’re out of luck.

Most time tracking tools make it difficult to calculate your billable efficiency — the percentage of your time that is billable compared to non-billable. If you track all of your time this is possible.

This is one of the ways that Minuteglass is different. Instead of “Client > Project > Tasks” our model is centered around categories that you create. Meaning you are free to create your own structure for tracking time. This gives you the flexibility to both track billable time and your own non-billable hours.