We’re announcing a scheduled maintenance for tomorrow at 22:00 GMT and expect the backend to be back available by 22:30 GMT.

Update : Maintenance went fine. Up & running within 20 minutes.

You already knew the user report, which used to give you a total chart at the top and a stacked chart at the bottom showing more details about the trackers.

Daily Report : Chart

user report

Single Tracker Graph

And the tracker report, with again a chart with the total time tracked for that tracker at the top, and a stacked chart with the data splitted up per user.

tracker report

We already changed the select boxes in a multi select, to give you more flexibility, but now we have added both select boxes on both reports, giving you full reporting options.

custom selection of users and trackers

We have been working quite hard on TrackMyPeople lately. New features/improvements/fixes are a daily routine and that’s a good thing. But sometimes you have to keep an eye on the ‘basics’, time tracking is what it’s all about. That’s why i decided to sum up the different ways to track your time using this free service !

1. Using the time entry page

Time entry is split up in day and week views. The weekly overview allows you to quickly register your weekly time sheet. Use the tracker drop-down (see : what is a tracker?) to select/add trackers to the list, and then easily add the time spent on a day-to-day basis. You can use different formats too, the system will notice the difference between time entered in another format (for example 3:30 is the same as 3,5). When you’re done, press the “save” button to register your time-blocks.

The day view allows you to work in a more detailed way. The time-block entry contains a field allowing you to enter the ‘description’ of the timeblock. Clicking add will instantly save the block to our system.

Note that time entry uses the “free block” principle (see : what is the difference between free and fixed blocks). Basically this means we do not have a start/stop date for this timeblock, meaning we cannot ‘draw’ it on on the calendar.

2. Using our time punch clock

Have you noticed the play/stop buttons on the right top of the page (only when logged in), this is the timeclock. This clock is displayed on most pages and will display the total time registered for the current day. Using the start/stop buttons allows you to easily “punch” in your time, just don’t forget to press “stop” when you are finished.

time punch clock

3. Quickadd (one by one) timeblock

Next to the clock we have the “quick add” button. So now you might be thinking : what is difference between time entry and quickadd ? For that you have to understand the difference between free & fixed blocks. Quick add allows you to add a single block forcing you to enter an exact start and stop date.

When saving the system will verify you don’t have any other timeblocks for the same timerange. If this is the case it will allow you to fix the problems by moving or deleting the duplicate time entry.

4. Use on of our widgets

If you want to enter your time on a regular base, this is the way to go ! Our widgets/applets allow you to easily “register” your time right from your desktop. Pick a widget from our download page and install it. Afterwards you can easily press start/stop to register your timesheet as you go. If you want to switch to a different project, just use the dropdown to switch to a different tracker (company/project/task or issue).

We have a public API allowing developers to write new widgets/applications that interact directly with your trackmypeople account. If you want to give us a hand drop us an email, we’ll be glad to help.

The developers behind TrackMyPeople love the open-source community & the tools it has given this world. With our new api documentation we’d want to give developers the opportunity to easily interact with the TrackMyPeople engine.

Our own widgets of course already use this interface, but we believe that the best software is developed by & for the community. The software is more inclined to move towards the real needs of the actual users, plus you can’t do everything yourself. With this announcement we’d like to once more ask you for your feedback, suggestions & perhaps we might even feature some of your own applications.

By the way, we’re really interested in an iPhone app for TMP, so if anyone’s interested, feel free to contact us!

It’s been too quiet on this blog, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around. On the contrary, we have done several fixes and, while doing so, we heavily extended our limetest suite, which now counts well over 1000 tests, and we introduced a better error logging mechanism.

Here’s a small listing of some important fixes:

• fixed timezone issue for free time entry where blocks would appear in tabular view on wrong day (special thanks to candislcurd)
• fixed quick add/edit for free blocks: hour input was peculiarly interpreted as seconds (special thanks to candislcurd)
• fixed white page issue when saving a time block that would overlap with the currently running block
• fixed white page issue when deleting a block that would overlap with currently running block (special thanks to regenerate)
• fixed calendar pop-ups for IE7
• fixed switching between daily and weekly time entry views when reporting (viewing time for other users)
• fixed/enhanced nested tracker trees: imagine structure A > B > C, before if you were member of A & C but not B, C would not be shown
• fixed forgot my password functionality (special thanks to unexpected)

And a few new features have been introduced:

• organigram: check out the new visualisation of your trackers under the Manage menu
  

  horizontal organigram

  

  vertical organigram

• mass edit: you can now change the tracker for multiple time blocks at once, by choosing the change tracker action at the bottom of the tabular view
  
• the tabular view now has a multi-select-boxes for your trackable trackers, reported users and tracker types, so you’d have a more flexible way to view time details and totals.

We’re also working on:

• API documentation for third-party widget development
• multi-select for charts, so you’d have more flexible reporting options, analogue with the tabular view.
• cleanup/update of faq, documentation & videos

More news about this soon, so keep posted!