We’re always open for interesting user suggestions and to prove it, here are some of the new features that have just been put online, all suggested by some of our users.

Dashboard & Tracker Tree Tracking

Suggested by: sebastian chedal

You’ll note a new start icon, or in case you’re already tracking, a switch icon, before the tracker’s name in the small overviews on your dashboard.

Similarly, on your tracker tree you’ll find a new context menu option by  clicking on the tracker row, to start tracking for that tracker or to stop the current block and start tracking for the selected tracker.

Note that you won’t have the option to add a description. If you want to do that you have to use the old way & click the stop icon in the inline timer.

Printer-friendly Weekly Time Entry View and Export to Excel

As suggested by admasterbill, we’ve added a style/layout specific for the printing of the weekly time entry view

and an icon to export the table to excel.

Extra Info Fields on Company Edit

To allow you to add more information to your Companies, we’ve added some extra fields on the Address form, as suggested by Murray Wilson. The new fields being: Zipcode, City and State.

Easily see Who’s Working on What & Making your Users Stop Tracking

Jan Sequens requested to be able to easily see which users were tracking at a given time and stop blocks for his ‘managed’ users, in case they forgot to stop at the end of the day for example. So we’ve implemented a small indicator on the user list allowing you to do just that!

The users with a red dot in front of their name are currently tracking

while the ones with a gray dot are currently not tracking, at least not for one of your reportable trackers.
Clicking the dot will take you to the edit page for the current block, but only if you’re able to edit the block.

As you can see, the tooltip will tell you which tracker they are working for. The tabular view also provides this information, plus it does so more accurately now. As Jan Sequens pointed out: an open block would be shown on the tabular view, but with a zero-total. We’ve improved this as well.

If you refresh the page, you’ll see the totals change since the block is running.

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!

If you are an active trackmypeople user you will notice we change alot of things, on a daily base. For those of you who did not notice those changes, a brief summary :

• User Profile : Edit / Information : We totally reworked this functionality. You can now easily update your (and your employees/contractors) profile with some advanced validation/error correction
• Tracker Edit / Information : Editing trackers (can be companies/departements/tasks or projects) never was this easy. Use one of the information tabs to get more information about a tracker
• Set your project (tracker) color. Each use can now assign his own color. These colors will be used when browsing through the calendar interface
• Create a user : Easily create users/employees and assign him/her to the trackers you want. This page will automatically send an email to the "created" user
• Calendar Tabs. We changed the calendar interface to support 'tabs'. From now on you can switch between day/week/month view without having to change page
• Updated the "MyTrackers" page
• Fixed various layout issues
• Timezone & Culture detection (when editing profileà
• Persistent User Login : Login once, check the "remember me" checkbox and stay logged in for the next 30 days (only on the same computer)
• …

Login to your account and try all those new features, or join us now, while trackmypeople still entirely free !

We advice everyone to use one of our widgets to track your time right from your desktop. Next to that we have a "time entry" page where you can easily update your timesheet for the day or week. This could happen if you are visiting customers, forgot to use your widget or just need an easy way to add your data all at once.

Meet the "Time Entry" page. This interface is split up in a daily & weekly view.

On the daily view you can add descriptions for timeblocks

Use the weekly view to easily register all the work done for a certain (or multiple) projects. When you're done just press save, and the "time entry" system will create the according 'free blocks ' for you.

A new version of the gnome applet is online. We fixed some small bugs.

• bugfix: The widgets wont start tracking when there is no internet.
• small: "user logged in success!" => "User logged in successfully!"

Feel free to informs us about bugs or leave some feedback or suggestions.

We have just released a new Windows/Mac version for the time tracking applet and now we have an update of the  Linux Gnome applet. Download the .deb here , and install it using synaptics.

A list of things we changed:

• small : language fix 'iva' -> 'via'
• bugfix : fixed day timer (time you have already worked for today) when refreshing applet
• feature : added autostart option : this option will automatically start tracking your attendance when the widget launches
• feature : autoload support : use this option to automatically log in using a certain user
• feature : authentication over http auth (improved)
• feature : using new XML/API protocol
• feature : improved checking of password when setting up an account
• feature : you can now enter a description spanning multiple lines
• feature : auto reminder on new version : the widget will tell you when there is a new version available
• fixed few minor bugs

As always, feedback welcome. Keep in mind we need your feedback to make trackmypeople the best available web timesheet software that is free !

After a few days of testing we got plenty of feedback resulting in a big update. Use our new & improved time widget to track your time from your desktop (download here ).

What's new ?

New features :

• added option "open urls": this option will allow us to open an url from your widget. In the future we will use this to inform you about widget updates, conflicting time blocks or other urgent issues that need your immediate attention.
• added option : "automatic attendance tracking" : when this option is enabled, the widget will automatically start tracking your attendance as soon as the widget is loaded (or when you start your computer)
• added option : "stop on close" : this option will automatically stop your time tracking session as soon as the widget (or your computer) is closed.
• added option : "choose your display" : choose wether you want to use the widget in small / large view (see screenshots)
• new feature : timeblock comments : when closing a time block (after you have worked on a single project) you can enter a description. This description will be stored together with the timeblock details for future reference.
• bugfix : parsing errors when pressing stop multiple times
• bugfix : parsing errors when there is no internet connection

You don't believe we did all that in a few days ? Check out some screenshots below.

Widget preferences

Right click your widget and select "widget preferences" to set these options.

Display Options

How does it look ?

I present you : the "light" layout. You can set this widget as 'always on top' to check your current working time from every application, all day long…

Normal Layout

Don't forget to keep sending your feedback & suggestions : support@trackmypeople.com