January, 2009


9
Jan 09

New goodies: Pulse, Punch, & Feeds

One of our goals for Freckle has always been to help consultants & freelancers figure out their rhythms.

For example, those cases where you might be asking yourself: What days do I do the most work? What days the least? Hey, I worked on 3 projects on Tuesday and felt totally exhausted, but on Thursday I worked only on the Acme Widget Corp project and felt fine… even though I worked the same hours!

When you figure that stuff out, it’s a golden moment, all dramatic shafts of light breaking through the storm clouds and creepy disembodied choral music. Which is awesome.

If we can help you to create that golden moment, we’re prepared to slug it out with tough technical and design problems to do it.

But don’t blame us for the creepy disembodied choral music. We don’t know who they are, either.

Feeling Punchy

So, I am very proud to unveil our new Punch Card. You’ll find it on the Pulse page in your account.

And it will look something like this:

nutsnbolts freckle: Pulse

(Don’t mind the November date range. I haven’t been spending much time keeping our sample data current.)

Use the Punch Card to get a feel for your rhythms, and your team’s.

Mouseover a shiny blob to see what the time went to, project-wise.

nutsnbolts freckle: Pulse

We underline each project name with the corresponding color in the pie chart.

(This example has only one project used that day, but it was close to the hint text, there at the bottom.)

Click a shiny blob to go to a report for that day, so you can see all the details.

Woo!

Feed Me, Seymour!

Question: How can a body ever maintain a pulse without feeding? Answer: It can’t. Duh.

You might have spied the new orange jellybean button up there on the top right of that Pulse screenshot. If so, well-spotted.

That would be the new Pulse feed:

nutsnbolts freckle: Pulse

Subscribe for a list of all your & your teammates’ frecklings, delivered hot & fresh over your new Atom feed.

So, what do you think?

We’re hard at work on other goodies, of course, but we do so like the opportunity to stop and smell the feedback.

Talk to me, baby.


3
Jan 09

Improvements across the board

We’ve been working behind the scene on improvements, although we haven’t been crowing about ‘em too much. I aim to fix that.

Solo Plan

Chief among the obvious improvements, we added a Solo plan: 1 person with up to 10 projects, for $12 a month.

It seems like the number one feedback item we got from our launch: a 5-person plan is just too much for many of you.

I’ll be totally honest: we were surprised. We were expecting that the majority of interest would be from small teams.

But we can admit when we’re wrong!

Sign up for the solo plan

Sexier Reports

We didn’t use to display the unbillable time on the reports—which made no sense whatsoever. Now: it’s displayed, it’s broken out, we gave each section a nice color coded heading, and you can toggle the display of billable and unbillable hours as you like.

nutsnbolts freckle: Report

Print Styles

We drastically cleaned up the way that reports look when printed. We’re not done with reports & data portability yet, of course,

Preview of 201Cnutsnbolts freckle- Report201D.pdf (1 page)

Cleaner Projects

We put the projects listing page through a couple design revisions.

nutsnbolts freckle: Projects

Deactivating People & Projects

Features we originally shipped without (not expecting anything like the kind of initial traffic we received), but of course, necessary ones.

free freckle: Project: Test Project
free freckle_ People

More increment options

We switched from a plain old text field to a list of radio buttons (still not ideal, but getting there).

nutsnbolts freckle: Projects

We got feedback from people who had different tracking increment needs than us—for example, folks in the law profession who bill in 6 minute increments. No problem!

h2. And more…

This is just the short list. And we’ve got a ton more tweaks, improvements, sexifications and other things that we haven’t been able to ship yet.

Including our work on a beta API, coming soon.