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:

(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.

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:

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm and is filed under new features & other changes, user experience. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.