Four months ago, a third-party developer got in touch by e-mail. He asked us to check out the private beta of his iPhone app with full mite.support, Anytime. We did. We gazed. We were amazed. This guy did nothing less than a fully-featured mite for iPhone, out of the blue!

Time tracking, management of customers, projects, and services, as well as detailed reporting, and export features to Dropbox on top. Anytime was a real deal, and got even better during the following months when we were invited to witness the ongoing improvements.

Today, Anytime is finally officially available on the App Store. It’s $4.99. Congrats to the launch, Josef Materi, and thanks for your dedication!

Anytime video on Vimeo

Anytime joins a duo of iPhone add-ons for mite: one, our own version optimized for the mobile Safari browser, two, mite.go, the native app developed by Daniel Rinser and Victor Saar. Our mobile version focuses on time tracking only, mite.go enables you to track your times and to manage customers, clients, and services. Thus, we’d like to especially encourage you to check out Anytime if reporting on the go is important to you.

Please note: Anytime communicates with your mite.account through the mite.api, our open data interface. You’ll have to allow API access for your account first, so the app will be able to work properly. Click on your user name in the upper right-hand corner of mite to allow API access.

If you give Anytime a try, please be so kind to take a minute to leave a review on the App Store, or a comment right here. You’ll not only support Josef in improving his app, but you’ll also help other users with your opinion. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Julia in New features, Add ons

Smartphone users, prick up your ears: there’s an app for your Palm Pre or Palm Pre2 now, too. In mite.touch, you can either track your time with a built-in timer, or you can add hours manually. You can manage your customers, projects, and services right in the app as well.

mite.touch is a 3rd party tool. It’s available from the App Catalog for $4.99, a one-time fee. Thanks so much for your great work, ZenAppStudios!

Please note: mite.touch communicates with your mite.account through the mite.api, our open data interface. You’ll have to allow API access for your account first, so mite.touch will be able to work properly. Click on your user name in the upper right-hand corner of mite to allow API access.

Julia in New features, Add ons

Since 21:21 CEST (what time is that for you?), mite is not available for some users due to a routing problem in our primary data center. We’re terribly sorry, please, excuse us! We’ll do everything to get mite up and running again as soon as possible. Please visit Twitter to get the newest information on this issue, we’ll update continuously.

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Update, 22:33 CEST: mite is back up for all users. Hardware problems at the data center were the reason for this outage, routing was at the heart of the problem. We are and will be working together with our hoster to understand this interruption in detail to prevent this from happening in the future. Again: we’re so sorry for causing you trouble!

Julia in Tech talk

At the moment, you can specify one hourly rate for each service in mite. The service is the only factor that determines the revenue of a time entry. Customer, project, and user don’t matter here. This approach to hourly rates is simple and easy to use—which is a huge pro in our opinion. But, it does not seem to work good enough for many users.

So please tell us: What do hourly rates depend on, in your case? We’d love to improve mite to better meet your workflow.

In my case,

Please leave a comment if none of these scenarios work for you, or if you’d like to describe your requirements in detail. Thanks for your input!

Update, May 26: The poll is closed now, 766 users voted. Thanks so much for your awesome input, simply great! We’ll dive into conception right away.

Julia in Let's discuss

After one year of maintaining and improving mite together, Gregor leaves our team. Sebastian and I will be taking care of mite as a duo again, as we’ve been doing for the last 4.5 years.

We did hope so much for other news after this year, every one of us. Gregor should have become a partner. Unfortunately, our team play was good, but not good enough for this perspective. A partnership is nothing we wanted to advance with if not beeing 100% convinced. Thus, we decided to split up, even if this is one of the toughest steps we’ve taken, ever.

But heads up! There’s great news, too: Gregor catched the start-up virus! He’s now driving the < HTML > EXPRESS, a service for designers. They upload a webdesign, Gregor converts it to working code. Furthermore, he just released minutes, the web app for better meetings. minutes lets you take notes collaboratively so you can shoot them around as soon as your call or meeting ends.

All the best for your future, Gregor! And a huge thank you for your support, your ideas and your joyousness during this year. It was a pleasure.

Julia in Inside out

The most important input field of mite, the duration of a time entry, supports a variety of notations to track your time: the bare number of hours, time frames with a starting time and ending time as well as basic arithmetic operations. From today on, this input field got even more flexible. It’s a small update, but hopefully one that’ll save you some precious seconds day by day!

Timer quickstart

If you append a + to any input in the field »hours«, mite will start the timer on the new time entry right away. You can combine the plus-sign with bare hours, time ranges, and basic arithmetic operations.

E.g., 0:10+ creates a 10 minutes time entry with a running timer, 8 11:30+ creates a time entry with a running timer with the time frame from 8:00 to 11:30am as a note, and 2*3+ creates a six hour time entry with a running timer.

Time frames

0:00* or * is a new shortcut to create a time entry with a running timer including the time frame as a note. The starting time is the current time; The ending time will increment automatically as long as the timer is ticking.

If you append * to any input in the field »hours«, mite will add the time frame as a note. You can combine the asterisk with bare hours and basic arithmetic operations: e.g., enter 0:10* if you worked from 10 minutes earlier until now.

Furthermore, you won’t have to type in the rather unconvenient colons anymore. mite now supports four-digits, too. Type 0800 1230 if you worked from 8:00 to 12:30.

Cheat sheet

Don’t remember all input options yet? Please head over to the time input cheat sheet, you’ll find an overview of all notations there, old and new. You can reach this cheat sheet right from your mite.account, too: simply click on the question mark on the right-hand side of the field »hours«.

All notations are supported on your desktop browsers as well as your mobile browsers, e.g. on your iPhone or your smartphone running Android. Hopefully, this small update will be helpful and speed up tracking your time a little bit!

Julia in New features

Your project at a glance—that’s what a convincing project report should be all about. Three years ago, we designed the now-former version of the project reports in mite. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve learned a great deal about which information is really relevant for a project. So much, that we decided to go back to start. And redesign the project reports from scratch.

Today, we’re extremely happy to lift the curtain, finally: here they are, meet your brand spanking new project reports!

Slimmed-down project header

We reduced the info shown in the header area rigorously. There are only a few key figures that are always worth your attention: the total hours, the total revenue plus the budget if there is one. Thus, the new project reports feature only those figures in the project header—period. Focus is what counts.

Activity graph

Below, the new project reports display an activity graph, a timeline of your project. The resolution of the bar chart adapts to the total duration of the project: each bar represents either a month, a calendar week or a day.

Hours & revenue per service or team member

The third area of the project report breaks down hours and revenue per service. mite shows the total for each service and its percentage. The color code should make it easy to spot A, B and C services at first glance, from an hourly perspective as well as a financial one.

You can switch this section from »Services« to »Team« to analyze hours and revenue per team member.

All time entries / unlocked / locked

On every project report, you might choose if all time entries should be analyzed, or unlocked ones only, or locked ones only. All areas of the report will adapt accordingly: the key figures in the header, the bar chart as well as the service / team section.

Removed: list of all single time entries

On the new project reports themselves, you won’t find a list of all single time entries any more. Instead, click on the total hours, on the total revenue or on the new button »Show time entries« in the sidebar to navigate to the tab »Reports => Time entries« which will be pre-filtered by project then.

In our opinion, this reduces complexity—which is always a good thing. Under the tab »Report => Time entries«, mighty tools to analyze and export time entries are available already. We’re convinced that an easily accessible link to this tab is far better than to dublicate all of those features on every single project report. Two, this change speeds things up a great deal: even big projects with several hundreds or thousands time entries now load in a snap.

Shared reports

The new project reports can still be shared; we redesigned those shared reports accordingly. There’s one new setting though: you can choose whether or not you’d like to include all single time entries on the shared report. If you activate this option, a slimmed-down version of »Reports => Time entries« will be displayed. Thus, you’re customer can filter, group, and sort the time entries of this report by himself. Also, he can export those time entries to Excel or as a .CSV file.

This setting is disabled by default. On those reports that were shared already, we disabled it, too. Please enable it yourself if you’d like to grant your customer this little extra transparency.

Some tech-stuff on the new charts

On the new project reports, we got rid of the old Flash charts. Thus, all charts can be viewed without a special browser plugin, and printed without a hassle. As a bonus point, we had another look at printing in general and improved this part of mite, too.

Feedback?

We do hope you find the new project reports useful! Please tell us if you stumble upon any bugs or if you have any feedback on how they’re working out for you. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

Julia in New features

iPhone, Android and Palm Pre users have been enjoying the mobile version of mite for a pretty long while now. Today, it’s BlackBerry time, finally!

mite for mobiles, which is a version optimized for small displays, is now available on all BlackBerrys running the new operating system BlackBerry 6; by now, these are the following devices:

• BlackBerry Torch 9800
• BlackBerry Bold 9780
• BlackBerry Style 9670

To get mite for mobiles on your BlackBerry, you won’t have to install an app. Simply point the browser of your BlackBerry to your known login address – done. mite detects your device automatically and serves the simplified view, optimized for a fast mobile experience. With this mobile version, you can track your hours manually or with a timer. Time entries can be edited, deleted or moved to another date.

Please note: Today’s release is a so-called beta, which means that it’s a first approach, a test version. So please: if you stumple upon a bug, get in touch with a detailed description! Thanks to those details, we can find a bug much faster – and get rid of it. Thanks up front for supporting us!

Julia in New features

Is there a dedicated e-mail address for invoices in your company, or a dedicated person handling your accounting? If so, you can now specify this e-mail address within mite. We’ll send invoices directly to this address – no more forwarding! If you do not wish to specify an alternative address, invoices will still be sent to the owner of the account, this address is the default.

Please find the new feature under the tab »Account => Payment«, in the section »Billing address«. The owner of the account can change the e-mail address there. We hope this little update saves you some precious seconds, month by month!

Julia in New features

Update 6:17 CET: Maintenance is completed, mite is happy to track your time again. Thanks so much for your huge patience, everybody! Please get in touch if you felt affected by this maintenance beyond the acceptable level – we’re really sorry for the delay.

Update 3:02 CET: Maintenance is taking longer than expected, we’re sorry!

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Tomorrow night, on November 27th between 1:00 and ~2:00 CET (what time is that for me?), mite won’t be available due to a move of our main servers to a more redundant server cage within our data center.

We don’t treat our promise lightly: this maintenance is one of the necessary measures that we’re taking from October’s downtimes. Tomorrow’s steps will help us to ensure a more stable mite in the future by putting redundant hardware in place. We ask for your understanding!

Julia in Tech talk