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

To put it mildly, we’re not satisfied with the current availability of mite. To be honest, we’re heavily frustrated. One hour of downtime on October 15th, fifteen minutes on the 19th and two hours during last night – that’s simply not the level of quality that mite is known for and that you can and should anticipate. We owe you. Not only another apology, but a detailed description of what went wrong and what we’re doing to prevent this from happening again.

What did happen?

Hardware failures in the data center caused all three outages, the app itself was and is running smoothly. The first failure wasn’t connected to the second and the third one. Bad luck and bad timing, it all came together.

On October 15th, an electricity problem occured in our primary data center, despite of redundant power systems being in place, of course. The power systems were undergoing maintenance, that’s when a switch between the two systems failed, due to a combination of a flawed documentation of the hardware supplier as well as a not perfect emergency plan. Power supply was recovered within half an hour, but the servers needed some more time to check all data and to resume their work properly.

The nightly outages on October 19th and 21th were caused by defect network switches. On the 19th, one of this switches broke. Within minutes, it was replaced. Yesterday night, two switches in one blade center by IBM failed simultaneously. Replacing the switches didn’t solve the problem. Servers had to be moved to another blade center, this took some more precious time.

What will be done about it?

Two notes upfront: one, no hardware will always work 100%, not in our data center and not in another one. That’ll simply not going to happen, that’s a reality we cannot change as much as we’d love to – but we can change how we deal with this reality. Two, our top priority is to assure that your data is totally safe, at any given point of time. To guarantee this guideline, we’ll even keep up with some more minutes of downtime, in case of doubt.

What we can do and will do, is a) throw light on every little failure to really understand it and therefore be able to prevent this from happening in the future, and b) enhance uptime by putting more redundancy in place.

In this particular case, after October 15th, the motor to switch between the different power systems was replaced. Plus, our hoster, the folks from the data center and the manufacturer of the systems have joined forces to clarify the error in the documentation and to fix it. Plus, they are discussing to implement another redundant power system on top of the existing one.

The network switches that caused the downtimes of October 19th and 21th will undergo a scheduled maintenance, probably during the next week. We’ll update as soon as we have more information.

At the moment, we’re thinking about how to add even more redundancy on our side, e.g. by adding further systems that could take over in case of a hardware failure.

On the bright side, we’d like to point out that we trust our primary hosting Partner, SysEleven, despite of those numerous downtimes. Monitoring informed us within a minute. Technicians were hands on within five minutes. CEO and head of IT updated us on an ongoing basis, in detail and in a transparent way. They are deeply sorry and definetely unsatisfied with the status quo, as well. They’ll focus on improving the current set-up during the rest of 2010, no new features will be taken on. All in all, their 10 years hosting history shows that this is not the norm, without a question.

Uptime of mite in 2010: 99,93%

Concluding, we’d like to talk about the bigger picture. We analyzed previous downtimes to help you put this into perspective.

From January 1st 2010 until today, mite was unexpectedly down for a total of 295 minutes. This is an uptime of 99,93%. Even if we included scheduled maintenance, mite was up for 99,89%, all in all.

The gap to 100,00% is not big, but not satisfying. We aim to be better than this. We’ll keep on improving every little detail to maximize uptime even further. Please, trust us: we will get better. If you’d like any further information: please, get in touch!

Julia in Tech talk

Update: Since 01:17, mite is back up. Again: we’re so sorry! These outages cannot and won’t continue.

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Since 23:18 CEST, mite is not available due to a hardware defect. Technicians are hands on, already. Please visit Twitter to get the newest information on this issue, we’ll update continuously. We’re terribly sorry, please, excuse us!

Julia in Tech talk

Update (12:41 am CEST): mite is back up now. All of your data is fine of course, there was never any real danger. Again: we’re terribly sorry for this brief outage! Hopefully, this downtime didn’t cause too much trouble on your side.

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Since 11:45 am CEST we experience electricity supply issues in our data center. We informed the data center, their whole team is working on the issue.

Please excuse this outage a thousand times! Please visit Twitter to get updates on the issue, we’ll update the status continuously.

Julia in Tech talk

Now, you can sort your tables below the tabs »Report => Time entries« and »Report => Projects«. This new feature makes it really easy to keep an eye on your most time-consuming services, your top-selling customers et cetera.

The list of all time entries can be sorted by date, customer, project, service, user, note, hours or revenue, each in ascending or descending order; the list of all project reports can be sorted by last activity, project, customer, (used) budget, hours or revenue.

To sort a list, simply click on the column header by which you’d like to sort the list. To switch from ascending to descending sorting or vice versa, just click once more. We hope this small—but frequently requested—improvement helps!

Julia in New features