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

Fast input, powerful output – those two are the top priorities here at mite. We put the last months into improving the output section, so it was about time to have another go at the input section! Et voilà: today, we’re happy to introduce four updates that’ll–hopefully–smoothen your time tracking experience.

Weekly calendar: fast forward, fast backward

Mondays aren’t the most beloved days in general, but in mite, there used to be a reason for that: if you forgot to track your hours for last Friday, you had to expand the weekly calendar to a monthly one to switch to the last week.

Mondays got better! Now, thanks to two little arrows on the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the weekly calendar, it’s a no-brainer to skip to another week. Just click those arrows to fast forward or fast backward to the next week or the last one. Then, pick the day you want to track hours on with another click.

At a glance: which days did you track hours on already, and how many?

In the weekly calendar as well as in the monthly one, you can now easily distinguish between days with and days without hours. Days with hours are displayed in a paler blue. When hovering your mouse over a single day, the total of your hours on that day will be shown as well.

Expanded input field »Hours«

We enlarged the time input field to make time frames, sums or products fit in comfortably.

Backstage: rebuilding the whole scene in Ajax

Lightning-fast! That’s the advantage of our reconstruction in non-techie speak. From today on, your browser won’t have to load the whole page including the navigation and the footer anymore when you switch to another day. Instead, it’ll only load the part of the page which really changed, the content. This reduces latency.

Plus, this paved the way for some minor improvements that weren’t possible before. The monthly calendar can now stay expanded even when you switch to another day or another week; this can be handy when you want to add time entries to a multitude of days. The form to add a new time entry can now stay open and filled with data as well; this can save some precious time if you realize that you’re on the wrong day, after you began to add a time entry by typing in some details.

Thanks so much!

Today’s updates are inspired by your feedback. So many users got in touch to tell us about their ideas on how to improve mite. Thank you, and keep it coming, please! This is really super-helpful for us.

Julia in New features

Who? What? Why? How? Did you know that? and What should we do about that? Yolk—the team serving mite—was all question marks during the last few weeks. And those questions kept coming, and coming, and coming. Normally, we would have stopped that immediately and would have tried to be a little more productive. This time, those question marks felt just great. They told us that we were up to something.

Every single one of those questions was a result of the new dashboards and the new information it was digging out for us. And that is exactly what we are trying to achieve: mite should be presenting data you are actively looking for, yes of course, but it should do even better: mite should distill this data to inform you. mite should help you understand your working time in depth. And it should report facts and trends. Proactively.

So here we go: curtain up, ladies & gentlemen! Meet your new dashboards – redesigned from scratch:

Features at a glance

Your new dashboards (formerly called: overview reports) feature three areas:

1. Key figures:
   • Today’s hours
   • Current week’s hours
   • Current month’s hours
2. The last 4 weeks, the last 6 months, the last year:
   • Chart: hours per day, week or month
   • Chart: hours per service, project or customer
   • Trends: comparing your hours to the preceding time frame
3. Projects with budgets over 75 %

Hours versus revenue
You can switch your dashboard from a time perspective to a financial one. If you use the hourly rates within mite and if you’re browsing mite as a co-worker or an admin, mite will not only show you which customers, projects and services you’re working on for the lion’s share of your time, but also which ones are bringing in the biggest share of your revenue.

My dashboard, team dashboard, dashboards of your team members
Tracking your time in a team? If so, mite will also show every co-worker a team dashboard. If you’re an admin, you can also access the dashboard of every single team member.

Customization
mite remembers which information you’d like to see. So, if you choose the yearly view of the team once, mite will show you this view again as soon as you return to the dashboard.

Everything is connected
All parts of the new dashboards are linked with the underlying data. So if you want to explore what’s behind a peculiar spike in a chart, simply click on it: mite will show you the corresponding time entries.

Some tech-stuff on the new charts
We said good-bye to the old flash charts! On the new dashboards, we got rid of this technology, totally. Thus, all charts can be viewed without a special browser plugin. Plus, the bonus point: you can print charts, now.

Any feedback?
We do hope you find the new dashboards useful! Please tell us if you stumble upon any bugs or if you have any feedback on how they’re working out for you. Tadaa!

Julia in New features

Time entries with time frames are now supported by the mobile version of mite. On the iPhone / iPod touch and on smartphones running Android or Web OS, you can now not only specify the bare number of the hours you’ve been working, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

Hence, all input options known from her big sister, the standard desktop version, are now available on smartphones as well. If you’re looking for an overview of all supported input options, please head over here. We hope you like the update, all the best with time tracking to-go!

Julia in New features

For over a year now, you can not only specify the bare number of your working hours when adding a time entry, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

If you want to track this additional information, just enter a time frame in the »Hours« field. E.g., enter »8 to 10« or »8 10« if you worked from 8am to 10am. mite will calculate the 2 hours then and save the starting time as well as the ending time as a note, so you’ll be able to keep that information for later reference.

Today, we improved the handling of those time frames when you export reports from »Reports => Time entries« to Excel or as a .CSV. Now, starting and ending times get their very own colums. mite extracts those time frames from the column »Notes« to separate cells. We hope that this new handling simplifies the further processing of your data!

If no single time entry in your export file contains a time frame, nothing changes for you. mite will then automatically hide those new extra columns.

Julia in New features

Always on the go, from the office, to a business lunch, to a conference, to a meeting, to a client’s office? Why not leave your notebook at home, and track your working hours on the go? mite is mobilizing!

Until today, mite to-go was iPhone only. Since today, mite serves a handy, simplified version to a couple of other devices as well:

• smartphones running Android,
• the Palm Pre and
• all BlackBerry, Nokia smartphones etc. browsing mite on Opera Mobile.

You don’t have to download anything from an app store. Just start your based browser and point it to your familiar login address (http://yourteam.mite.de) – 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 version, which means that it’s a first approach, a test version. Of course, we did check the little sister of mite on all emulators available, but we did not check it on every single mobile device on every single operating system. There are too much combinations – it’s a jungle, honestly. Thus, design and function won’t be running 100% smoothly on every smartphone, we’ll have to assume that.

And that is exactly why we’d love to ask for your help: please tell us if you stumble upon a bug! Get in touch by e-mail, leave a comment right here on the blog or send a tweet. Any medium is perfect, but please never forget to include some information about the mobile device you are using, your operating system as well as your browser. Thanks to those details, we can find a bug much faster – and get rid of it. A huge thanks up front for supporting us!

Update, June 24th: Thanks so much for your helpful feedback! We just pushed two updates based on your comments. One, you’ll now find a link in the footer of the standard browser version as well as the mobile version which lets you switch to your preferred version. Two, in the mobile version, we changed the icon to edit a time entry. Now, it’s the crayon you know from the standard version, we skipped the »>«. Hope you like it!

Julia in New features

Next Monday, between 1 am and 2 am CEST (what time is that for me?), some updates to our servers will be made. Therefore, mite will be unavailable for a very brief period of time. We expect the interruption to last for no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.

Maintenance will include updating the kernels, i.e. the heart of the server systems, as well as some improvements to the hardware, i.e. server rack restructurings. This maintenance takes place to reduce the possibility of future downtimes by tackling the root of past problems. We ask for your understanding.

Julia in Tech talk

It’s time to introduce myself, so that you know who’s behind the new name that will answer some of your mails from now on:

I am a Media System Designer and worked as a self-employed web generalist for 8 years. During my diploma thesis, I supported the OLPC-Project in Ethiopia.  My last adventure took place in Santa Barbara, USA, where I worked as a Project Lead, a Developer and a UI Designer at ELC Technologies.

For me, a well written software should be simple, open in communication, and enjoyable to work with.  As a loyal user myself, I am inspired by how mite embodies these qualities. And now that they took me on board, I feel like I’m finally where I wanted to be! Here at my new, digital home: Yolk.

Coming in with a fresh perspective, I am extremely motivated to make use of my former experience for mite.  Together with Julia and Sebastian, I’m excited about the new things you’ll see from Yolk.

After Berlin (Julia) and Hamburg (Sebastian), I am aiming to open Yolk’s third office in Paris. And yes, there is WiFi in the Parc du Champ de Mars.

Gregor in Inside out

Yolk turned two. And three! On May 1st, German Labour Day, we were happy to celebrate two birthdays simultaneously. One, Yolk was founded two years ago. Two, Yolk 1-uped! We’re excited to welcome a new mate around here: Gregor Martynus joined Yolk to support the ongoing development of mite.

This growth is not only an enormously joyous milestone for our young company. You’ll benefit from this power-up as well, for sure. Most important, development will speed up, but we’ll also have more time on our hands to push this blog a little further.

Today, we’d like to send a big thanks to all who applied for this job. Every single application says, in a way, that we’re on the right track. Merci!

Our second curtsy goes to all of you, our customers. You made Yolk what it is from today on: a very happy trio! Merci & cheers to an awesome voyage, together. Let’s see where the next years will take us.

Julia in Inside out