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

Between 1:22pm and 2:20pm CEST, mite was down for all users. We’re terribly sorry, please accept our apologies!

The reason for this downtime were problems in our data center: defect routers of the upstream provider caused an interruption in the external connection. Three minutes after this downtime started we began to update on this problem via Twitter. Within minutes, technicians started working on the hardware in the data center. Collaborating with our hosting partner SysEleven, we’ll keep looking into this problem to prevent similar problems in the future, this goes without saying. Of course, your data was totally safe throughout this downtime.

Again: we’re so sorry! This shouldn’t happen.

Julia in Tech talk

If you have to specify in great detail what you’ve been working on, or if you’d simply like to structure your notes in a better way, today’s update is for you: the note of a time entry can now be multiline.

The first point that was important to us while crafting this improvement was to keep the input form tight. Adding a time entry should be possible in no time, that’s for sure, but furthermore, the form itself should reflect this rapidity visually. Therefore, we kept it streamlined: now, it’s a two-liner by default. When entering more text, the text area simply grows accordingly. When entering more than six lines, a scroll bar will appear.

The second point crucial to us was not to break the current workflow of many users: by hitting the Return key, you were able and you are still able to send the form, to add the time entry. To prevent collisions, we therefore taught mite to trigger a line break within the notes field as soon as somebody hits Shift+Return or Shift+Enter. We updated existing text areas, e.g. when adding or editing a new customer, project etc., accordingly. We do know that this solution is not a perfect one – we think it’s the best though. Please give yourself some time to adapt to this slightly modified behavior.

Along with this obvious update, the multiline notes, we released some minor enhancements as well, all dealing with adding time entries, such as:

• Hours first: The most important field of all, »Hours«, now holds the top position within the form as well. This improves the time tracking process if you navigate by keyboard. You can now tab through all attributes smoothly.
• Advanced arithmetic: More complex operations such as »2:15+0:30*1.5«, input in the field »Hours«, are now interpreted as well.

Thanks to all users who sent us feedback to push those updates forward! We hope they’ll help you – and all the other mite.users – track your times in a better way. Keep it coming, please, we love to learn from your experiences.

Julia in New features

Hear hear, Mac users: version 2.0 of DynaMite was released today. With DynaMite, you have full control over your timers directly from the menu bar of your operating system – it’s kind of a remote for your mite.

Thanks to the new version, time entries can now be enriched with notes. Plus, stopping a ticking timer became a whole lot easier: just right-click on the orange icon in your menu bar to stop the timer.

Features

• Always keep an eye on ticking timers; And never forget to switch ’em off, ever, again.
• Start, stop or switch timers with a single click.
• See the total working time of your last working days at a glance.

If you’re tracking your exact working hours throughout the day, DynaMite makes time tracking so much more easy. Really – we’ve been using it ourselves.

Installing DynaMite

DynaMite makes use of our open data interface, the mite.api. To setup the connection, you’ll have to activate the mite.api within your account first. You’ll find this option by clicking on your user name in the upper right-hand corner in mite. Please activate the corresponding checkbox there and save your changes.

During set-up, DynaMite will ask for your account name: that’s the subdomain of your mite.account. E.g., if you login at http://testteam.mite.de, the account name is »testteam«.

Later on, a window will pop up, asking for your e-mail address and your password, or, your Mac will ask you to allow using your mite.credentials stored in your key chain. Please enter the credentials asked or allow access to those infos in your key chain. DynaMite needs those credentials to connect with your mite.account.

Trial vs. full version

You can give DynaMite a try for free: the only limitation of the trial version is that timers won’t run for more than 30 minutes at one go.

A single license of the full version of DynaMite can be purchased within the external application. DynaMite is €10 $15, support by MediaAtelier included. Mac OS 10.5+ is required.

Merci, MediaAtelier

Adding notes to time entries in DynaMite was feature request number 1 since the first beta version. But, this feature wasn’t trivial to add. Stefan Fürst, developer of DynaMite, had to rebuild DynaMite from scratch to make this happen. Therefore, we’re double grateful he took this step. Thank you, Stefan!

Last but not least: Stefan is also the brain behind GrandTotal, the invoicing app for Mac users that integrates with mite. We’re happy to inform you that this hint might be special to you. There’s a promotion going on: If you buy GrandTotal and DynaMite bundled, you won’t pay a Cent for DynaMite. The bundle costs exactly the same as a regular license of GrandTotal.

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Update, 2019: MediaAtelier doesn’t offer DynaMite to new customers anymore. So sad. However, as a current or former customer, you can still download DynaMite 3 over here.

Julia in New features, Add ons

Update, March 21th, 7:53am: Maintenance went as planned.

One of our brand-spanking new servers isn’t feeling quite at home yet. To prevent future problems up front, we’ll therefore move it to a new server blade. Unfortunately, this action requires another scheduled maintenance. Fortunately, this one requires a very short period of time only.

mite will be offline on Sunday, March 21th, between 7:30am and 7:50am CET. (What time is that for me?)

We’re so sorry for this second interruption! This decision didn’t come easy. But we’re convinced that this preventive step makes sense even if nothing serious happened yet. We ask for your understanding.

Julia in Tech talk

At about 11am CET, mite became extremely slow; So slow, that the service went down between 11:24am and 11:35am. First of all: we are terribly sorry, this shouldn’t happen!

These problems were due to a disruption of the external internet connection of the data center where our servers are taken care of. Our own alarm systems did work, as well as the ones of our hosting partner SysEleven; we updated via Twitter. SysEleven managed to solve the problems of the IP uplink. All seems fine again. Nevertheless, you can definitely count on us for being extra-observing today.

Again: we’re sorry. Please excuse this interruption!

Julia in Tech talk