Hear hear, Redmine users! Thanks to a plugin developed by Thomas Klein, time entries tracked on issues within Redmine can now be sent automatically to your mite.account.

Redmine projects might be bundled with mite.projects. For each project in Redmine, you might specify which mite.services should be selectable. Furthermore, dynamic comments are available: you can specify if information such as the title or the ID of a ticket should be added to the notes of your time entries.

Setup

Redmine2mite makes use of our open 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 corresponsing checkbox there, copy your API key and save your changes.

Having installed Redmine2mite successfully, you’ll find a new link in the upper right-hand corner within Redmine, labeled »mite«. There, you’ll have to specify your login credentials from mite (login & API key). Once your Redmine account is connected with mite, you might specify how projects should be bundled as well as which services should be available on a per project basis.

Download

Please head over to GitHub to get the latest version of Redmine2mite. Thomas Klein who developed the plugin published it under the free MIT license. Help yourself, grab it, fork it, improve it! And please don’t forget to get in touch with Thomas if you’re missing anything or simply want to give props.

About Redmine

Redmine is an open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. It is written using Ruby on Rails and under active development. You’ll find an online demo here.

Julia in New features, Add ons

Unquestionable, we’re not running out of ideas how to push mite a little bit further, again and again. Even after almost three years of continuous development, there’s still so much to do, it’s amazing. The reporting section has been our main building site for the last few weeks, and will be for some more. There’s lots of potential to be tapped in this section. Today’s update package holds one new feature and a couple of smaller improvements. We hope you’ll like it!

New: Bookmarkable filters

Under the tab »Reports => Time entries«, the heart of the reporting section, filtering and/or grouping became a whole lot faster today. Even the most complex filters can now be applied with a single click: just bookmark them.

A couple of default bookmarks are waiting for you already. Don’t need one of them? Please apply the bookmark in question, then click the »-« button on the right-hand side of the select menue to delete them. To add a new bookmark, select the corresponding filters and/or groups first. Then, add the bookmark by clicking the »+« button on the right-hand side of the select menue. If you’re tracking your time on a multi-user account, you can chose if the bookmark should be shared with other authorized members of your team, or not. Users are authorized to view team bookmarks if their rights are not restricted.

Redesigned: How to trigger filters

The lion’s share of today’s updates tend to improve the ease of use of mite‘s reporting section. We learned a great deal during the last years, above all not to go with our instincts only. Putting features to the real life test surely brings up issues you’d have never thought of otherwise. In this case, we were honestly surprised to experience that the huge orange button »Apply filter« on top of the sidebar, which triggered the filter box under »Reports => Time entries« and »Reports => Projects«, was overlooked, over and over again.

Some users simply didn’t spot this button, and therefore missed one of the best parts of mite. Yes, it was roughly a 5% percent issue, but with harsh consequences. Most interestingly, when pointed to the button, users couldn’t quite explain why they missed it in the first place. Was it because the orange color was associated with adding a new item? Was it because they took the button for a miscarried header of the other sidebar buttons (print, export etc.)? To be honest, we couldn’t get to the exact root of the problem. But we could and did try other versions of this button: we experimented, tested, retested and tested again. Finally, we came up with this new version. It is just a little bit inconsistent with other sections of mite, and will hopefully therefore manage to solve this issue:

The button to trigger filters and/or groups now finds its place in a new header, just above the content area with the list of all time entries. Our tests went well – now we’re excited how it’ll work for thousands of real users. Please give yourself some time to adapt to the new version if you catch yourself pointing your mouse to the sidebar during the first few days. Even if you spotted the button in the first place, the new version will save you some time by bringing the button and the filter selects closer together.

The menues inside the filter box can now be selected faster as well. Instead of activating the checkbox first to trigger the selects, the select menues can now be activated directly. Inactive selects are not hidden anymore, but differ visually instead.

Please note: the new version of the select menues won’t be available under Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately, technical reasons forced us to stay with the old version, here.

Redesigned: Entries per page

Formerly available within the filter box, you can now specify how many entries you’d like to see in the footer area. Older entries are loaded via Ajax, right on the same page. Therefore, the former pagination is not available anymore.

Easier printing

On the right-hand side, within the sidebar, mite now serves a special print view of the list of all time entries. The print view which opens in a new window now displays all time entries corresponding with the current filters and/or groups, not only the first page, as it used to.

More to come

Stay tuned! More updates in the reporting section will be launched during the next months.

Julia in New features

Mantis2mite is a plugin for Mantis which I developed during my bachelor thesis also thanks to a lot of precious feedback from mite.users. It is licensed under the terms of the MIT License and hosted on GitHub.

Mantis is an open source bug tracking system based on PHP and under constant development. Mantis2mite connects your Mantis account with your mite.account. Track your time easily on issues within Mantis and get them automatically send to mite. Projects from Mantis can be bundled with mite.projects. Furthermore, you can specify which mite.services should be available in Mantis on a per-project basis. Users having a certain (configurable) role in Mantis may also view the time entries made by other users. This option is meant for project managers to easily get an overview on how much time was tracked on a problem.

There is one important precondition: Mantis >= 1.2.0., since this is the first version with a real plugin system. This was necessary to develop Mantis2mite.

You can find a zip archive containing all files on GitHub. Addidtionally there are installation instructions, a FAQ and a list of known issues in a README document. Make sure to check this out first, if you have any questions.

I’m looking forward to your feedback, especially in regard to the upcoming Trac-/Redmine plugin!

[Update, September 7th] After renaming a directory of the plugin, nothing worked as it should. I just discovered this issue and fixed it. Please download the fixed version on GitHub. Sorry for the trouble. I guess I couldn’t totally hide my green horn ;-)

Thomas in New features, Add ons

Are your projects staying on budget? mite offers a very simple way to help you track that crucial information at a glance: once you specified the total max. budget of a project, a visual budget status bar will show up in your reports that informs you about the amount of remaining hours.

This feature has been around for a long time. From today on, you’ll have the option to not only track your budget in hours, but in dollars or any other currency as well.

Thanks to all users who made their voice heard and requested this feature! We surely hope that this alternative will help you staying on budget.

Julia in New features

[Update, 2nd August] Survey closed. Thanks for your input! The results are: Trac, Mantis and Redmine.

My name is Thomas Klein and I’m currently studying Computer Science & Media at the BHT Berlin (Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin). For my final exam, lasting for three months, I’m dealing with the connection of open source issue tracking systems and mite via plugins.

The term »issue tracking system« has many synonyms and covers therefore a wide variety of software. In my perception, an issue tracking system should at least support the processes

1. Create a ticket and assign it to a person
2. Edit the ticket and give feedback
3. Mark the ticket as solved

Due to the limited time I will focus only on web-based open source issue tracking systems, having each:

• a good documentation
• an API
• a repository of plugins for my reference
• a programming language not to difficult to learn for me in the limited time

Now it’s up to you: Take part on this survey with only 3 questions to affect my implementation ranking of the remaining issue tracking systems. Additionally you can provide some feature requests for the mite.plugins. Based on the results and your recommendations I will implement a mite.plugin for the first 2-3 issue tracking systems.

Let’s get rolling!

If you have any questions or comments regarding my thesis or the survey feel free to contact me on Twitter.

Thomas in New features, Add ons, Let's discuss

Undo was one of the first commands I learned – and learned to love – when getting my hands on my first computer. NO, I didn’t really mean to delete this Monkey Island cheat sheet! For sure, this command saves all of us, day by day, right? Thus, I’m really happy to experience that this feature, long-serving in desktop software, is heading to the web as well – slowly but surely.

Here at mite, undo has been around for accidentally deleted objects for almost a year now. That’s a good first step, but we wanted to push this even further: as of today, undo is everywhere. Just click the undo link in the info message that fades in right after you deleted, edited, archived or activated a customer, project, service or user. If you changed the date of a time entry or duplicated it, undo is on your side as well.

To help spread undo on the web, we open sourced the corresponding code: memento is a small RubyGem for Rails/ActiveRecord that covers destroy, update and create. Are you a Rails developer? Help yourself as well as your users and grab memento at GitHub.

Julia in New features

Developers, admins, passionate nerds: If you’re a real command-line lover, tracking your daily working hours will change a great deal from today on. Lukas Rieder, a freelancer based in Berlin, developed a command-line interface for mite: mite.cmd.

With mite.cmd, you may add time entries, control your timers and generate simple personal reports, right within the terminal, without ever moving your hands away from the keyboard.

What’s really great about mite.cmd is that it’s developed with the strengths, but also the weaknesses of the terminal in mind. Lukas didn’t only make the default input options available via this text-only interface. He thought deeply about how to save key strokes and therefore implemented additional syntaxes that are smart, simple and don’t require a lot of typing. Furthermore, mite.cmd comes with a handy autocomplete (and one of the most amusing launch posts I stumbled upon in a while).

On top of that, Lukas put the code of mite.cmd on GitHub, open for all interested developers to improve it. Thank you so much, Lukas! We like your hairstyle, too!

Julia in New features, Add ons

[Update: June 10th, 7:25 a.m.] The regular domain *.yo.lk which was erroneously suspended is now working again. You should be able to access your mite.account under its standard URL. As a matter of course, your data was safe at every moment.

It could take some time for DNS servers all over the world to reflect the unsuspension. If you cannot access your account by now, please continue accessing mite via the emergency domain. We are deeply sorry for these problems, even if we were not responsible directly for them. We know that you depend on mite. We will do everything possible to gain your trust again. Sorry.

Since this afternoon, some users are experiencing problems accessing their account. Our servers are up and running, but there is a problem with our DNS entry. If you happen to be affected, we want to apologize first of all!

We set up an alternative domain, under which you can access your account:
http://youraccountname.appmite.de

All your data will be waiting there for you, of course. If you create new time entries or any other data, it will be accessible again, as soon as the regulair domain address is available again.

Unfortunately, SSL is not available on this backup domain. Please access mite through HTTP as long as we are working to get the domain working again.

We will get back to you via mail with detailed information. At the moment, we assume that a service provider became insolvent and took our DNS entry with him. We’ll keep updating via Twitter.

We are terribly sorry for these problems. Please stay with us!

Julia in Tech talk

The very heart of mite is a simple input field to enter the hours you have been working. This field got smart today! From now on, you can not only specify the bare number of the hours there, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time, a sum or a product.

If you enter a time frame, mite will calculate the hours 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.

This additional note can be manipulated directly. E.g. if you set back the ending time later on, the hours of your time entry will be re-calculated.

All in all, those are the possible options to enter times with mite:

Hours
1:30 or 1.5 or 1,5
for 1 hour 30 minutes

Time frame
8 to 13:30 or 8am 1:30pm
for a time frame from 8:00 to 13:30.

Sum or difference
2+0:15 or 2-0:15
for 2 hours plus or minus 15 minutes

Product or quotient
2*1.5 or 2/1.5
for 2 hours multiplied or divided by 1.5

Quickstart timer
0:00 or a blank field
creates a time entry with a running timer

Please let us know how the updates are working out for you! We’d like to improve, to provide you with even better input options.

In particular, we’d love to learn about your view on whether we should add an option to create a time entry with a running timer, that features the starting time of the later time frame as a note – say: an option that merges time frames with the quickstart of the timer. If so: what syntax would you like to use? So far, we’re thinking about a simple now or 0:00+.

Julia in New features

Between 16:01 and 17:29 this Sunday afternoon, mite was down for all users due to a power interruption in our data center. We are terribly sorry for this interruption of the service! This shouldn’t happen. We’ll continue to look into the issue, together with the very capable people in Munich maintaining the infrastructure, to prevent something like this to happen again. Again: we are sorry for the inconvenience. Please stay with us.

Julia in Tech talk