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

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

Did I stop that timer or is it still ticking? We want you to be able to answer this questions at a glance. That’s why we integrated an additional hint that shows up on every single page when there is a timer running.

The new hint is displayed in the upper right-hand corner. It is linked to the day on which the timer is running, so you can get there to stop it with a single click.

Furthermore, a hint is displayed in the page title of your browser. Even when surfing the web with a crowd of open tabs, you can detect a running timer as well as the time measured so far in no time.

Julia in New features

With mite, you might share the report of a project with a third party in a very easy way. By activating the appropriate option on a single report, you will be given a private link. Hand this link to any person you want to be informed about the status of the project – as simple as that. Your customer, project manager or whoever will then be able to view the corresponding time entries. Even without his or her own mite.account.

We launched this feature in September 08. Today, we added the option to specify exactly what you want to show up in the shared report. Now, you can choose if you want the revenue as well as the user names to be displayed. Decide for yourself how much transparency should be added to your projects!

Thanks to Hagen, Jörg, Lucas, Jürgen and other users for suggesting this feature. Keep the feedback coming!

Julia in New features

8 hours 42 minuten – Wednesdays’ total working hours. To get this information, you either used to have to click the day in question or dive into the report section.

Passé! Simply hover your mouse over any day of the calendar. No matter if in weekly or monthly view, your daily working hours will now be displayed right away.

It’s a small update, but those details are exactly the ones that do matter in our opinion. Hope you like it too!

Julia in New features

Mac user? We got something special for you: The first sleek Mac client for mite was released today. With DynaMite, you can control your timers directly from the menu bar of your operating system.

If you’re tracking your exact working hours throughout the day, the tool comes in pretty handy. Always keep an eye on running timers; start, stop or switch timers with a single click. Directly from your menu bar, featuring a native look & feel. It cannot get much more comfortable to track your times.

DynaMite was developed by Swiss MediaAtelier, using our open API. It is available in English as well as in German language. You will have to run Mac OS 10.4.10 (Tiger) or higher to experience it. Please activate the API for your mite.account if you want to give it a try: you will find the option by clicking on your user name in the upper right-hand corner.

A trial is available for free forever, which will restrict the running time of your timers. A single licence can be purchased within the external application. DynaMite is €10, support by MediaAtelier included.

Any feedback, suggestions and ideas should be directed to Stefan Fürst, the developer. Thank you so much, Stefan, for your great work!

Update 12/04/09: Tiger is not supported anymore. DynaMite runs on 10.5 (Leopard) or higher.

Julia in New features, Add ons

(Thanks to Bruno Girin for uploading the picture under a Creative Commons licence)

How might a product do in in the eyes of an international jury, that has been improved and rethought for two years now, based on the feedback of German-speaking users?

How will a one-year-old German startup do, suddenly facing competition from companies from all over the world?

How might an enthusiastic just-out-of-college founder duo do, running their tiny yet agile business, compared to middle-sized VC-backed teams, driven by experienced corporate guys?

We’ll see for ourselves: Today, we launch the web-based time tracking tool mite in English language.

mite. Sleek time tracking for teams and freelancers. from mite on Vimeo.

Do you think we deserve a chance? Because we do care for an excellent product and enthusiastic customers, rather than for VC, a big hit on TechCrunch, or a short-dated attention peak?

Spread the word, then! Tell your overseas colleagues. Donate a tweet. Blog about the launch. And don’t forget to drop us some helpful feedback, if you happen to stumble upon a bug.

Let’s take the ride together. And get some questions answered.
Thank you so much.

Julia in New features