Rachel Cook regaled us with the story of her adventures to Silicon Valley as an angel investor. It would seem that some of the crazy stories that we hear are actually true, and it must have been amazing to be literally rubbing shoulders with the big names of the industry. Although I don’t think the current level of VC and Angel investment is healthy for online applications, it is interesting to see how that side of the web works.
Next up was Lisa Herrod who once again gave a thought provoking presentation of what usability and accessibility should really mean and how it should be handled with in an organisation. As developers we often think that standard compliant code is enough to make a site accessible – where in reality, you can’t predict how an alternative input user will react until you watch them use your site. If you want to view the slides, they are available on slideshare.
A big thankyou to AWIA for the opportunity to sponsor the night, along with the other sponsors. It was fantastic, and I can’t wait for the next one!
PS. Jordan Brock videoed both presentations and has posted them to Vimeo. Which I have also embedded below:
This release of 88 Miles has quite a number of improvements and bug fixes which I will outline is detail
below — as always if you have any suggestions or comments, drop me a line!
Saasu.com integration
Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I’d like to
see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason)
a third party has come to the rescue! Saasu | The web finance engine
is an online accounting system that can deal with everything from invoices to payroll to inventory.
The integration allows you to create invoices straight from your 88 Miles timesheets!
To enable it, you will need to have a full Saasu account. Once you do, click on “My Membership” >
“Manage Files and Users” and take note of the WSAccessKey and the FileUid.
Then, back at 88 Miles, click 3rd Party Apps and then Enable your access (If you are currently
logged in you can save time by clicking here). Enter
the access key and file uid in the fields provided.
You can now sync your companies and contacts (Click on “List companies”)
and create invoices by creating a time sheet report.
OpenID support
88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles.
If you have an existing 88 Miles account, you will need to claim your ID. Go to the Identites page and add you unique OpenID URL. You can even claim more than one
identity!
There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends
and the data that the server expects is the same). To facilitate this, the end points have changed slightly. I would recommend checking
out the developer page for all of the details.
If you aren’t a developer, but would like to take advantage of the 88 Miles API, MadPilot Productions
is available for your integration needs. Whether you just need some scripts to migrate across to 88 Miles, or you want to modify an existing
system, MadPilot can do it for you at a reasonable rate.
Pricing changes
After reviewing the different plan, we have decided to reduce the discount of the quarterly and yearly plans. They are still great
value with 10% and 20% discounts respectively. For those of you already on the plans, the change will come in to effect from the
first billing cycle AFTER July. Don’t worry, you will get an email reminding you later on down the track!
New Server
Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails
platform. This means everything will be quicker — so now you should be spending even LESS time tracking and more time doing.
Well that’s it — I hope you find the changes useful. As always, please send your feedback and suggestions via the website. Happy tracking!
The Ideas series has been a fantastic set of talks over the past couple of years, and this year‘s event should be no different. We are lucky enough to have Lisa Herrod a Usability consultant flying over from Sydney and Rachel Cook a Perth-based entrepreneur, speaking on the night.
Where:The Melbourne Hotel, 942 Hay Street, Perth, Western Australia
The Australian Web Industry Association is proud to announce the first speaking event of 2008 – Ideas4.
Please come along, hear two great speakers talk about usability, accessibility, web start-ups and more, mingle with industry peers and support the work of the Australian Web Industry Association.
Tickets are $25 for members and $35 for non-members and will be available soon from the Ideas4 website. They usually run out quick, so keep an eye on the site!
Oh, and for those who are wondering about the new changes that have been made in the past couple of days, there is a newsletter due sometime this week.
The announcement for the 2007 WA Web Awards finalists has just been made, and 88 Miles has gotten a guernsey in the Online Application category!
The WA Web Awards is in it’s third year and is run by the Australian Web Industry Association (formally known as Port80). For those three years, it has congratulated the Western Australian Web community for the fine work that they do.
The quality of the entries this year were fantastic, so it is a huge honour to be included amongst the list.
The awards night is on August 17 — listen out on this blog to see if we won!
88 Miles wasn’t the only Western Australian Web 2.0 app to make the list:
In at number 5 was Minti, the parenting social network. Number 6 was Scouta – the Podcast suggestionsnetwork started by Richard Giles. 23 was Bronwen Clune’s PerthNorg. Number 29 was the social bookmarking tool, Buzka
Watch out for the Australian startups, they really are starting to gain momentum!
Can you believe it is half way through March already! Where has the year gone? Well part of my year
has been spent cleaning up the 88 Miles codebase. Since this project is nearly a year old, it was refreshing to clean out some
of the cobwebs. The plan is to roll out a new version of the codebase in the next two weeks or so — but first, I thought I might
let you know of what is going on, as the changes may affect you.
88 Miles has had SOAP and XML-RPC webservices for a while, but they don’t seem to have been very well received. In fact, it seems that
most of you want to use a REST interface to access 88 Miles remotely. Well, your wishes have come true! The
next release will include a full REST interface, that will allow you to do everything you can do with the web version (the old SOAP version
only had a subset of functions). The REST interface will also include JSON support which should allow Windows Vista gadgets and
OSX dashboard widgets to be created (hint hint!).
Now, here is my question to you: Who is still using the SOAP/XML-RPC system? If anyone is actively using it, please let me know
— I’d like to remove them on the next update. If they are used, I can leave them online for a little bit longer and help you
out converting over to the newer REST system.
As always, all of your feedback is appreciated. Expect another newsletter in a couple of weeks. Until then, happy tracking!
As most people are winding down for the season, 88 Miles is full steam ahead with a number
of updates that will be pushed out through during the Christmas/New years break. The changes
include a help system, some more UI changes and time budgeting.
So for those of you who have been waiting patiently to set a time limit on a project, your wait
is NEARLY over! I’ll explain it further after it is released, but in a nutshell, you enter
the number of hours (or minutes) you have to complete a project and you get all sorts of warnings
when you go over.
Anyway, that is enough for now, as I’m sure there is much eating, drinking and merrying to be had.
On behalf of 88 Miles and MadPilot Productions, please let me wish you all a happy festive season,
and I hope you look forward to a spectacular new year.
Welcome to the December of edition of the 88 Miles newsletter! This month brings some cool updates
to 88 Miles, which I hope will make your lives just that little bit easier.
88 Miles tip
Did you know you can manually add shifts to a project retrospectively?
This is really handy if you forgot to punch in, or if you did some work away from you computer.
Just click the “Options” button,
select “Summary” from the drop-down panel and then click “Manually add a shift”.
New accounts
The biggest update this month is the introduction of the new business accounts. The business version
has been in beta for a couple of months, and it is now time for it to go live!
The pricing structure should cater for everyone — there is a price point for everyone from freelancers
to huge corporations — if you are interested in seeing how much is all costs now, goto the pricing page. For those of you who were
business beta testers, you get a special surprise — you get access to the corporate version of 88 Miles
for free for the next 12 months (Value: $648!).
The other big news is that the free account has just become useful! The free account has no time limits,
and has no limit on the number of staff you can have. The only limit is you can only punch 40 hours per
month (so roughly 10 hours per week). As a result, those of you who’s accounts have expired have been
un-expired — so login again and see what has changed!
Better reports
88 Miles will now generate graphs for project summaries and project staff summaries. If your have a
JavaScript enabled browser, you will be able get a visual representation of where your time is going.
To see the graphs:
Pick a project
Click “Options”
Click “Summary”
Click “Graph view”
Until next time…
Happy time tracking! (And remember to tell you friends!)
The announcement for the 2007 
