Knowing how much time you have spent on your projects is really important, because everytime a project runs over time, it costs you money.
88 Miles makes it really easy to track your time — simply punch-in when you start and punch-out when you finish.
It would seem a few people have been having some problems enabling web service access for their Saasu.com accounts.
To alleviate this, I have updated the help files to include a more detailed set of instructions. Head over to the new help page to find out more.
On Saturday I posted that 88 Miles was profiled on the Startups Carnival run by VS Consulting. Well, the results are out now, and 88 Miles came a extremely respectable 4th from 28 entries!
A big congratulations to Richard at Scouta for taking out the first prize and to GoodBarry and Suburb View for rounding out the top three.
Also hats off to OurWishingWell, who shared fourth place with 88 Miles.
VS Consulting Group has been running an online startups carnival over the past two-weeks, profiling 28 up and coming Australian startups.
It is well worth checking out some of the other entrants, including fellow West Australian Scouta.
A big thanks to Vishal for putting on such an “event” — it really goes to show that the SaaS-o-sphere is alive and well over here in Australia!
Last month, 88 Miles added OpenID, allowing you to use a single sign in with out having to give us your password details. That is great unless you wanted to use our webservice API, which required a username and password.
This is no longer the case!
I have just pushed out an OAuth implementation, which allows 88 Miles user to grant access to 3rd party applications without providing a password! There are a number of pre-built libraries for a number of popular languages, which will make interfacing with 88 Miles easy.
If you are a developer, check out the development page for details
As part of this roll out, I also pushed a change which will allow you to select what users have access to particular projects and companies, so rather than an all-in (public) or all-out (private) company or project, you can select a subset of your staff members that will have access.
To do this, select the “Let me choose…” option for visibility when adding a Company or Project (You will need to select “More Details” first if you are on the projects page) and you will see all of you staff appear.
Happy time tracking!
I just purchased an ASUS Eee PC and as I was setting up my desktop environment, I realised that after I set up my web browser, I was basically done — because I rely so heavily on SaaS for day-to-day tasks. Not only that, I don’t have to worry about whether the tiny 900Mhz processor (under-clocked to 630Mhz) would be up to the task of running my apps. And best all all, because Firefox run in Linux, there is no compatibility issues.
I use (obviously) use 88 Miles for my time tracking, Saasu.com for accounts, Google Apps for office facilities (although, I do admit, I’m still not on Gmail yet). For my RSS, Newsgator has a web version, and I can still get my Twitter feed via their web interface.
This, I think is the best example of why SaaS rocks. In less than 15 minutes, all of the software that I use everyday was ready and waiting for me.
Wednesday night was was Ideas4 put on by the Australian Web Industry association, and proudly sponsored by 88 Miles. It was a fantastic night of talks from two very talented ladies.
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:
Ideas 4 – Rachel Cook at Ideas4 on Vimeo.
Ideas 4 – Lisa Herrod at Ideas4 on Vimeo..
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!
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.
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!
If you aren’t aware of what OpenID is, head over to http://www.openid.net
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.
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!
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!
Myles
Just a quick note to let you know that 88 Miles will be down for maintenance on January 25th 2008 between 10am and 10:30am AWST (GMT+9).
During this time, we are moving to a new server to increase the capacity and speed of the system — I have done a couple of test runs, so that side of things should be fairly smooth. I only really envisage 5 minutes of actual downtime, but with DNS delegation, you never know!
During that time, you won’t be able to punch in or punch out of projects — however, if you are punched in on a project, the system will remember it and you should see the running task when it comes back online.
If you have any questions, please contact us me via the MadPilot Productions website.
Thanks for your cooperation, and sorry for the inconvience
Myles
MadPilot Productions makers of 88 Miles is a proud member of the Australian Web Industry Association and is proudly sponsoring their upcoming event — Ideas4.
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.
When: January 30, 2008 7–10pm
Where: The Melbourne Hotel, 942 Hay Street, Perth, Western Australia
Tickets are $25 for AWIA, $35 for non-members.
Anyone in the Rails community would have read Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. For those of you who don’t know Zed, he wrote Mongrel, which is the default web server library used in Rails, and which coincidently powers 88 Miles. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every rails list around. I’m not going to discuss what he said, or his tone, as it has been done to death, and he seems like the type of guy that you need to know to understand where he is coming from.
What did hit home from me was what he said out enterprise Rails. To frame this correctly, have a listen to the first half of this podcast from RailsConf.
As a rubyist, I could never understand why projects like JRuby or IronRuby existed. Why would you want to run another language in a different virtual machine? After reading and listening to Zed, the answer is obvious – integration for enterprise. If you look at existing enterprise systems they will run on technologies such as Java and ASP.NET and as a result, prefer to use things like Tomcat and IIS – they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache in many cases.
So take the easy and speed of development of Rails and put it into an environment that has traditionally been in the realm of complex systems that are hard to maintain and hard to use. Instead of worrying about writing XML configuration files, developers can spend more time making sure their apps are easy to use
I’ve been playing around with IronRuby a little lately, and am planning on trying out JRuby just to see how it is all going to fit together — and I have to admit, I’m getting pretty excited about having a truely cross server language that will be easy to deploy and maintain.
