yaTimer News

yaTimer 2.3 is now in testing

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:44:26 GMT

All the features, fixes and improvements that will make it into yaTimer 2.3 are finished, as always I had to delay a lot of features to the next version to keep something even remotely like a schedule.

If there are no serious bugs yaTimer 2.3 will be released this month.

yaTimer 2.3 will be a free upgrade to all yaTimer customers, you can download the current version on the download page.

yaTimer Development Update: Version 2.3 Almost Complete

Nir Dobovizki — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:00:01 GMT

The next version of yaTimer is almost done, I expect it will be finished in another week or so.

When it’s finished there is still a lot of testing to do, but based on my experience and the fact that this version is about making the existing features better and not introducing new features I expect the testing phase to be relatively short.

I estimate yaTimer 2.3 will be released sometime near the beginning of December, the actual release date will be when the version is ready.

yaTimer 2.3 will be a free upgrade to all yaTimer customers.

First Page of yaTimer’s Help is On-Line

Nir Dobovizki — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:19:54 GMT

The first page, describing the task list - yaTimer’s main window, went on-line today.

The current plan is to finish the rest of the on-line help at the rate of roughly one page a week.

As always, comments are extremely welcome.

yaTimer 2.3 Development Plans

Nir Dobovizki — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:36:58 GMT

There are a lot of small user interface improvements in my to-do list, each one, taken separately, is not worth doing – it will just not have the impact on user experience to justify the time investment.

But all of them together – that’s another thing entirely.

So, for the next version of yaTimer I’m going to put all the big features I’ve been planning on hold and add all the small user interface improvements instead.

If you have any suggestions about UI improvements to yaTimer there’s still them to add them to the next version, leave them in the comments for this post or send them to me using the contact form.

yaTimer 2.2.1 New Feature - Screen Saver Detection

Nir Dobovizki — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:01:12 GMT

As I mentioned before yaTimer 2.2.1 adds just one small feature – and this feature is screen saver detection.

If you turn this feature on (from the options window) yaTimer will automatically stop all running timers when the screen saver starts, if you use yaTimer to track time spent on the computer you can turn this on and if you forget to stop the timer when you finish your work it will stop automatically in a few minutes when the screen saver kicks in.

yaTimer 2.2.1 released

Nir Dobovizki — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:55:58 GMT

After a lot of hard work yaTimer 2.2.1 is finally released.

This is a service update, with just one tiny feature and a lot of bug fixes.

As always you can upgrade you older version for free here.

With this version I also updated my release process and automated some things that I did manually before, this set me back about a week or two for this release but it will speed up future releases.

The plan is to add this new version to the automatic updates system sometime next week.

yaTimer 2.2.1

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:18:04 GMT

Today the next version of yaTimer went into the final testing phase, a few more days of intensive testing and the new version will be released.

Version 2.2.1 is a minor service release, it contains a few bug fixes and only one new feature.

yaTimer 2.2 Changelog

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:10:24 GMT

Here is the list of all user-visible changes between yaTimer version 2.1 and 2.2:

NEW - Add create from template to toolbar
NEW - Grouping in task list
NEW - Un-pause tasks
FIXED - Comment text truncated on reports
NEW - Weekly project timesheet report
NEW - Weekly client timesheet report
NEW - A new version of all task reports with full comments
NEW - Reset all tasks
FIXED - Time event text unreadable when using XP classic theme
FIXED - Time event show up in wrong order when resetting a running task
NEW - Automatically start yaTimer on login option
FIXED - Bug when manually entering time in the past
FIXED - Make sure the window never starts off-screen
FIXED - Change toolbar style
FIXED - Change on-top button style
NEW - Mark task as non-billable
NEW - Mark task template as non-billable
NEW - filter report by billable status
NEW - Add fixed and per-hour rate to task
NEW - Add fixed and per-hour rate to task template
NEW - Add task creation date to task
NEW - Billing breakdown report
NEW - Add fixed and per-hour rate to task
NEW - Add estimated time to task
FIXED - Use Vista New Common Dialogs
NEW - Bill report
NEW - Add more info to task tooltip
NEW - Grouping in reports
NEW - estimated/actual time report
FIXED - Change task text color to white when task color is dark
FIXED - Change startup message
NEW - help button
FIXED - Tasks will sometimes not show up in weekly report
FIXED - Bug when switching between timer and countdown when task is running
FIXED - When deleting the complete event of a completed task it may become inaccessible
FIXED - Change CSV files from UTF-8 to current code page (Excel can’t read UTF-8 CSV)
FIXED - Bug in options dialog when running from a portable drive

yaTimer 2.2 Released

Nir Dobovizki — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:48:12 GMT

yaTimer 2.2 is officially released - late last night I updated the web site and uploaded the new installer.

All yaTimer customers get the new version for free from the upgrade page.

Now it’s time to start working on the next version, so if you have any suggestions or requests leave a comment or use the contact page.

The Next Version of yaTimer – version 2.2

Nir Dobovizki — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:08:10 GMT

Blogging has been very light the last few weeks – this is usually a sign I’m working on something big, in this case it’s the next version of yaTimer – my time tracking tool.

First, the standard disclaimer, this post is about an unreleased version of yaTimer, nothing is final until the software is actually released.

yaTimer 2.2 will be a free upgrade for all current customers.

yaTimer version 2.2 is almost ready – and it’s a big update:

Billing

<>In this version I’m introducing the first set of billing related features, you can set a fixed task cost or an hourly rate and yaTimer will happily track how much you need to charge and print bills.

You can also mark a task as not billable and filter the reports to show only billable tasks (or only not billable if you like, or both).

This is just the beginning, there are a lot more billing features planed for the future.

Estimation

Another “tip of the iceberg” feature is time estimation, in this version you can enter your estimate when you create a task and view a nice graph of estimated vs. actual time when the task is complete.

Like the billing features this is just the beginning.

Reports

First, all the problem with printing and comments are finally solved, the comments are now printed correctly in all reports and in for every report where comments are truncated or not shown there is a version that will print the full comments.

But the feature that takes the report into the next level is grouping – you can select to group any report by client or project.

Also there are some new reports, the new version has a total of 17 reports and many of the old reports have been improved or fixed.

The User Interface

The biggest user interface improvements is grouping in the task list, you can group your tasks by client, project or color and the task list will be sorted with a header for each group and a small +/- button you can use to hide and show groups.

The pause all tasks button on the toolbar can now also resume all tasks – so if you are working on something and have to take a break you click the pause all button and when you return another click will continue from the point you left off.

There is also a new reset all button, you can set yaTimer to start automatically when you log on and many other small improvements and fixes.

I’m working hard making yaTimer the best and easiest to use time tracking software available, and I believe this version is a big step forward, the version is now in final testing and if there are no show-stopper issues will be released later this week or next week.