The new Squirrel Clock hit two very important milestones today: It now has all the functionality of the old Squirrel Clock – but done much better. It has run from a real web server over the internet and not only locally on my computer. But that’s not enough for me, there were two big things missing from the original Squirrel Clock that I’m not going to launch without: reports and a way to buy subscriptions. With just two days left until the end of the month it’s very unlikely Squirrel Clock will be ready in November,...

There are a lot of features you would want to see in an employee Attendance tracking software, but like almost everything features also follow the Pareto principle (also known as the 20/80 rule), 20% of the features will give you 80% of the benefits. Now, you really want to get the software release as soon as possible and start getting people to use the system and give you real feedback on how real customers use the system (as opposed to the "made up" customer you develop for) - and of course to also get those customer's money so you can keep...

I’ve just uploaded a new version of the Squirrel Clock home page, the only thing missing is the screenshots/tour page, I’ll write it closer to the release when I can make screenshots that will look like the final application. I really welcome any feedback you may have (you can leave a comment on this post, e-mail me using the address in the footer, use the contact form and even twitter) I’ve also updated the yaTimer home page, you can now sign up for the yaTimer newsletter directly from the yaTimer home page and join the exclusive group of...

One of the biggest mistakes I made in the first version of Squirrel Clock is that I structured the GUI around "features" instead of around usage scenarios. This is an extremely common mistake and it always happens when no one stops to really think about the UI and exactly how people will use it. So, in the Squirrel Clock 2 I've completely restructured the application around how people will probably use it, for example, I've moved all the common features employees will use to enter attendance and update their details into the same page, this page will also serve as the main...

A quick note to my readers: I'm writing a lot about Squirrel Clock because that is what I'm working about right now, over the next weeks until Squirrel Clock is released I'm going to write about the design choices I've made and about the development process, if you don't care don't worry, the blog will return to the previous topics some time in December, if you do care tell every one you know who may need to track attendance to register to be notified when Squirrel Clock is ready, anyone who registers will get 20% off the list price, this...

The VPS holding this site was just upgraded, now it has lots and lots of extra capacity to support more users for both of my web applications: yaTimer Central (sync and collaboration tools for the yaTimer time tracking software) and Squirrel Clock (employee time and attendance tracking software). Everything is supposed to keep working just as before, but if you see anything wrong please contact me.

Squirrel Clock is a web based employee attendance tracking software written with the same philosophy and visual style of yaTimer. I plan to release Squirrel Clock some time at the end of November of the beginning of December of 2010, if you want to be notified when Squirrel Clock is ready you can sign up here. I originally released the first version of Squirrel Clock at the beginning of 2010, some people signed up for the free trial, no one actually used the software and not even one of them cared enough to contact me and complain about it - a really...

Last week I sent the first ever issue of the yaTimer newsletter, creating the newsletter was more work that I thought it would be but I'm happy with the result - and it will probably be better next month. I'm planning to send out an issue on the first Tuesday or Wednesday of every month, I have some interesting content planned for the next newsletter so if you are interested in time management you should sign up using the link below (and if you are not interested in time management you probably should be): Sign up for the...

Some times you just need to quickly look up a color hex value, or quickly check if a color is light or dark, so I made a table of all the named colors in .net (that corresponds nicely to the named colors in HTML, CSS and most other platforms). The text color in this table (black for light colors, white for dark colors) was calculated by the code from my post about the perceived darkness of colors. Color Name ...