iZepto Blog

Sorry to those of you trying to use the site in the last hour or so.  We had put up a release with some new functionality and there was some nastiness with some clashing modules. <<Insert technical gobbledigook here that makes it sound hard to solve (which it was) but you won’t feel any sympathy (’cause you shouldn’t) for the blind panic we were feeling (which we were)>>

The good news is that there has been some work done under the covers to allow us to more easily add scheduled jobs.  To start, the weekly reminder email (Under Admin in the Preferences area) you can now set the day of week and time of day for the email to be sent.  This is in your local time zone so make sure you set that preference too!

On the iPhone application front we are very close to submitting the application to Apple for review.  We will update you on our progress.  We have been doing some additional work to improve usability for getting set up based on feedback from our Beta test.  Not long now!

I love the iPhone.  As a user.

As a developer, the story is a little different.  I won’t bother you with all the details but suffice to say that our perfectly working application using the Beta 4 version of the code is only now back on its feet and deploying again.

We have some concerns around the fragility of the deployment.  We can get the application working well on one machine and device, but it fails on another.  Getting it working on the other machine causes problems on the initial machine.  We aren’t the only people to have identified that iPhone applications are fragile.  What we don’t want to do is join some other companies whose applications have been published when not stable, or worse still, have been removed from the Application Store.

So, although many of you have been inquiring as to when the iZepto iPhone application will be in the Application Store, I am afraid our answer is ‘not yet’.  We are just starting a beta program with a few ‘friends of iZepto’ to try to gauge the stability issues.  If that goes well we should be in a situation to submit to Apple in a few weeks.

Please be patient.  We would rather release a good product later rather than a bad product now.

For those of you from the US, or who just love dates in the mm/dd/yyyy format, today is your day!  iZepto V1.7 now supports both date formats as a company preference.  This effects both the display of dates as well as the entry of dates for time entry creation.

Make sure you check out the Company Preference settings on the Admin page (only if you have Admin privileges of course).

Version 1.6 went out today with some updates to the reporting functionality.  The date section of reports is now split into “All” for reports on all dates, “Period” which is the “last 1 month” type of report and “Date Range” where you can specify a start and end date.

Why Period and Date Range?  Well, if you set up a Period report then the actual date range in your report changes depending on when you run it.  Set up a “current 1 month” type report and you can always see what you have done in the current month.  Set up a “previous 1 month” report ready to do your invoicing at the start of the month for the month just ended.

Don’t forget that you can add a saved report to your Dashboard, and then get the total emailed to you and others daily.  A great way to keep track of budgets and easily communicate with your clients.

Sometime soon the iTunes App Store is going to open and hopefully soon after that you are going to be able to see this on your home screen:

Yes, we have made a native iPhone application for iZepto.  Now you can quickly and easily enter time wherever you are using the intuitive touch interface that is the iPhone.

First, you will need to have your settings in place.  Of course, this is done the the standard way by clicking on the settings icon:

and then entering your login details:

Now, you are ready to use the application.  When you launch the application we communicate directly to the iZepto website to retrieve your information and confirm your login:

Then, we rotate nicely into entry mode.  The areas of the screen are all touch sensitive, ready for you to choose what you would like:

Selecting the date will bring up the native date picker, and selecting the duration will bring up a time picker:

The task picker shows a list of your favourites. In the next version, we will also allow task searching:

Once you have entered all your required information, just touch Add Entry and your entry will be immediately updated on www.izepto.com:

Fast, simple, intuitive.  Timesheets Made Human!

Today we have added a ‘Same as Yesterday’ and ‘Same as Last Week’ feature in the Time Entry page.  If you haven’t entered time for a particular day, but you do have time entered for the previous day you will get a prompt like the picture below.If you click the link it will simply apply all time entry for the current day the same as the previous day.  Nifty!It would be great to get some feedback on whether you think this is helpful.

After some feedback we have updated the Daily Reminder email functionality for Watches to not send emails if the total is zero.  There might be some who might quite like to get an email saying ‘nothing happened’ but it seems like the majority don’t.Of course, we could have added a preference to “don’t send on zero total” but as I may have expressed earlier I am not a huge fan of preference-mania.  A tool should make assumptions on the best case and make it easy for users.So, keep the feedback coming.  We are working on some exciting things that I am not ready to talk about, so you will need to wait a bit longer… 

The latest release of iZepto now includes Project Sharing.  With Project Sharing you can nominate a project that you want another company to see.  This means they can see the project, all tasks and time entries for those tasks.This feature was requested through our competition, and enables you to let your clients monitor budgets themselves.  Since the project and related information looks like one of their own projects, they can even set up a saved report or even a Watch that emails the report total to them daily.Why try out Project Sharing by going to the Admin page!  Here are some tips:

•  When you share a project, you can name the client that the project will appear under.  Why not call it the name of your company - it will probably be the most logical spot for your client to look under
• You can create reports that combine ‘real’ projects with shared projects
• If someone has shared a project with you, you can edit the client it appears under and even the name and shortcut of that project.  The original project information is unchanged - just your reference changes
• At any time either side can stop the sharing by going to the Share Project page and clicking ‘Stop Sharing’
• When you share a project you can optionally send an email (and CC yourself) with details about the shared project

We’ve resolved the performance problems that iZepto began experiencing a couple of days ago (they was actually fixed yesterday but we wanted to be super-sure they weren’t coming back). Thanks for your patience!

Congratulations to CrashedSnow for suggesting integrating with Jira from Atlassian.  Rather than announce we are going to do something, this time we have held back and actually done the work already!

So, feel free to go to the Administration tab and see the new link to add a Jira Connector.  You can link a project in iZepto with a project in a Jira instance and get all issues created in Jira automatically created as tasks in iZepto!

The main benefit of this change is reduced overhead in task creation in iZepto.

Please note that all Jira Connectors are synchronised every 15 minutes so you won’t see them straight away, but you will see them fairly quickly.  If you are not seeing them, please ensure that your Jira instance is publicly visible, that the XML-RPC API is enabled and that your user id and password are valid.

For your own peace of mind we recommend that you create a special read-only privilege user in Jira.  We don’t need to do any updates to Jira, so making a special low privilege user would be a good idea from a security perspective.  Of course we encrypt your password in our system but you can never be too careful