What’s Next for TrackRecord

TrackRecord 2 has been available for a while now and has bedded in fantastically. We have individuals, freelancers, agencies and companies throughout the world using TrackRecord to accurately track their time easily.

When the original TrackRecord started out, we used it in house to manage our time with just Basecamp. Since then, we have extended the features and services that TrackRecord now works with.

So, whether you’re using Freckle, Freshbooks, Tick or Basecamp classic, TrackRecord will make tracking your time easy.

New Features & New Third Parties

The best thing about our job is getting feedback from our customers, we are always looking for ways to make TrackRecord better and solve your headaches. We are also looking to integrate with more third parties.

So, if we’re missing a third party application from your perfect list or a killer feature that would make your life easier, let us know and we’ll look to add it in the future.

On improving our customer support

Hundreds of customers use our products on a daily basis to help them manage their businesses and increase their productivity – which is why it’s important that we’re able to offer agile and effective support.

For a long time that meant offering support via email. But as we’ve grown, so too have the number of requests we receive. In order to make the process of responding to customer issues as efficient and friendly as possible, we’re happy to announce the availability of our new support centre. It’s our hope that by introducing the support centre we’ll be able to improve support response times across the board.

To that end, you’ll find articles that focus on common problems as well as the ability to post and review public questions. If you still can’t find the answers you’re looking for you are still free to send us an email via our contact form.

Introducing TrackRecord 2

For almost three years businesses across the world have trusted TrackRecord to accurately track and bill their time. We’ve spoken with hundreds of customers about exactly what makes their businesses tick. The result is TrackRecord 2. A ground-up rewrite designed to make your life easier and your invoices more accurate.

Here are just a few of the changes TrackRecord 2 brings to the table:

• Multiple services. Unlimited accounts
  Whether you’re a busy freelancer or part of a dedicated team, TrackRecord has you covered. Connect to services like FreshBooks, Basecamp Classic and Tick and even setup multiple accounts for each. Sharing your time between accounts is as simple as dragging-and-dropping. Neat, right?
• Smart search & active filtering
  Many of you asked for it, and we’re happy to deliver. TrackRecord 2 comes with search built into the project pane. Not only that, but we’ve improved our filtering to be faster and more flexible.
• Speed, security and safety
  We’ve made changes across the board to make TrackRecord more secure, including proper keychain handling of account credentials and improved account management. Not only that, TrackRecord now saves your data each time a change is made, making sure you’re always up-to-date. Our networking code has also had a total ground-up rewrite, and we’re happy to report that it’s now up to 400% faster. Yep, you read that right. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, so we went ahead and replaced the dog.

We put a lot of work and a whole lot of love into TrackRecord 2 and we think you’ll love it. As a thank you to all of our loyal customers, we’re happy to announce that TrackRecord 2 will be available from today as an upgrade for the small price of $5. Click here to check out TrackRecord 2.

An important message regarding changes to Basecamp

Dear TrackRecord customers,

For the past two years we have been dedicated to delivering the best Basecamp time tracking application for the Mac. We’ve spoken with many of you and heard just how essential both TrackRecord and Basecamp are to you and your clients.

We’re writing to you today because, as some of you may have heard, 37signals have recently announced the imminent release of the next iteration of their Basecamp product. They’re calling it Basecamp Next and are currently rolling it out as a separate product.

Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to us, 37signals have chosen to entirely remove time tracking from their Next product. You can view a list of the other services they will be removing on their official blog. While we fully support the development of Basecamp as a service, and are excited to see where the Next product takes us, we’re also fairly shocked that 37signals would terminate time tracking support so abruptly.

So where do we go from here? The good news is that Basecamp Next is currently an opt-in service. Meaning that the Basecamp we know and love will continue to be supported by 37signals for the foreseeable future, and will continue to work with TrackRecord. It’s important to note, however, that users who choose to migrate to the Basecamp Next service will no longer be able to track time.

While 37signals have mentioned that they will consider adding time tracking support for Next in the future, we’ve been given no estimates as to when (or even if) this is likely to happen. As such, we urge you to contact 37signals to let them know exactly what kind of impact the loss of time tracking will have on your business, and to formally request it be reimplemented in the Next product.

To do so, you can create a support ticket at the following address: http://help.37signals.com/tickets/new, or alternatively you can reach 37signals directly by email at email@37signals.com

While there is no immediate threat to TrackRecord or Basecamp users, we feel it would be beneficial for all involved to get a clear and concise response from 37signals regarding the future of time tracking support in Basecamp.

DropIn’ prices

DropIn is the best way for Dropbox users to share files fast on their Macs. Since releasing adrop.in we’ve seen DropIn grow to become an integral part of many of your creative lives. Today we’d like to sweeten that deal by making the application completely free. We love seeing how people are using DropIn on a day-to-day basis and it’s our hope that this change can help put DropIn into the hands of a much larger audience.

Along with pricing changes we’ve also released an update that includes some exciting new features:

• Custom domain sharing
  Love sharing files via adrop.in but want a more personal touch? It’s now possible to configure DropIn to use a domain of your choice completely free of charge.
• Speed and stability improvements
  We’ve worked hard to improve bottlenecks and have rewritten large parts of the core infrastructure to help with stability.
• More reliable automated screenshot updating
  DropIn is now smarter when it comes to finding and sharing your latest screenshots.
• More secure URL generation
• Interface tweaks

As DropIn will no longer be appearing in the Mac App Store, customers who have previously purchased the application will be required to download it from its new home. We apologise for any inconvenience but promise that it’s for the best!

Nevertheless, we look forward to what the future holds and are excited to experience it with you.

New bulk pricing

TrackRecord is used on a daily basis by teams all over the world. Which is why, starting today, we’re revising our pricing options to make TrackRecord an even better fit for people buying in bulk. Whether you’re a small team or a much larger outfit, it’s now possible to see savings of up to $10 per license depending on the quantity of your order. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Orders of 4 or more licenses will see a saving of $5 per license.
• Orders of 7 or more licenses will see a saving of $10 per license.

Paired with our exceptional support, there’s never been a better time to purchase TrackRecord.

TrackRecord 1.3

TrackRecord 1.3 is the single biggest update we’ve made to TrackRecord since its debut almost two years ago. For the 1.3 release we looked at exactly what made TrackRecord the best Basecamp time tracking experience around, and then we set out to make it even better. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Project list filtering
You asked for it, and we’re happy to deliver. TrackRecord now comes with filter support, allowing you to selectively hide projects that you’re either not involved in or aren’t actively timing against. It’s a great way to de-clutter and prioritise.

Todo filtering
Only want to see the to-dos you’re personally responsible for? TrackRecord comes with a handy responsibility filter. Toggle it on or off to instantly breakdown your project listing.

Manual time editing improvements
Entering time manually shouldn’t be a chore. That’s why TrackRecord 1.3 comes with support for multiple time formats as well as improved error handing. Whether you like to deal in hours, minutes and seconds (02:00:00/02:00) or prefer Basecamp’s native approach (2.0), there’s something here for everyone.

Time tallying
TrackRecord now comes with a timer tally in the application’s bottom bar. Select one or more timers and we’ll total your time. Perfect for quickly checking how much time you’ve spent across a project or a particular period of time.

Drag & Drop
Want to start a timer quickly? Just drag a project or to-do from the project pane onto the timer list and TrackRecord 1.3 will automatically create an associated timer.

New networking class
We’ve totally rewritten TrackRecord’s networking class from the ground up. You’ll see faster connection times and better error handling.

UI updates
Our 1.2 update brought the application up-to-speed in the interface department, and TrackRecord 1.3 continues the trend. We’ve completely removed the restrictions surrounding project pane resizing, making it even easier to read those long to-dos.

Lion fixes
TrackRecord 1.3 fixes a number of Lion-specific rendering-issues, and we can honestly say it’s never looked better!

Update for TrackRecord

Just a quick update…

We’ve been working hard on the latest update to TrackRecord which we are going to be launching on the 15th June. This update will include big changes to the UI, better system preferences and we’ve fixed a number of bugs. We know it has been a while since the last update and hope its been worth the wait.

There are of course more updates planned for the future and if you have any comments or suggestions please do let us know.

Please note that the price is going to increase on the 15th June for new licences, existing licences will be able to upgrade for free.

More updates available on our website and via Twitter.

Customising your TrackRecord experience

Whenever we add features to TrackRecord we discuss the impact those new features will have on our customers. To date, we’ve always tried to spend our development time wisely, working on features that will be appreciated by the majority, rather than the minority. This often involves admitting that not everyone likes to work in the same way. As a result, TrackRecord tries (wherever possible) to allow you to customise its time tracking behaviour.

The majority of this customisation will occur in TrackRecord’s preference pane. Today we’d like to give you a quick run through of the options available to you. To open the Preference pane, use the keyboard shortcut , or select ‘Preferences…’ from the TrackRecord menu.

Here’s a run down of the options available to you under the General tab:

• Add TrackRecord to the menu bar. As we discussed in a previous news post, this option toggles the existence of the TrackRecord menu bar item.
• Hide timer badges in the Project pane. Project pane badges are handy for keeping track of timers which have unposted time against them, but some people don’t like the visual distraction. The preference pane makes it easy to hide them.
• Remove timers after they have been posted to Basecamp. If selected, TrackRecord will remove timers from TrackRecord after they’ve been posted to Basecamp.
• Let me edit a Timer’s description immediately after it is created. Get started quickly by editing your timers description.

Under the Basecamp tab there are a number of options for Basecamp specific settings:

• Hide to-dos and to-dolists marked as ‘complete’ in Basecamp. Great for completionists, TrackRecord lets you hide anything you’ve marked as complete within Basecamp.
• Automatically set posted times to the current date and time. This one has tripped a few people up. It’s selected automatically and ensures that whenever you post time to Basecamp, the timer is updated to today’s time and date. Handy for people who don’t enjoy manually updating timer dates.

Today we’ve covered just a few of the options available to TrackRecord users. Please feel free to grab a copy yourself and give them a try. TrackRecord is built to work the way you want it to. If there’s something you think we’re missing, why not drop us a line?

The TrackRecord mobile status board

Here in the office we’re all big fans of Panic. Being a Mac-based web design agency, we use Transmit on an almost daily basis and absolutely love it. We especially loved their Panic Status Board and knew that when we released our first Mac application, TrackRecord, we wanted to take a shot at cooking up our own status board solution.

Sadly, while we don’t quite have the budget for a nice, wall-mounted Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display, we do have an office iPad. The result is the TrackRecord mobile status board.

It runs from our local webserver and makes use of a healthy helping of HTML5 and CSS3. We grab site visits from our Mint installation, with the number of application downloads, sales and revenue generated from our own logs. We even calculate the number of trial copies due to expire today (and those due to expire the day after). Running in the background is a Google Map which we use to plot recent sale locations. And at the bottom we’ve even got a twitter activity ticker to let us know when we need to get back to people.

All data is updated via AJAX calls at set intervals, to keep things nice and fresh. Rest assured, though, that all of the information you see in the above pictures has been faked. Visitor counts, downloads and purchases have been (unfortunately) massively inflated, and purchase locations have been randomized.