I’ve had a quick go at upgrading ClockingIT to Ruby On Rails 2.1 and the most difficult snag I ran into was a has_and_belongs_to_many relation with a symbol as the join_table parameter which suddenly lacked the downcase method, and had to be changed to a string.
While reworking my HTML in ClockingIT to support TaskList reordering with Drag and Drop, I ended up with some strange padding around empty LI’s used to make sure a tasklist never ends up empty (to work around a dropOnEmpty problem with Prototype/Scriptaculous). After several hours of trying just about everything, it seems IE decides that and empy LI needs to have some content after all, and that empty content makes IE refuse to set an height on the LI lower than the font-size inherited by the LI. Forcing
style="font-size: 1px; and line-height: 0px;"
on the empty LIs fixed the problem.
We’ve been hard at work lately and we’ve implemented a new design which we’re both very happy with. I’ve also ripped out domTT and created my own tooltips implementation, as domTT was way overkill and created all kinds of problems with stuck tooltips. I’ve also changed the ajax working indicator into something I think gives better and more natural feedback.
We’re not quite ready to make a full announcement and bring in loads of people, but if you want to take it for a spin, it’s available at ClockingIT along with more screen-shots and information.
I’m getting more and more into Ruby on Rails’ RJS Templates, and I’m really enjoying it so far. It’s so easy to make sweeping changes to the page after an ajax call, all genereated from Ruby code. This functionality allowed me to update the completion percent and time estimates on all affected TaskLists when you edit a Task, using just a small loop and some well placed tags in the appropriate places.
There’s also a periodically\_call\_remote which updates the header showing how long you’ve been working on a task as time passes. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to disable the periodical remote call, but I’ll probably turn it into a more general pinger which will update tasks that have changed on the server so your page doesn’t get out of sync with what’s really there.
The calendar also got a massive speedup. I’d more or less just followed the example that came with the CalendarHelper, but that ends up looping through all your events once for each day — which takes ages when you have more than a couple of events. I ended up building a hash of due dates and the tasks that are due on that date, then just doing a lookup on each date instead. Rendering time for my ClockingIT project (with lots of milestones, due dates, tasks and messages) takes about 1 second now instead of 12 seconds which was the old average.
I’m sure I can speed things up further before we officially launch, but it’s not too big of a problem to bother with now. I need to get the rest of the polish and required functionality in place so we can bring in some more testers.
I managed to get Dynarch’s Javascript Calendar integrated whenever you can enter a date/time in ClockingIT. Looks pretty sweet, and works like a charm — although entering a time might be a bit too clickety. We’ll see how it all works out after it’s been used for a while. At least it looks way better than the default Rails datetime_select which is awful and cumbersome to use.
It wasn’t too much of a pain getting it implemented either, as I found a CalendarHelper which took me most of the way. What took the longest was finding out that I had a typo in my attempt to use the helper, but of course I thought it was the helper that was bugged.
I’ve finally gotten around to implementing Drag and Drop of a filtered task view in ClockingIT. It took a bit longer than anticipated due to my Ruby newbieness, but I did manage to get it sorted in the end. While I was at it, I ajaxified edit Task / Tasklist, and fixed the popup menu so it doesn’t go outside of the browser window. Also, adding a new message to a task now updates the message count of the task .
I’m beginning to love RJS templates, they really make it easy working with the DOM and let you do updates that affect multiple elements without breaking a JavaScript sweat.
The wife has also come around and agreed that the icons we have today demand too much attention, and she will be toning them down a bit in the coming days.
According to my Milestone view, I’m 71% done with the 1.0 release. Mostly polish and cleaning up left, ClockingIT is really shaping up to be great. Seeing my project manager at work use it on his laptop for the status-meeting we had this week proved to me that it’s quite usable already. Feel free to register an account and start using it to track your projects, it’s of course totally free.
My wife came up with a new name last week, and now we have the new domain and a new portal in place. Have a looksee at it here. Feel free to try it out as well, it’s free to use and there are no strings attached.
Over the weekend, I implemented commenting on tasks and CSS tab-menus, and got the missus to come up with a new set of icons for the popup-menu and other actions. They look a lot better than the temporary ones I had in place earlier. Things are beginning to come together, it’s really helped that we’ve used it internally here at work the last couple of months. Nothing like some Real World usage to iron out interface problems and find bugs.
It’s actually been fun working on ClockingIT again lately, with new features being implemented and lots of polish applied every evening. Expect more to come, I still have loads of things planned which will make tracking software projects a breeze.
We’re finally closing in on a ‘launchable’ version of my pet Project Manager / Time Tracker. I’ve cleaned up the look quite a bit, and implemented a frontpage design my wife came up with. It’s actually quite usable, and we’ve been using it to keep track of a few projects at work with quite a bit of success. As noone reads my little blog, I figured there’s no harm in writing about it here.
Anyways, it’s free to use, so sign up and please let me know what you think. I’m desperate for some feedback, as I think it has great potential even though there might be some rough edges here and there.