New feature: multiple hourly rates per user

On request of a client a new feature has been added to Project Hours: multiple hourly rates per user. This is useful because often users work in different roles on a project and each role can have a different hourly rate. To use this feature, go to 'Administration, Hourly Rates', specify your rates and enable the feature. Currently this is only available when entering hours via the web site, mobiles apps will follow soon..

Working on Outlook integration for Project Hours

The redesigned apps for iPhone and Android are live in the stores now, time for the next improvement.. A customer asked for Outlook integration! Great idea, this will allow users to enter time directly from the calendar, for instance to register meeting time. Improved productivity and an opportunity to advertise Project Hours in the Outlook Add-in store :-)

So I am investigating what is needed to create a Project Hours Outlook add-in. Outlook web add-in, security, a design for the plugin. The plugin will allow for selecting a project and activity in Project Hours and storing this together with the meeting duration and date. And there will be a button to jump to the full project hours web site for more advanced things like updating time entries or checking time entries for that week.

I have a simple add-in up and running, I have a security design in mind, check  Privacy and security for Office Add-ins for some considerations,  now it is a matter of building all this. To be continued..

Beta testing voor new mobiles apps started

Public beta testing is now on-going for both the iOS and the Android apps for Project Hours! We completed the internal testing round, many issues were ironed out. 

A challenge was to get listview items in projects and activities lists to fold out correctly when tapped on by the user, especially on iOS. Also, initially some page crashed in release mode because of empty properties in the xaml page make-up. The strange thing was that these pages showed up ok in debug configurations, but apparantly release mode is less forgiving.  The xamarin forum is very useful to find answers: One of my questions on the Xamarin Forum

You can try-out the Android and iOS beta's on: (note that if you install this, your phone will write hours to a test database, you will have to unsubscribe to return to production).

Join beta on Android

Join beta on iPhone

Any help is much appreciated!

Regards,

Bert-Jan

Completed new UI and signup feature for mobile apps

I did a lot of work on the new UI and features for the Project Hours mobile apps.

- New UI designed

- Pages added to signup for a trial period.

- Pages added to invite other users to sign up.

I am now working on a page to manage projects and activities in the mobile apps. Currently these can only be edited on the web site. 

Once I have finished the development work, I will create extensive app store pages for Google Play and the Apple Store. Together with the new features, the Project Hours app will be much better visible and hopefully this will attract many new users!

First screen for new users. There is a image carousel with 7 images and feature list.

First screen of signup wizard. Maybe I should improve the layout of the welcome message.

Once an organisation has signed up, it is easy to setup teams by inviting new members.

Developing new look for mobile phone apps

The past week or so I worked on setting up new mobile phone apps for Project Hours. Again it will be a Xamarin Forms project with a shared library with UI pages and business logic, and an Android app and a iPhone (iOS) app that use that shared library. I created a new page UI design that is going to replace the old header.  Thanks to  Andrew Hoefling's Xamarin Blog with a good explanation on how to design page headers.


Old look and feel (currently in the app stores):

New look and feel (better release this asap..) Looks so much better..

Above new code currently runs on Android, must test this on iOS now.
To be continued,
Bert-Jan

Received useful feedback from customers

A product must be improved continuously, and beyond that it is fun to add new features! I believe that it is best to add something that customers and reviewers asked for. So in the coming period Project Hours will be updated with a few things that users requested.

Notification feature 
Nobody likes filling in hours in a time-tracking tool. It is something on the side that has to be done. It is often forgotten which leads to huge backlogs of time-tracking to do. To help prevent this, a daily or weekly reminder to fill in your hours will help. The Project Hours mobile apps will be updated so users can schedule reminders that will appear as notifications on their phones. I am not sure yet how to display reminders on laptops and PC's. Email reminders? Something to consider.

I will also add warnings for timers that run longer than a day. Usually these timers were started to measure time on a tasks but the user forgot the stop the timer. Perhaps a reminder every hour is useful..

Easy sign-up from mobile phones
Currently, if you are interested to start using Project Hours, you have to sign-up via the web site. But I think it would help finding new customers if companies can sign up up and organise their projects and team directly in the Project Hours iPhone or Android app. It will also help to advertise Project Hours on app listing sites like https://getapp.com

Enough to do, to be continued..

Working on new landing page for potential customers

Project Hours is always looking for new customers and it is important to provide an easy entry path for interested companies. At the moment the Project Hours landing pages looks like this:

Works reasonably well. Unfortunately many people try out the demo but do not sign up for the free trial. Missed opportunity for both sides. So I am going to combine these buttons to one button that will say 'Try it out now'. User that try out Project Hours will go through a short wizard to setup a demo account. In this way, everybody that tries out the system, basically gets a free trial immediately.

To be continued..