Thoughts @ Dotner

This Tracker version will become available for production use during February 2009.

The new features and functionality

• Navigation buttons for journal.
• Time entry creation via my journal is no longer listing the closed tasks.
• You can now comment on tasks and projects.
• Comments are shown in task and project detail page in reverse chronological order.
• Latest 5 comments are shown on the dashboard in reverse chronological order.
• When removing projects, you can now either drag them to the Archive folder like before, or if the project is empty, just delete it.
• The time entry form (the one you get by pressing the clock icon) accepts now the regular “1h 30m” format strings instead of the obscure “1.5″ format.
• Task and project priority mechanism works in a new way.
• Multiple items can have same priority.
• Items are listed in priority order in the sub project contents.
• Project search enables the user to list sub projects and tasks by author, assignee, priority and status.
• Descriptions and comments support the textile markup.

Bug fixes

• Inputing an absence entry without choosing a task gives now an error message.
• IE rendering is at least slightly improved in various views.
• Duplicate entries on active task list are handled gracefully.

Visual and usability improvements

• New login screen.
• Hover tips for image buttons.
• Task links show the project path in the hover tip.
• Tabs for report views for choosing the month and user.
• Rounded corners for tabs and headings on Firefox browsers.
• New soothing button design for task and project detail views.
• User can open the project details, search and comments from behind a tab. This saves space and decreases clutter.

Some earlier features I may not have mentioned much anywhere

• Support for OpenID authentication.
• The user can specify a trusted OpenID URL, which the user can use for logging into the account.
• The administrator can disable this feature for the whole system.
• Support for Yubikey authentication.
• The user can specify which physical Yubikey token the user can use for logging into Tracker.
• When logging in, the user inputs their user ID and triggers a one-time password from the Yubikey token.