We really enjoy using several mobile services, including:

Backpack, which has a mobile version at youraccount.backpackit.com/mob
Flickr, who have a mobile service at flickr.com/mob
Google Personalised Home for mobiles, and:
Gmail's mobile service, which is at m.gmail.com.

We thought it would be great if you could access your Tiktrac account using your phone, so we created Tiktrac Mobile. Use your phone’s browser to go to:

youraccount.tiktrac.com/mob

You can login, and then add and edit tasks for any of your timesheets.

And, if you’re using an old phone or you simply don’t like your phone’s browser: don’t panic! You can download and use Opera Mini for hundreds of mobile phones. And it’s free!

As well as mobile functionality, we’ve also added a better print stylesheet to Tiktrac, so now you can print your timesheets without all the extra navigation and ajax widgets that make it so great.

We’re Railsing it up here at Helicoid as usual, and in the process we’ve done a few little things that may help you in your quest for perfection in web application form:

Using helpers inside a controller – for when you must pluralize() but dont want to mess with the controller namespace.

A few fixes to some FormHelper bugs – need to use a form with get rather than post and find checkbox weirdness happening? fixed!

RailsConf and another patch – speaking of poor neglected get parameters, here’s the reason why they might not be working properly. Also, one half of Helicoid will be seeing you at RailsConf.

Continue reading → | code

We’ve just added another report to Tiktrac, and added a few bugfixes that we’ve been hard at work on over the last week.

If you’d like to see more reports on Tiktrac, please tell us what kinds of reports you’d like to see. You can use our contact form to get in touch, or post comments to this blog.

Continue reading → | tiktrac, announcements

The Tiktrac API is currently being tested, along with some interface enhancements and new reports. If you’re a developer who’d like to use Tiktrac’s API, please read the docs:

Tiktrac API documentation

The API isn’t live yet, but will be at some point in March. We’ve put our internal documentation up so you can see how it works and get some ideas on how to use it.

For example:

• You could use it with Blinksale’s API to generate invoices from your timesheets.
• You could use it with your own scripts to produce exports of data for internal systems.
• You could create a Mac OS Dashboard or Yahoo! widget to post tasks to Tiktrac

As always, you can post comments to this post to get more information from us.

In Breaking down barriers to Linux desktop adoption, an interview with Jono Bacon (an IT consultant who helps companies install Linux), the author makes the following comment:

“they fault Linux OpenOffice desktops for not having all the features in Microsoft Windows Office, even though few actually use all of the Microsoft stuff. So, in essence, they’re saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features.”

Now, he’s really referring to the old 80/20 rule, something every computer science course seems to reinforce at some point in its lectures. What this means is that to make off the shelf software, you have to cram in every feature possible to try and satisfy the average user.

However, our products, such as Tiktrac, throw away this kind of thinking. Instead of adding features, we give the most efficient solution we can to a simple problem. Our the…