Thorough Time Tracking - will it ever appear?

The Freshbooks' widget is exactly the type of thing we're talking about, but like I say, it won't be something we develop in-house. Initially at least.

Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement though.

We'd hoped to be able to announce something in the last couple of weeks, but that hasn't happened.

I can't give any guarantees as we're not in charge of development but I'm reliably informed that a FreeAgent compatible widget for Windows and Mac will in the offing shortly.

Sorry I can't be more specific at the moment, but we'll let you know as soon as we hear anything.

Hi Petey,

Our current level of time tracking does allow for basic entry of tasks/timeslips against a project, as well as timesheet report generation.

Apart from the timer widget functionality, are you requiring more than this? I'd be really interested to know what.

With regards to the aforementioned time widget, it looks like the wait won't be too long. :)

We could try to do something simple to our existing timeslips which might work:

What if we had the concept of a 'live timeslip' - you create an normal one (to set the project etc) but you also have a start button?

In our very simple initial version we might only show the start time rather than a fancy counting clock, but then when you press a stop button, the elapsed time would be added to the total.

Would that do as a starter for ten?

That's great news Mark.

Thanks for all your hard work, and I'm sure FreeAgent users will appreciate it. I know I will.

Great looking new site btw

Naderby

Rest assured you're not dumb -- we gave FreeAgent a tiny tweak last night to resolve a small teething problem ;-)

Let us know how you get on with Timepost

Hi Brenda,

While we won't rule anything out, time tracking like that provided by Timepost, isn't on our immediate roadmap.

I'll write a little more about this on a Central post later, but it's tricky balancing act responding to feature requests while still trying to keep the software simple and easy to use for everybody.

Looking through GetSatisfaction you'll see so many other great ideas that people would like to see from FreeAgent, and we just don't have enough time in the day to do all of these right now.

So for the moment we feel that the level of time tracking within FAC is good enough for most freelancers. If you do need more than this, and of course some people do, then there's Timepost, which is, as you say, very reasonably priced.

Our Time Tracking will undoubtedly improve as time goes on, but for now we're concentrating on other areas of the application, making big improvements that will benefit everybody.

Sorry, it's not exactly the answer you're looking for, but hopefully it explains our reasoning.

Pete,

The API (still in beta, since not all of the FreeAgent functionality is available through it as yet) is documented here: http://www.freeagentcentral.com/devel....

It really is straightforward to get Time and Project data in and out of FreeAgent using most programming languages -- it just involves making a couple of HTTP requests and parsing some basic XML.

Which programming language would you like to write your timer in? I'm sure there are guides to using REST APIs (which the FreeAgent API is) for most popular languages.

Hi Pete

I don't have any direct experience of ActionScript, but I've just had a quick Google around and it looks like the flash.net package contains everything you'll need for communicating with FreeAgent (the URLLoader, URLRequest and URLRequestHeader objects in particular).

I can't verify the correctness of the following at all, but I would imagine this is partly what you'd need to do to make a GET request to FreeAgent to obtain a list of projects in XML format:

var projectsUrl:String = "https://[yourdomain].freeagentcentral.com/projects";

var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(projectsUrl);

request.requestHeaders.push(new URLRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/xml"));

request.requestHeaders.push(new URLRequestHeader("Accept", "application/xml"));

request.requestHeaders.push(new URLRequestHeader("Authorization", "Basic " + base64Encode(email + ":" + password)));

request.method = URLRequestMethod.GET;

I hope this helps!

Hi Pete,

I'm afraid not, although actually you probably don't need to do the encoding at all on the email/password -- just set them as plain text (I just cut and pasted my example above from a different site verbatim).

If that doesn't work I recommend asking on a dedicated ActionScript forum, or perhaps a programming QA site like the excellent http://stackoverflow.com as we don't have any direct AS experience.

Good luck and do let us know how you get on.

Andrew - really sorry to hear this is a showstopper for you. We use Timepost ourselves here (on Leopard) and have been really happy with it.

As for your VAT rounding issue - I'd be really grateful if you started a new topic on that - it's something we're aware may be an issue for some but no one's thought it a major issue (until now!). We can certainly look to digging in deeper...

Do feel free to get in touch with me directly (ed at freeagentcentral dot com) if you like. Having annoyed and unhappy users upsets me and I want to see how we can fix things.

I've been using Timepost 2.6.1 today and I haven't seen this problem. If you email me your company name (olly at freeagentcentral dot com) I can check the FreeAgent logs to confirm everything is ok on our side, otherwise you might want to contact Colovo: http://getsatisfaction.com/colovo

There was a lot of discussion on this thread so I just thought I'd let everyone know that a new Open Source time tracking widget for OS X has been released for FreeAgent by one of our users, James Adam.

You can get more information and download it here:

http://interblah.net/freeagent-widget

It's a shame that people seem to be having problems with Timepost.

Apart from contacting Colovo directly (which you've done) i can't really suggest anything else.

Hopefully we'll have another time tracking app for windows soon, so FreeAgent users have a choice of time tracking widgets.

Naderby,

We're frustrated, too. We have finite development resources and boundless good ideas! The process of selecting the 'immediate' from the 'later' is a constant balancing act.

However, if only attested to by the length of this thread, we know this improvement is very much in demand, and it is being prioritised as such. No delivery timescale, yet, I'm afraid.