Workstreaming in Tempo Time Tracker
June 25th, 2008
We’re very excited to officially announce the latest Tempo upgrade.
This time around we decided to try something big. Really big. A game changer. Something that would begin to redefine the way people track time. We decided to reinvent the traditional time tracking timer in a way that doesn’t suck. And thus, the Workstream release was born.
As the name implies worktreaming borrows heavily from the concept of lifestreaming. It’s not a new term but we have our own take on it: you “stream” updates directly into Tempo as you start working on tasks. We track exactly how long you spend on each item as you make updates. There’s no need to explicitly enter hours or manually track time – we do all the work for you. You get an exact log of everything you’ve worked on, tagged, assigned to projects, shareable with colleagues, accessible through RSS, and ready for reporting.
Imagine using Twitter and messaging Tempo as you change streams and switch between projects. Or, use our new Dashboard Widget, the Bookmarklet, the Tempo application proper, your mobile phone, email, whatever. How you stream is up to you but the fluid approach leaves you free to think about the task at hand.

Visit our documentation for more details on how workstream timers work.
Honorable Mentions
In addition to the core workstreaming functionality we’ve added a ton of other supporting functionality to Tempo.
iPhone

We’ve vastly improved the iPhone interface from our previously release. Now it looks and feels just like an iPhone app ought to, and provides you with the new timing features and a view into time you’ve already logged. Check it out on you iPhone at m.keeptempo.com.
Dashboard Widget

Users of Mac OS X can work really seamlessly with Tempo using our new Dashboard widget. A command-line interface and a view of recent time entries gives you the most important features.
XML API

Tempo now sports it’s own API. Use it to integrate with internal systems or 3rd party services.
Delegated Management & Proxy Time Entry
Tempo now makes managing teams even easier. First, any member of your project can be made a manager (including users on free account plans), allowing them to view the dashboard statistics, and manage the team roster. Managers can also perform “proxy time entry”, allowing them to enter and edit time entries on behalf of other people on the team. This rocks for groups where only one person is responsible for handling all the time entry.
Stream-lined Interface

We over-hauled Tempo’s interface to make it more intelligent and easier to work with. The ‘Add Entry’ tab provides a command-line interface for quickly entering time records or kicking off timers complete with type-ahead lookup when you start entering your tags!

The full web interface is sparser by hiding optional fields.
Lock and Unlock
Project managers can now easily lock and unlock individual time entries.


Smart Defaults
The web entry form remembers the last project you billed to, and whether you started a timer or not, saving you time when creating new records.

Enjoy!
We hope you’ll find some of Tempo’s new features useful and we look forward to your feedback!
3 Responses to “Workstreaming in Tempo Time Tracker”
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.


June 25th, 2008 at 03:40 PM Bookmarklet looks bad since the changes. Buttons and text overlap, etc. Otherwise, tempo is great. I looked at it using both Safari and Firefox 3
June 25th, 2008 at 04:28 PM Hi Gordon - we had to expand the bookmarklet a bit to fit the new timers. Can you log into Tempo and update your bookmarklet link from the sidebar under Options? It has the new width setting and should render properly for you. Thanks!
July 1st, 2008 at 06:15 PM I've had a go using tempo, but can't figure out the Tags feature. How do I insert a multi-word tag? Most of my recurring tags require more than one word, but Tempo doesn't seem to be able to cope with this. I've tried using quotation marks (as in Google) to group tags, to no avail. The help section doesn't seem to have anything on this issue. Unfortunately, it renders Tempo unusable for me -- my current time tracker app is better able to cope. Here's hoping that the niggling usability issues in Tempo are addressed in the near future -- then I may sign up! Andrew