Last night we delivered an update to Tempo, our time-tracking service, called Macross. The previous release version had been named Voltron internally. The reason for naming them, beyond internal version control and tracking, is that we want to start providing some more communication going forward about what’s on the road map for Tempo, and having names for the releases makes it a bit easier.
In any event, Tempo release Macross went into production last night. It brings a number of badly needed performance improvements and runs off the latest and greatest stable version of Rails (2.3.8) AND gets us off Ruby 1.8.6 (now we’re on 1.8.7). In particular, users with very high numbers of projects and users will be happy to know that the management screens are way faster thanks to implementing some over-due pagination. There’s still a lot more optimization we’re planning to do, and we’re starting to consider changes we might make to the UI on the Projects and Team screens to make them more useful, in particular for our larger account holders. If you’ve got your own ideas, please get in touch and tell us what you’d like to see.
Another important update in last night’s release was switching our Twitter API interaction over to OAuth from HTTP Basic Authentication, due to their upcoming switch-over on June 23rd now-postponed conversion to OAuth. Whenever they do make the switch, Tempo will continue to scoop up your time entries via direct messages to @keeptempo.
Macross, named after the TV show Macross and the SDF-1, is mainly a stepping stone, to move us off some really old tech and to better position us for further infrastructure upgrades and service and UI improvements. This is now the current version of Tempo.
The next release, Macross Plus, is currently shaping up. The biggest thing I want to tackle there is moving Tempo to Rails 3; we anticipate that this will deliver some really great performance gains, as well as make on-going development far easier. We still need to firm up the list of other improvements and features that will be in Macross Plus – it will likely remain in flux, so it’s not a contract, but I will post it soon.