Designed by Mr. Matt Jones, of the British Experimental Rocket Group (BERG):
You know you want one. I just ordered mine.
BERG does amazing things like this:
Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.
Been real busy here at Zetetic HQ. Bloggery to resume soon!
I was intrigued by Steven Frank’s recent blog post describing how Panic software approaches communicating with customers about feature announcements and product updates. Like Panic, we tend to say little, work a lot behind the scenes, but it sounds like once in a while it’s a good idea to get out in front with a blog post to let your customers know what we’ve been working on and what’s coming.
Our primary development focus with Strip at the current time is a replication library that will be the core of our sync process, and it will likely become an open source project. Many folks have been emailing us to say that they love Strip on the iPhone, but they need desktop sync, and some of them miss the old beaming functionality of STRIP on their Palm devices. The replication engine is almost complete, and is the key to enabling these additional pieces of the Strip platform.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a maintenance update brewing for Strip on the iPhone. We expect the following issues to make it in to the next update, time permitting:
So here I am, minding my own business on Labor Day, working on the upcoming teams branch of Tempo. Basically, it introduces a new account model that’s distinct from users and projects, ideally facilitating the setup of teams for small organizations. Accordingly, an account has an owner, and every user belongs to an account. In addition, users can be managers for the whole account (new!), or users can be marked as a manager for a particular project assignment.
This all sounds great on paper, but in the Projects controller there arise a number of concerns:
id parameter for the XML api, enabling the lookup of an aribitrary collection of managed projectsAs you can imagine, this could lead to a lot of spaghetti in a controller method, that you’d want to hide away in a model. Typically, you’d want your User model to set up the various project collections as association (has_many) resources so you can provide find options as needed (such as :conditions => { :is_active => true }). That keeps your redundancy down, but your controller (or a model method) would have to conditionally decide which resource to provide. There was the possibility of adding a method to the user model that handled the conditional logic and passed back the right result set, but it would have been a royal pain to correctly pass through find options, especially given all the various circumstances above..
To make things further complicated, we need to also use these methods for the reporting interface and to make sure users only see the time entries they are supposed to see. That means keeping nonsense and code repetition to a minimum is critical.
That’s where acts_as_union saves the day!
has_many :managed_projects,
:source => :project,
:through => :assignments,
:conditions => [ 'assignments.is_manager = ?', true],
:order => 'projects.name ASC'
has_many :owned_projects,
:source => :projects,
:through => :owned_account,
:order => 'projects.name ASC'
acts_as_union :manageable_projects, [ :owned_projects, :managed_projects ]
ActsAsUnion is included in our ActsAsNetwork plugin, and it allows us to UNION together multiple associations and operate across them as we would any other association, by supporting the various find_* options we are used to with has_many.
Now I can do any of the following:
@projects = @current_user.manageable_projects
@projects = @current_user.manageable_projects.find(:all, :conditions => { :is_active => false})
@projects = @current_user.manageable_projects.safe_find_from_ids(params[:id])
On a tangential note, safe_find_from_ids is a quick and dirty monkey-patch we throw in an initializer so we can look up a set of ids that returns an empty set instead of raising an exception when no ids are found:
class ActiveRecord::Base
def self.safe_find_from_ids(*args)
ids = args.kind_of?(Array) ? args.flatten : [args]
ids.empty? ? [] : self.find(:all, :conditions => ["#{self.table_name}.id IN (#{ids.collect{|p| '?'}.join(',')})", ids].flatten)
end
end
It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done. There may be a better way of doing it in recent versions of Rails, need to look into that.
Happy Labor Day!
Recently we hired Aaron Aiken’s Trim Trab Creative to put together some videos demonstrating how Tempo works, and the videos are coming out great (check out the main tour vid here). He has a real knack for putting together interesting demos and communicating the concepts at work in a piece of software.
We put a lot of thought and work in Tempo’s interfaces, but sometimes it gets tricky to explain some of the concepts to new users, especially some of the advanced controls that can save you a lot of time. Introducing people to the benefits of using our simple command line for time tracking is one of those tricky things. Aaron hit it out of the park:
Tempo Time Tracking – Text Entry Demo from Zetetic on Vimeo.
We’ve been working pretty hard on Tempo since we released the new design this Summer, fixing bugs, refining the interfaces, and making those subtle tweaks that can really make a difference with a piece of software that we use frequently while we work. With that in mind, we’ve got another maintenance update out that should provide some requested changes and fix yet more “things” that needed fixing.
Here’s the full list of what’s changed, then I’ll go into what we’ve got coming down the pipe:
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on another major update for Tempo that should dramatically improve our ability to set up teams and collaborate. The current system can be a little bit confusing for first-time users who are looking to set up a Tempo account for their organization and invite their teammates. In the future, the setup process will distinguish between an Account, and a User. An Account will have a distinct name, e.g. Conglomo, and a subdomain for accessing the account (e.g. conglomo.keeptempo.com). Billing functions will move to the account and users will be set up directly under the account by the account owner or any users assigned as managers.
Once we’ve got that in place, we plan on putting together an iPhone application (we’ve got some experience doing that now), making some much-needed improvements to our API, and getting to work on some of the integrations people have been asking for.
Oh, we’re cooking up a Gadget for the Windows Sidebar, too!