We had an interesting request not too long ago for Tempo. Basically this user was accustomed to logging his time in minutes instead of hours. He found himself having to calculate 90 minutes into 1.5 hours to make new entries in our system, and asked us if there was some way to accommodate this other method.

It’s still a bit experimental at this stage, but if you put put an ‘m’ after the number in the hours box, it will get interpreted as minutes and converted for you by Tempo:

This also works when posting by e-mail. In addition, you can always use an ‘h’ after the number to clarify that you are submitting in hours if you wish.

Since we launched Tempo a few weeks ago we’ve been hard at work adding new features to provide some of the mobile access we were looking for here at Zetetic.

The easiest to tackle was a mobile web interface for phones with data plans and iphones and such to have a quick and easy way to enter time. The screenshots in the tour give you a quick idea — it’s a miniature interface for logging your time on the go.

We also added a capability that allows you to record your hours by sending a simple e-mail. On every Tempo user’s account there is now an additional field called ‘alias’ that we set to something fairly random, but which you can change. Here’s how it works:

Let’s pretend my alias is super20x6. I could send the following e-mail to super20x6@keeptempo.com and it would get added to my time entries:

1.5 updated pl/sql stored procedure @bigco @oracle @plsql @development

This will create a new entry for one and a half hours, description ‘updated pl/sql stored procedure’, it will associate with my project BigCo, and it will be tagged with oracle, plsql, and development.

To find out more about how this capability works, skip on over to the new Mobile section in our FAQ.

Finally, we’ve made some adjustments to our pricing structure for premium plans. The big change is that all premium plans now provide unlimited projects (they still start at only $5 / month).

We’re definitely interested in hearing your thoughts on the new features and pricing. Leave comments here or email us at support@zetetic.net.

Throughout the course of building Tempo, we’ve relied heavily on software written by other people and made freely available. It’s worth doing a quick run-down to give credit where credit is due.

Ruby On Rails web application framework

No surprise there, right?

PostgreSQL relational database

Our favorite relational database system, Postgres is the most mature of the free systems out there, has the best feature set, and has quite a bit in common with Oracle. Highly recommended.

FamFamFam icons

Everybody needs icons, we’re big fans of the Silk set.

Acts As State Machine Rails plugin

This plugin by Scott Barron allows an ActiveRecord model to act as a finite state machine rather elegantly.

HAML & SASS HTML & CSS templating

Gone are the days when we painfully labor over HTML templates thanks to this great Rails plugin by Hampton Catlin. We can’t live without it now.

gchartrb Google Charts for Ruby

Those charts in Tempo look really good, but they’re largely the work of Google’s Chart API and this wrapper library for Ruby written by deepak.jois and aseemtandon. All we had to do was write some clever SQL and voila!

Active Merchant Rails plugin

Definitely the easiest way to integrate with a payment gateway in Rails. Also provides an awesome layer of abstraction in the event that we decide to switch gateways – we won’t have to do a major rewrite of the code in our site that handles payment processing.

Ruport Ruby Reports

Ruport made it incredibly easy for us to provide Excel/CSV and PDF exports from within Tempo’s WYSIWYG reporting interface.

RESTful Authentication Rails plugin

Very handy plugin by Rick Olson for quickly setting up an authentication system for your users that includes an activation step.

Thanks everyone for making these valuable open source contributions to make software like Tempo possible.

Today marks the launch of our newest app, Tempo, a time tracking app for stats addicts, consultants, and anybody involved in professional services and billing time. The “beta” tag is gone, the gloves are off, the doors are open. Check out the tour to find out what it’s all about, sign up for a free account, let us know what you think (e-mail us: support AT zetetic DOT net). As our regulars know, we love hearing your suggestions.

We built our newest product, Tempo, based on some of our own needs as a business here at Zetetic. Over the next couple of weeks (if we have the time!) we’re going to start talking about some of those reasons to give you a feel for how Tempo works and what it can do for your business.

Now, I’m basically a worker bee, in the sense that I’m not management here at Zetetic. I work on a number of projects that are disparate in terms of technology and clientele, and my day is often split up working on sub tasks within those projects and contracts. I generally use Tempo as the day goes on, whenever I complete a project or switch tracks.

The bookmarklet makes this particularly easy in that I don’t have to go to the site, bring up the new entry form, etc. I just click a button in my browser, I’m still logged in from who knows how long ago, I tap in the hours, and some tags describing what I did.

Usually around the end of the week I’ll log into the site and take a look at a couple of the charts. I generally like to review what projects I’ve spent my time on:

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The chart makes it very easy to see where I’ve been spending the most of my time, and where I might want to put a little more in.

Also instructive is taking a look at a break down of hours by tag:

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Here I can see that the lion’s share of my time so far this week has been spent on rails development, and that ‘recruitment’ could use a little love, because it’s on our minds.

Finally, I find myself looking at my total time trend for the week, or the month, to get a feel for, well, how productive (or not) I’ve been:

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I always like to see that my time trend for the month so far has gone up and not down! But basically I should see a fairly steady trend, or I can expect some abnormal billing at the end of the month.