Squirrel Clock News

Squirrel Clock News

Plans for 2012

In the last blog post I’ve talked about what happened in 2011, in this post I’ll talk about plans for 2012, but first a disclaimer: A year is a long time for a software company, this post outlines the current plans for the year but those plans will change as the business and technology environments change during the year So now that we got that out of the way here are the plans for the various products: yaTimer time tracking software and yaTimer Central yaTimer and yaTimer Central will continue to be developed based on customer...

2011–the year that nothing went according to the plans

Again this is the time of year for summarizing the passing year and making plans for the next one. Businesswise nothing went according to plan in 2011, some things went worse than the plan and some things were way better. The bad parts are mostly traced to several months I was so swamped with other work I had nearly no time to work on my products, here are the 2011 plans and how they turned out: yaTimer time tracking software was supposed to have a major upgrade – in reality it had many...

Products update for April 2011

I’ve just wanted to write a quick update about what’s I’m working on right now. yaTimer time tracking software – I’m working on the next minor update to yaTimer, this update will mainly fix the auto-update system, it will also include a solution for people using yaTimer from a USB drive on both 32bit and 64bit systems, also, if you want a feature added to the next major update of yaTimer now is a good time to contact me about it. Squirrel Clock on-line employee attendance tracking -  Squirrel Clock isn’t “officially” released – but it’s actually already...

Squirrel Clock will be released on January

Ok, Squirrel Clock was supposed to be out by now - but I had a lot of last minute changes that had to be made and some last minute bugs that I still have to fix and before you know it it's the middle of December and everyone is starting to take vacations. Releasing a business application when most of the world is getting ready for vacation is bad enough, releasing on or just around Christmas is just plain stupid - so I'm delaying release until everyone are back to work and looking for attendance tracking software. the...

Quick Squirrel Clock Update

The new Squirrel Clock hit two very important milestones today: It now has all the functionality of the old Squirrel Clock – but done much better. It has run from a real web server over the internet and not only locally on my computer. But that’s not enough for me, there were two big things missing from the original Squirrel Clock that I’m not going to launch without: reports and a way to buy subscriptions. With just two days left until the end of the month it’s very unlikely Squirrel Clock will be ready in November,...

Cutting features for the first release of Squirrel Clock

There are a lot of features you would want to see in an employee Attendance tracking software, but like almost everything features also follow the Pareto principle (also known as the 20/80 rule), 20% of the features will give you 80% of the benefits. Now, you really want to get the software release as soon as possible and start getting people to use the system and give you real feedback on how real customers use the system (as opposed to the "made up" customer you develop for) - and of course to also get those customer's money so you can keep...

Check Out the New Squirrel Clock Site

I’ve just uploaded a new version of the Squirrel Clock home page, the only thing missing is the screenshots/tour page, I’ll write it closer to the release when I can make screenshots that will look like the final application. I really welcome any feedback you may have (you can leave a comment on this post, e-mail me using the address in the footer, use the contact form and even twitter) I’ve also updated the yaTimer home page, you can now sign up for the yaTimer newsletter directly from the yaTimer home page and join the exclusive group of...

Combining Screens for Better Usability

One of the biggest mistakes I made in the first version of Squirrel Clock is that I structured the GUI around "features" instead of around usage scenarios. This is an extremely common mistake and it always happens when no one stops to really think about the UI and exactly how people will use it. So, in the Squirrel Clock 2 I've completely restructured the application around how people will probably use it, for example, I've moved all the common features employees will use to enter attendance and update their details into the same page, this page will also serve as the main...

Squirrel Clock browser compatibility

A quick note to my readers: I'm writing a lot about Squirrel Clock because that is what I'm working about right now, over the next weeks until Squirrel Clock is released I'm going to write about the design choices I've made and about the development process, if you don't care don't worry, the blog will return to the previous topics some time in December, if you do care tell every one you know who may need to track attendance to register to be notified when Squirrel Clock is ready, anyone who registers will get 20% off the list price, this...

Re-Introducing Squirrel Clock

Squirrel Clock is a web based employee attendance tracking software written with the same philosophy and visual style of yaTimer. I plan to release Squirrel Clock some time at the end of November of the beginning of December of 2010, if you want to be notified when Squirrel Clock is ready you can sign up here. I originally released the first version of Squirrel Clock at the beginning of 2010, some people signed up for the free trial, no one actually used the software and not even one of them cared enough to contact me and complain about it - a really...

Preparing For The Big Squirrel Clock Re-launch

I'm now working on re-launching Squirrel Clock - my employee attendance clock. The first beta of Squirrel Clock didn't go so well - so I've decided to take it off-line and really fix it before releasing it again. The main part of Squirrel Clock - the interface used to clock in and out is nice and solid but all the supporting pages like the signup process and employee management weren't so good. So, I'm now going over each and every page of Squirrel Clock and I'm fixing all the mistakes I've made with the first version. ...

Preparing to Re-launch Squirrel Clock

Earlier this year I’m launched Squirrel Clock, it has undergone a short invitation-only beta and stayed closed for new customers ever since because of the poor results of that beta. I’m now working hard on improving Squirrel Clock, my on-line time-clock/ punch clock application in order to re-launch it. I going over all the pages in the application and checking every field, table, link and button – this is resulting in a lot of tiny UI improvements that make the app much more pleasant to use. I’m also going to shorten the sign-up sequence from 3 pages...

Status Updates and Plans for 2010

I’ve been so busy lately I didn’t have time to blog so I’m writing this post to summarize everything I’m working on and my plans for the future. The most important thing for 2010 is the decision to retire StartMenuSearch and focus on time tracking and time management related products, this will let me expand the Nbd-Tech product line in a way that makes sense from a marketing perspective. I’ve released the second time tracking product - Squirrel Clock – and I have 4 (yes four) other time management products in various stages of planning and development. ...

Introducing Squirrel Clock

I am very happy to announce my second time tracking product: Squirrel Clock. yaTimer is a wonderful time tracking tool, it is designed for people who need to track their own time - freelancers, consultant and anyone who wants to improve personal productivity – it does not fit very well with the need of employers who have to know how much time employees spend in the office. For tracking how much time employees spend at work I’ve built Squirrel Clock – an on-line employee attendance tracking time clock. Squirrel Clock is now entering a...