Those of you who have been CPO users for awhile have probably learned to ignore the "search box that does nothing" by now. For a couple of weeks, the Search Your Office feature has been languishing in neglect. No longer! The office search now works so give it a try and let me know what you think.

Office search is available either as a dashboard widget (shown below) or in the right-hand column. Search works identically either place - enter a search term and results will be found from clients, projects, invoices, files, and tasks. Results that are tagged with the search term are listed in their own section because, in theory these should be the most accurate results returned.

CPO dashboard search widget

Another nice feature is the ability to search by tag simply by clicking on a tag in the project, client, or invoice detail views. Clicking a tag, as shown below, automatically opens up the search results box on the right, allowing you to quickly see all office items tagged with the selected word.

Searching by tag on the project detail view

I've spent the past two weeks stomping bugs and responding to user requests for better internationalization support in CreativePro Office. These are, shall we say, not the most glamorous tasks in software development - but they are a necessary part of the process. Anyway, as a reward to myself I spent part of the weekend configuring the CPO dashboard widgets to work in the Google and Netvibes homepages. So far, I'm pleased with the results. Both dashboard modules are identical and they give you access to your CPO tasks, projects, invoices, RSS feeds, notes and del.icio.us links. Look for a Pageflakes module soon as well.

Google Homepage Gadget (showing the CPO calendar widget)

Netvibes Dashboard Module (showing the CPO Project widget)

Adding the gadget and module

There is a new sub-menu item on your CPO dashboard called Export Your Dashboard. Click this link and you will see Add To Netvibes and Add To Google buttons. Simply click a button and follow the instructions. (I'm not entirely sold on the 'Export Your Dashboard' link title so please suggest a title if you wish.)

Creating the module

Developing the Google Gadget was easy. All you have to do is create a simple XML file that points to an application page formatted to fit nicely within the Gadget window size. The Netvibes module took a little more work but Chris Cant's Netvibes Mini Module made integration with Netvibes a piece of cake. Thanks Chris!

To learn more about developing gadgets or modules, visit the Netvibes Developers Network and the Google Gadgets API Developer Guide.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

Several users have kindly alerted me to the fact that CPO really needs to support multiple countries, currencies, time zones and other standard internationalization features.   In retrospect, I knew from the word 'go' that this would be an issue.  No self-respecting developer builds a web app without the rest of the world in mind.  So shame on me for not addressing this issue early on - but I was always too involved in getting the core feature set in place and stable.

So, without further delay, I will begin incorporating other countries, currencies and time zones into CPO within the next 2-3 days.  I've already managed to address some UTF-8 character support issues and there's even some talk of providing the application in Spanish and French by summer. 

If you wish to help with translation into other languages, please give me a holler.  

Thanks for reading.

Jeff 

Ok, I know the CPO calendar is a little, shall we say, underwhelming. Essentially, it's functionality is ripped right from the Pageflakes calendar widget - it's unobtrusive, and I hope easy to use. But it's small and, currently, there's no "mother calendar" behind it such as one would find with 30 Boxes or Google Calendar or any of the 1000+ web calendars that are available. And that's the point - there are many stellar calendar apps on the web and I just didn't see the benefit in spending 2-3 months creating yet another.

30 Second Overview

Calendar entries are maked as icons in the day that they occur.  There are currently icons for project start dates, meetings, deadlines and general events.  More may come later - for example invoice due, task deadline, etc.  Hovering over an icon gives you a quick view of the details for a given entry.

For a more detailed view, click on a day and the entries for that day appear. You may delete entries from this view. 

Adding an event is quick and simple.   

I think the calendar widget achieves what I originally wanted which was a quick, at-a-glance, overview of my daily schedule without a lot of clutter.  This widget tends to fail once you get more than 5-6 entries for a given day.  But then, most of the time I have a maximum of three entries and often less than that.

Future Plans

Some of the improvements I intend to make in the next version of the calendar widget are:

1. iCal and hCalendar support (import and export)
2. RSS feed of calendar entries
3. REST integration with some popular web calendars
4. Ability to designate entries public or personal so your team can share a calendar
5. Better integration with other CPO features like tasks and invoice dates.
   

Ultimately, I don't want my users to have to learn the idiosyncrasies of another calendar. I would rather the calendar widget simply act as window to whatever calendar users already enjoy using. However, the stand-alone functionality should be good enough to provide light duty event scheduling.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

It's been a busy week here at UpStart Productions.  On Tuesday, 2 of my apps were submitted to Buzzshout and traffic has spiked for most of the week.  It's dramatically tapering off now as I suspected.  CreativePro Office saw more than 50 new registered users which isn't much for the likes of Digg but for CPO, it's downright dramatic.

Everyone has been very cool and very patient.  The feedback has generally been positive and critiques have been constructive.  So, thanks a lot, guys!  I appreciate your willingness to give CPO a shot - even just to kick the tires.

Special thanks to Pali over at AfterThe.net .  After giving CPO a fine review on Buzzshout, he raved about it some more in this post .  Thanks a million, Pali!

Anyone who registered can see there's plenty of work yet to be done.  However, the feedback so far tells me that, fundamentally, CPO is on the right track.  It's lacking some features right now and there are bugs, but it's easy to set up and begin using immediately and folks seem to like that.  

Thanks for reading.

Jeff 

Most of the features in CPO are built as I need them.  The discomfort with my current work process becomes too great so I sit down and build something to make my life incrementally better.  Same goes for the new CPO task widget.  No doubt you dislike creating daily/weekly task lists from memory as much as I do.  Heck, I CAN'T create task lists from memory anymore...who am I kidding.  

The task widget is designed to show you a two to three week snapshot of your project obligations in one neat little window right on the CreativePro Office dashboard. To use it, start by selecting Tasks from the Widget Menu.

If you have any projects with associated tasks, your widget should look like this...

Clicking the task counter link on the right opens a panel to reveal the outstanding taks for that project...