So, the job timer went live on Tuesday night - late Tuesday night - but a full three days ahead of my anticipated delivery date. I'm hoping it's functionality is fairly straightforward so I won't bore you with a lot of details here. There are controls for timer Start, Stop and Reset. You can select a project and a task, add comments and log the hours to your timesheet once the timer is stopped.

Job timer started.

Job timer stopped.

Known Issues

There are a couple of bugs worth noting from the outset. If you stop th timer, the elapsed time will show in the Hours text field. However, if you then navigate to another page or reload the page you're on, the elapsed time will vanish. You can quickly start and stop the timer to bring the elapsed time back but your hours really just need to stay there until you reset the timer. The same thing happens with your selected project/task. Those selections are lost if the page is reloaded.

These are relatively quick fixes but I just don't think I'm going to have time to address them before leaving on vacation for the weekend.

UPDATE: These known issues have been addressed. 

Future Enhancements

1. Integration with the dashboard as a widget - this will also provide integration of the job timer with the Netvibes and Google modules.

2. Port the timer as desktop widgets for Mac and PC and as a Vista sidebar gadget. The gadget will log your time online or offline and synch with your timesheet when an internet connection becomes available.

3. Allow multiple jobs to be timed at once. A couple of users have requested this feature but I'm having trouble figuring out how useful this could be. I mean, I can multi-task with the best of 'em but I can't fully do 3 tasks at a time and feel good about billing the entire time for all three. Anyone seeing something I'm missing here? Please let me know.

I'm also fielding input concerning widget technology. I have to admit that the Yahoo! Widgets platform sounds tempting because it's (in theory) completely cross-platform. The idea of building one widget and deploying on Mac, PC and Vista sounds too good. My concern is the adoption rate of this platform. I don't want to force anyone into downloading Yahoo's widget platform just for a job timer. Any thoughts here?

Another idea I had was building something with Adobe's Apollo platform - but again, there's that whole adoption thing to contend with. So, I'm open to ideas - I'm giving myself one week to field comments and do some research before I decide on a technology so let your voice be heard.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

First, allow me to apologize for the long delay between posts. I've been trying to be responsive to the forum posts that have been coming in while also picking away at some new features.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to simply say that invoice editing now works as it should. A bug that prevented an accurate invoice total while editing an invoice has been haunting CPO for the past 2 weeks. I believe this problem has been fixed but, of course don't hesitate to let me know if you experience problems.

I appreciate everyone's patience as this problem was sorted out.

Thanks for reading.

CPO user SebyM was kind enough to alert me to some pretty significant problems with the invoice editing features. Here's what's happening...

1. A user creates a new invoice - everything works just fine at this step.
2. The user goes back to edit the invoice.
3. Invoice edits work fine unless you remove invoice items while simultaneously editing the tax rate.
4. If you remove items from an invoice while editing, the invoice total is no longer accurate and really can't be changed by the user. Even removing all items and starting from scratch won't give an accurate invoice total.

I've looked into this bug today and found that it's a bit of a monster. There is so much code involved and not all of it is really clean. So, my thought right now is that this will take me through the weekend to fix properly. Until next week, don't plan on doing any serious edits to invoices or you may wind up having to delete them and start over.

Ok, now that the confession is out of the way, I'd like to express a tremendous amount of appreciation to a few bug watchers. Yanick Rochon, Maurer Sebastian and Greg Manset - you guys are terrific! Thanks a million for sticking with CPO and taking time out of your busy day to help me identify problems and suggest great improvements.

CPO has grown much faster than I ever could have imagined and, right now, I'm scrambling a bit to keep up. It's a pleasure to have some users who will graciously point out problems without just giving up and leaving.

Thanks so much, guys. I hope I can do something nice for you one of these days soon.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

It ain't pretty yet but the support forum is now online. Please go here to post questions about using CPO, report bugs, check up on bug fixes and all that. You can get to the forum from within your CPO account by clicking on the Help! icon in upper-right header menu (below the CPO logo).

Of course, there aren't many active forum members just yet but don't let that keep you from posting. I will do my best to respond to every forum post within a couple of hours.

One last thing, there are several features that need to be added to the forum such as RSS feeds for topics, email notification of post replies, etc.  These features will be added shortly but I wanted to get some kind of framework in place for having conversations around help questions and problems. 

OK, let's move on...

Why do we still need the bug reporting tool?

The bug reporting tool is still around because it's convenient. If you want to alert me of a bug on the page you're viewing, it's much simpler to just enter a description of the bug in the drop-down window than it is to go to the forum and post. If I think the bug description needs to go in the forum for all to see, then I'll copy it there along with a reply.

Thanks for reading!

Jeff

Has anyone else noticed latency issues with CPO today?  If so, I sincerely apologize.  Before I work myself into a complete tizzy, I think I'll keep an eye on things for the rest of the day.  I've noticed a lot of traffic the past 2 days from Netvibes since releasing the CPO dashboard module on Sunday.  I'm thinking this might be a temporary surge that will die out in a couple of days.  If not, I'll contact the data center and see what my options are for increasing bandwidth.

Thanks for your patience.

Jeff