As you can see we do count down, it was two weeks and now it is only one week! Yay!
As a bonus for waiting here is a screenhost of the tags screen in Factory Nova. You can assign multiple tags to a task and use this in different ways. In the Stuffed Tracker project we use tags to specify for which version a task has to be finished. When we then look at the list of all tags we can clearly see the progress for each version.
You can start the countdown now. We are finishing the translation of the Factory Nova interface and doing a bunch of small but needed things, like creating a web-based installation wizard. But generally the beta is ready.
Traditionally, we have very long holidays in May in this country. So this delays things a bit, but not for long. As I’ve wrote in the title of this post — two weeks and a beta should be announced.
Thanks for bearing with us all this time.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am excited to present to you the world’s premier of the Factory Nova English interface! You can’t see it anywhere else — only and exclusively in this blog.
Don’t forget to click on the thumbnails to see full size images!
Screen #1
This is the main tasks page in Factory Nova. To get to it, you first select a project, so the tasks that you see on this page are limited by only one project.
The main task view is tree-based, but you can also see the same tasks as a flat list (one of the many cool features of Factory Nova). Children tasks are loaded with Ajax when you click on a plus sign available to the left of any task which has children.
Screen #2
The same tree view of tasks, but this time I’ve opened a filter layer. In Factory Nova, you can filter the tasks tree by a variety of parameters: a user to whom the task is assigned, priority, deadline, etc. The filters can be saved and easily re-used later.
Screen #3
Again the main tree view. This time I’ve selected some of the tasks (they have a yellow background). You can see that at the top, instead of a filter, there is now a new select box that allows me to select a new status for the selected tasks. You can select multiple tasks in the tree and then do some most common operations with all of them at once: change status. assign to a user, close, change deadline, etc.
Also, on the same screen you can see a floating div opened with all possible actions that you can do with a particular task. This div is opened when you click on the “o” icon (for “options”) to the right of the task.
Screen #4
Finally, this is a so called “Overview” page. You get to it when you click on the project in the list of all projects. As you can guess, the main idea of this page is to show a brief overview of all activity in the project. It also shows quick stats for all members of the project team.
Still in Russian, but looks fantastic now:
Just the start, but here they are:
We’ve decided to go with the 2d ones.
Starting from this January we are undergoing some changes. We’ve just moved to a twice bigger office, but that’s not all.
Shal
Unfortunately, Shal Jacobs, the main developer of our project management software Factory Nova, has decided to pursue his own project and has left Stuffed Guys around Christmas. He was planning to do this for several months, so it didn’t come as a surprise. But certainly this influenced the schedule of the beta version of Factory Nova.
For 2 months I was working on finishing Factory Nova myself. That was an interesting experience for me. I worked some insane hours every day (I think it was around 18 hours every business day, plus a little less on weekends). After I was returning home in the evening, a new working day was starting for me.
New PHP developer
That wasn’t that bad (except the absense of free time), I had some great time programming interesting stuff, I’ve managed to achieve some good progress with the software. But then we were lucky enough to get a new experienced PHP developer on board and now the future of Factory Nova is in good hands (we are really close to finishing beta.. no, really!).
The new developer had to spend several weeks on learning how things already work in FN, but now he is working on the list of the remaining bugs and features at full speed. The new interface is also almost implemented, our designer started working on the fancy icons and I hope that soon I will be able to show some fresh new screenshots.
Slava
In January, we’ve also got one more developer on board. I want to introduce Slava Snakin who is now working on the hotels reservations system which we’ve developed and are now maintaining for our friends in Skoosh International.
+2
We also plan to hire 2 more developers in the next 2 months. One for our Perl-based projects and another for our PHP-based projects. If you happen to live in Moscow, read this blog, have a good great knowledge of Perl or PHP (or better both!) and might be interested in working with us, please feel free to contact us.
The new PHP developer will help us to work on our products and improve the speed with which we release the new versions (this will become especially important with the release of Factory Nova, when we expect our load at least to double).
Coming up next: what’s up with Stuffed Tracker.
We’ve just implemented an interesting custom modification for Stuffed Tracker for one of our clients. The idea came from the client and I think it is interesting enough to be described here.
The story.
The client has a form on his site which is submitted by potential customers. The form is quite general, it basically asks for customer’s contact information. Traffic on the site on which the form is located is tracked with Stuffed Tracker.
The client asked us to implement a functionality which will allow the form handling script to get the full path of the visitor and send it in the email along with other information from the form. With some simple Javascript magic combined with a specially written PHP code we’ve implemented a solution for this.
So now our client can see a full path of a potential customer on the site: where he/she came from, what actions he/she has performed etc. And all this — in the email with other information from the submitted form.
Useful stuff!
In other news.
You wouldn’t believe this, but the release of the beta version of Factory Nova is still planned for the end of February. I think this is the first time I am reconfirming a release date for Factory Nova (which probably means that we are really close to completing it).
Just an hour ago I’ve completed support for a “code” tag in FN, which is meant to be used to insert any type of code in the task description, task comment, discussions, etc. It even has syntax highlighting for PHP sources.
First of all, in Factory Nova we are showing thumbnails for all uploaded images. So, for example, a designer can upload mockups of the design that he/she is creating to a task and everyone can see them as thumbnails, not just as a name of a file.
But we have gone even further with this. If you will click on a thumbnail you would get to a page where a bigger version of the image is displayed and you can discuss it, posting comments right under the image. We use this feature ourselves quite often when working on the new Factory Nova interface.
Wait! There is even more. The image on this comments page is dynamically resized to fit the size of your browser window. If the window is smaller then the image then the image is slightly decreased to fit (and of course at any time you can simply click on the image and see its original version). The resizing is done on the server side (not in the browser) and thus the quality of the resized image is quite good.
I’ve just added one more feature to this functionality. When you resize your browser window, the image is resized as well!
Here is a video of how this works (please ignore the interface of Factory Nova that you can see in the movie — this is our current interface, it is all in Russian, and we are working on completely changing it).
QuickTime movie (3.3 Mb).
It was a long time since my last post about Factory Nova here. Now that we’ve finally released Stuffed Tracker (I’ll post a separate story about this later) we can concentrate on finishing Factory Nova.
I think I can safely say that 90% of the functionality is already complete in Factory Nova. We are using it ourselves for around 6 months now and I can report that it helped us a lot in the Stuffed Tracker development.
Most interesting features added in the last 30 days:
And finally, we are experimenting with file uploads in Flash 8 that was released not long ago. It looks like a little revolution, actually. Finally it is possible to upload a file or even several files from inside the browser and see the progress of the upload. It is even possible to cancel the upload while it is in progress.
It’s a popular theme these days — make your software as simple as possible; instead of implementing something, make a shift in your mind and think of what NOT to implement.
Well, we do it kind of differently. We implement everything we can imagine while we have time. This is done on purpose. I need to see everything that is possible before I can understand which features are really exessive and which features are ideal for the software.
This makes the software messy at some point. A lot of stuff is in it, a lot of features of different quality. But I think it is very important to see and be able to use them all. This allows me to see the big picture, to understand how the software should work to feel perfect (at least for some of the users).
When I see that we’ve tried all the ideas, it’s time to sit down and thouroughly think through all the features and decide which of them should go away, which should be changed or combined together. It’s not an easy task, but after finishing with it we get an excellent software product.
Currently, Stuffed Tracker has already undergone this polishing phase and Factory Nova will only reach it in around 1 month.