Building a Widget
In case you aren’t aware, we’re building a time tracking tool and actively developing it right now. It’s called Minuteglass and you can sign up for beta at Minuteglass.com.
Alongside of main application, we are now working on a desktop widget for Minuteglass! It is being developed in Adobe AIR and we’re pretty excited about the prospects. We designed everything in Photoshop first to get a feel for how it would work.
We’re realizing quickly that the widget will be a major part of our application’s success. Because it’s in Adobe AIR, we will be able to roll it out on all the major platforms and at the same time.
Screenshot: Widget sign in page.
As we get closer to launching Minuteglass we’ll show you the rest of the widget. It has two major features: a stopwatch mode and a manual time entry mode. But you’ll always be able to use the web based tools as well.
Feature Lockdown
For about 6 months now we’ve been in a bit of a “feature lockdown” meaning no new feature is added if we think it will take an extra day of work. This allows us to concentrate on launching our product, and keeping our code debt to a minimum.
In the world of web startups they say “launch early” for a reason. The longer you work on your application the more details and ideas you have. Before you know it your simple idea has turned into the next bloated version of Windows.
We’ve recently picked up a lot of development momentum (5 people now working on it). We don’t have a launch date yet, but we’re really excited about our progress.
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Looks great so far, Chris! Looking forward to seeing it in the wild!
Launch! Launch! Launch! Launch!
The previous Comment was posted on February 27, 2009 at 9:00 am
Thank Brian!!
The previous Comment was posted on February 27, 2009 at 10:19 am
Love the widget so far. Crack the developer whip and get it launched. Using AIR is such a great idea.
The previous Comment was posted on February 27, 2009 at 11:27 am
Would really be interesting to hear of your experiences in developing in Flex
The previous Comment was posted on February 27, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Thanks Don, yep! We’re working on it every day (or nearly every day).
Mark, yeah, when the app is built we’ll do some sort of followup on the experience. I’ve been saving design iterations as well, so we’ll be able to show how the design progressed.
The previous Comment was posted on February 27, 2009 at 10:04 pm
This is awesome Chris, congrats on all the progress you’ve made!
The previous Comment was posted on March 12, 2009 at 9:23 pm