Over the last month I've spent a lot of time investigating if Silverlight offered Task|Mate any unique features or competitive advantages, so what did we find:

• Silverlight offers highly interactive web experiences.
• The development experience is fantastic
• Creating Rich internet styled applications allows for a more responsive user interface.

Although Silverlight offers some advantages I think we can get very close to the same experience using our current codebase and increasing our ajax usage.
Over the near future we hope to push out the following new features as well as some background improvements:

• A new dashboard
• Add a task from anywhere

With Silverlight 2 being released today, it's a good time to show off the prototype we've been working on the last couple of days. The aim of this prototype was:

• To see what the development experience is like
• Experiment with what kind of user experience could be created.

You can view our small prototype at the below address:

http://www.task-mate.com/proto/TestPage.html

All it does at the moment is allow you to alter some tasks from a "fake dashboard", however it serve's it's purpose as a Technology Preview. So far I've been extremely impressed with everything it has to offer, and would be very interested to hear your feedback.

Last night we pushed out the highly anticipated new version of Task|mate that includes:

1. Improved Project Overview Screen.
2. New First Run Experience.

As we previously blogged, the new Project Overview screen brings increased clarity to the status of your project, we hope you enjoy all the improvements.

Since our launch, we've discovered that people have found it hard to get a feel for how the software works without filling in lots of test data. We've tried our best to strike a balance between enough information to show off our features and not too much to overpower new users, and we'll continue to tweak the amount of information in response to your feedback.

Over the coming months, we aim to continue pushing out more and more improvements, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think of the new improvements.

I've spent alot of time recently thinking over the Rich vs Reach arguement, and I'm contemplating creating a Rich Client of Task|Mate to improve the experience even further.

So what are the options:

• Silverlight
• WPF 
• Ajax

At the moment we're currently using Ajax a fair bit, but I'm sure we could push it even further. However that leaves two other options. First Silverlight with version 2 coming out in the very near future this is becoming a very tempting development story, you get alot of the advantages of a WPF anda cross platform story. However it still based in the browser and there are some graphical limitations compared to full WPF and no offline. Alternatively there is full WPF, a client would be installed locally from our website and have access to all the power your computer has to offer. This also has it's limitations, if your not on the latest version of .net then you'll have to upgrade to run our application and Task|Mate would only run on windows. In this situation your data would still be stored safely on our server, plus we would keep a basic web client as well - but when your running locally it would be far more responsive.

I'll be creating some small prototypes and putting them live for you to play with, I'd appreciate hearing your opinions on the options available.

The current TaskMate project overview screen needed a little polish, so we've transformed it from the below:

To the following:

With these changes we've improved the clarity of the information on the screen, this combined with the extra information we've added will improve communication of the projects progress.

We've improved the milestone section by removing unnecessary information, now the milestone graph turns red when your milestone is overdue - allowing for instant notification of problems on your project. 

This will be released to the live system shortly, but first we need to finish working on our other changes which we'll blog as we get them finished.

Well it's been a rather busy few days since our official launch on Friday, we've had a few teething problems along the way but they we're all solved as quickly as they where found.

We've also tonight pushed out a slight update to our systems, including:

• Improved Login Page - we've clarified the text and simplified the interface.
• The Registration page - it's now much simpler and explains the process upfront - no surprises when you’re forwarded to PayPal anymore.
• Improved the logging of all errors that occur, now we'll be instantly notified of any problems that happen and be able to fix them just as quickly.

This is just the first of many improvements and additions to the Task|Mate functionality we've got scheduled over the next couple of months.

We'll be announcing more shortly.

 

Today I'd like to announce the full launch of Task|Mate(all price plans) - a simple project and task management system, it aims to be simple to use while still being powerful for monitoring projects and there progress.

We still have loads of idea's to implement and add to the system, but we're launching as early as possible to get user feedback.

Please visit us at:

http://www.task-mate.com

Your feedback is always welcome, just comment on this site or email us me at:

Andrew.Stewart@i-nnovate.net

We're currently going through the process of choosing a partner for taking monthly payments for Task|Mate, I'd narrowed my options down to:

• 2Checkout.com
• Google Checkout
• Paypal

We have some fairly simple requirements:

• Take monthly payments
• Adjust payment amount via an API
• cancel payments via API.

Straight away that takes google checkout and 2checkout out of the equation, leaving us with only PayPal for the moment. However unfortunatly that still doesn't solve all our problems, PayPal offers only an html forms as an integration route which prevents us from having a really slick payment system for now. When we launch our paid for versions shortly you'll first have to sign up for a free account then select company information to upgrade your account to one of our premium accounts.

In the future we'll be looking at streamlining the whole process, however at the moment we think you'd prefer us to spend our time improving Task|mate than streamlining the payment process.

We'll be launching our paid versions very shortly and hope you'll enjoy using them.