Task|Mate

The Silverlight experiment and the Future.

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:23:31 GMT

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

Silverlight Release and Task|Mate Tech Preview

Your DisplayName here! — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:02:10 GMT

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.

New Release

Your DisplayName here! — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:03:15 GMT

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

Improved Project Overview Screen.
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.

Contemplating Rich

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:37:57 GMT

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.

Improved Project Management With the New Project Overview

Your DisplayName here! — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:00:51 GMT

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. >

First Few Days

Your DisplayName here! — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:29:37 GMT

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.

Full Launch of Task|Mate

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:58:52 GMT

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

Choosing an e-commerce partner.

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:50:34 GMT

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.

Launching Task|Mate

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:52:45 GMT

Today we've launched the free version of Task|mate, we hope you enjoy using the product as much as we have during the testing process. Over the coming weeks we'll be finalising more of the key features and releasing the subscription product lines. In the mean time sign up today for an account and let us help ease your project management troubles.

Finally if you have any suggestions, please let us know and we'll work on implementing them as soon as we can.

Congratulations, you've installed DasBlog!

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 07:00:00 GMT

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.