We’re still busily working on freckle. Yesterday our friends from Beanstalk launched their freckle integration. Now you can track your time directly via Subversion commit message.
A big thanks to the guys at Beanstalk for the awesome collaboration!
Speaking of freckle extractions:
Amy did a Jump Start Credit Card Processing Cheat Sheet for this year’s Ruby Advent. It is based on experiences from our work on freckle.
The sheet also includes some Javascript goodness from Thomas which he details on his blog.
Stubbing named_scope calls can be a real nightmare. If you use Rails’ named scopes as often as I do, you probably know this.
Imagine this code in a controller:
1 user = @account.users.activated.find_by_email
Using off-the-shelf Mocha you would stub it with something like the following:
1 @account.stubs('users').returns(mock('users', :activated => mock('activated', :find_by_email => users(:kommen))))
This doesn’t fit my coding style though. So lets fix this.
With this little monkey patch extracted from freckle you can now do this:
1 @account.stub_path("users.activated.find_by_email").returns(users(:kommen))
Now we can talk.
We know we’re a little late to our own party, but now that the dust has settled a bit, we’ll give you a short intro about freckle, our first product we built together with our friends from slash7: Amy and Thomas.
Freckle is a software-as-a-service product which makes time-tracking and report-creating easy and fast. Period.
For us, the main reason we wanted to build a time tracking app was that there just wasn’t any app out there which was easy enough for us to actually use the product and thus, track time.
In all the time tracking products we tried so far, we didn’t find any product which was different in the way you enter time. They only differentiated themselves from the others on the surface but never in the process.
As Tim Bray puts it in Build It For Yourself we knew, we had to sit down and build something which makes it easy for us to track our time just the way we want to. Coincidentally, Amy and Thomas had exactly the same problem which then led to an awesome collaboration between us. With freckle we created something which kind of rethinks the way you’re used to enter time.
Freckle comes with 3 paid plans and 1 free plan and offers a free 30-day trial period for all paid plans. Be sure to read our manifesto and subscribe to the freckle blog or follow us on twitter for product updates.
Freckle is powered by the latest and greatest Rails 2.2 and runs on Passenger (aka mod_rails). We utilize Exceptional for hunting down bugs and newrelic for keeping an eye on performance.
For UI enhancements and animation niceties we use the in-the-works scriptaculous 2 (which will have it’s own exciting announcements soon) as well as the well-established Prototype framework.
Give freckle a try and expect more soon.
webstock conference —
We were there!
