Previously, when adding a Task via ‘tasks’ > ‘add a task’, and you chose a Client that had no live projects assigned, you were presented with the following :

mmm … informative, but not particularly helpful.

Now, a link to assign a project to that client  is provided, and the chosen client is automatically pre-selected on the ‘Add a Project’ form.

A sharp-eyed user made contact to point out that only whole minutes were being taken into account when calculating the cost of time recorded.

This was a ‘feature’ inherited from when I first started building adderuppa several years ago. Because a fraction of a minute added to each project isn’t going to make any difference to my income tax bracket, I was simply rounding the total recorded seconds for each project to the nearest minute.

Although every second timed had actually been recorded, the few stray seconds left over after rounding were not being used to calculate the value of that recorded time.

Having received the email, I realised that this lack of instantaneous feedback could be misunderstood, and confusing, and so the formatting of recorded time in the Task List and Project Task List, where these values are updated in real time as the timer is stopped, has been altered to replicate a stopwatch value, listing hours, minutes and seconds.

This has the dual benefit of giving instantaneous feedback on the user’s action, and helps to distinguish recorded time from estimated time.

Recorded time listed elsewhere is still rounded to the nearest minute, for the sake of clarity and simplicity, but the value of that time takes into account every second recorded.

The Project Details panel has been re-arranged to show Client contact information, removing the need to move between Project and Client pages. The information reflects changes made to the Client dropdown. Client name and telephone number are also displayed when the section is collapsed.

Adderuppa now remembers your list ordering, and section viewing preferences.

This is done automatically, you do not need to create these settings. Every time you order a list by one of the available headings, or show or hide a page section, the page will be displayed in exactly the same formation the next time you view it. These settings are remembered from session to session.

Thanks to Web Sight for the suggestion.

More User Interface updates were uploaded over the weekend. Aside from a number of minor cosmetic changes to styling, there are two key changes to the layout and how the system registers interaction.

All functional links have now been moved to the far right of the page to keep them in one place for ease of navigation. This includes the expand / collapse buttons, which have been replaced with simple blue text links, in keeping with the other action links.

Also, an animated gif now appears whenever links or buttons that activate a change in a page’s content are clicked. This has the benefit of showing that something is happening, useful when the service is being accessed via a slow connection.

I’ve finally found some time to dedicate to feature requests, and to some small tweaks that I’ve had lined up for a while. The small tweaks are coming first, followed by the features.

First up is an addition to a Project’s collapsed sections - a brief summary of the section’s contents so that you’re given an overview without having to open it up.

The notes section has had the number of notes listed for a few months now. In addition to that, ‘Financial Details’ now shows the total value of a Project to date, ‘Sundry Items’ displays the total value of those items, and ‘Tasks’ lists the total time recorded to date, plus that time’s value ( if the user has financial privileges ).

I have also made another revision to the action links, colouring them blue, and removing the tick icon. The icon was unneccesary, and the blue gives more prominence to the link’s functionality.

We have replaced all the old action buttons, which were similar to the Windows OS style buttons, bevelled and a bit bulky, with simple text and a small adderuppa logo icon.

Some subtle changes have been made to the styling of pages that contain collapsible sections. Collapsed section titles have been given a muted colour, and a light colour background has been added to the whole collapsed section. This has the effect of pulling focus towards the open section, the area of interest.

Ajax events are normally tied to a link so that the mouse pointer identifies a live button or text element, and the user knows that a useful function lies underneath.

Because the link doesn’t point anywhere, a blank anchor could be used:

<a href="#" onclick="myMagicAjaxFunction();">Click for magic</a>

Unfortunately, this leads to the browser jumping to the top of the page every time the link is clicked, resulting in very confused and jittery users.

The answer is to replace ‘#’ with ‘javascript:void(0)’.

<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="myMagicAjaxFunction();">Click for magic</a>

No more jumping pages. Lots of happy users.

Following the decision to design for the 1024 screen width as default, we decided to revise some of the styling and rework the navigation. Up until this point, sub navigation was displayed only once a top level tab had been clicked. With more and more features being added to the pipeline we thought that it would soon become visually messy, and distracting, having too many text links along the old green bar, as well as annoying having to select a page in order to see available choices.

So we decided to opt for a css dropdown menu instead, building on HTML Dog’s classic Son of Suckerfish. This not only gives instant access to all the options available, it removes the cumbersome full-width colour bar, making the page appear lighter.

We also made a couple of subtle changes that push focus towards the main body of the page. Action links, such as ‘edit’, ‘delete’ etc, have been reduced in size and lightened in colour, pushing them to the background a little while retaining the functional immediacy.