When closing a task from the ‘Open Tasks’ page, although the task was being closed correctly, the wrong page template was being served.

This has now been fixed.

After adding the facility to set a Project’s status to either ‘Quote’ or ‘Live’ we forgot to adjust the details listed under ‘Active Projects’ on the dashboard.

Number of Quotes and associated value are now listed seperately from Active Projects.

Some users may have experienced trouble logging in today. This was down to a bug in some changes we made to how the ‘logged in’ cookie is handled.

The bug included a classic ’stray semi-colon’ mistake. We had added a trailing slash on the cookie domain  and so the cookie was not being set.

This bug has now been squashed; our apologies and thanks for your patience if you were affected.

We uploaded the quote facility today. Quotes are essentially Projects that have not been set live; they are accessed via the Projects navigation tab.

To make building a quote meaningful, we have added the facility to enter Estimated Hours for each Task. These estimated hours are listed alongside the Recorded Hours, and are totalled to give you an idea of how long you think a Project might take to complete.

You can add Sundry Costs to a Quote. You can add Notes to a Quote. In fact, everything you can do within a Project you can do with a Quote.

You can also time tasks assigned to a Quote. This is very useful because it will allow you keep tabs on how long you take building the Quote, and build that cost in. In fact, we found this aspect so useful that we have automated the process of adding a ‘Build quote’ task when a new quote is created.

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.