Happy new year to all our Timetastic users! This blog’s been pretty quiet, but we’ve spent the last two months working on a big update to Timetastic, which we’re currently planning to release in late January.

Speed and stability

This release is full of under-the-hood improvements. As we head towards a full launch, we’ve really focused on stability, trying to iron out as many bugs as possible. We’ve also speeded up many places in the app, and also made it quicker for us to roll out new updates.

A design refresh

We’ve done a big refresh on the design of Timetastic – the top navigation bar is easier to use, we’ve made the colours nicer, and this has allowed us to incorporate some really nice things. For example, you can now see your holiday allowance for both the current year and the next year.

We’ve cleaned up other pages, too. Here’s a look at the new settings interface:

The wall chart

Some people have been experiencing problems in the beta period with the wall chart, and we’ve done a full rewrite of how this works to combat this. The new version is a lot more resilient for both big and small companies.

We’ve also added some new features here – if you click on your holidays, you’ll have the option to cancel them directly from the wall chart.

What about charging?

We still haven’t made a decision on when we’ll start charging for Timetastic – we want to get this release out, plus some other features people are waiting for, like iCal feeds, and make sure everyone’s happy with Timetastic before we start charging people to use it.

Our current plan is to get this out by late January, and we’ll email everyone who’s signed up when we’re planning to do this. Speak to you then!

Not only has there been an awesome video added to Timetastic, but we’ve added some nice new features in the last few days too!

Better emails – featuring Harry!

We’ve got some great new emails. You get a different Harry depending on if your holiday’s been approved or declined!

Better staff management

There’s now a “Staff” page if you’re a department boss or administrator, and you can easily edit people’s details from that page. Also, when you’re viewing your own calendar (or someone else’s if you can see it), you can now toggle between a calendar and list view.

Easier support and feedback

There’s a handy support tab on the left that links into our help desk system – click it, and you can tell us your feedback or ask for support!

Lots of statistics

You won’t see these from a user perspective for a while yet, but we’ve got some awesome graphs that tell us how much people are using the system and how many people are signing up. If you’re adding lots of holidays, we might be coming to talk to you about how you’re finding it!

As a sneak peak, here’s what our signups look like over the last few days… (it’s a sneak peak because we left the numbers off the side!)

Mobile apps – coming soon!

We’re (no surprises) having a little back-and-forth with the Apple ‘App Store’ review team. No estimate yet on when the iPhone app will be in the store, but based on what we’ve heard we’re hoping in the next week or two.

The Android app’s just being finalised and we’re testing on as many devices as we can – we’ll be submitting that early next week.

Your feedback

We’ve had lots of great feedback so far and we’re really enjoying talking to people about how they’re using Timetastic. Two of the most requested things we’ve had are the ability to see your holidays as an ICS feed (so you can include it in Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar), and the ability for bosses to book holiday for their own staff.

Both of these will be coming very soon. In the meantime, we hope you’re enjoying using Timetastic!

Today we got the Timetastic video loaded up on the marketing homepage.

Timetastic is one of those apps that will replace a tired old paper or spreadsheet based system. The video’s an attempt to show how the app fits with the employees of a small business, and the advantages of a system for managing staff leave that’s on a web and mobile app, rather than paper work or spreadsheets.

Naturally we wanted to inject some fun into the process, let’s be honest; holidays should be something to smile about. That’s why you’ll see Harry book a holiday to Bognor Regis for £30 and head to the beach on his surf board!

For the Geeks amongst you, the transition from computer screen to mobile app is particularly cool.

We hope you like it?

The timetastic beta will be down for a few hours from around 11 o’clock today (28th June).

We’re moving the server to its new home in a real data centre ready for the finished version to go live next month.

Once we’ve moved the server you should find timetastic is faster and more reliable as it will have a proper internet connection rather than just our office broadband.

[Update: 14:30]
Timetastic is now back up and running

I’ve just pushed out another beta release of Timetastic (it’s all go!) with some really useful changes, especially for larger companies.

What’s new?

• You now get an email if your holiday has been cancelled.
• Made some speed improvements for multiple departments.
• Added the ability to delete a department.
• Added department filtering to the wall chart.

Coming soon…

• Nicer notification emails!
• Bulk upload staff members from an Excel spreadsheet.

As ever, you can get in touch by commenting here or emailing us on hello@timetastic.co.uk.

I’ve just pushed out a new beta release of Timetastic with some bug fixes.

Changes since the last release

• Fixed various bugs when your holiday year didn’t start in January.
• Fixed a bug whereby you got an ugly error message if you tried to book a holiday with no dates in the date boxes.

Known issues

• You don’t get an email notification if your boss cancels your holiday.

As ever, if you’ve got any feedback, or find any issues, please get in touch on hello@timetastic.co.uk.

One of the things we really wanted to concentrate on when we started building Timetastic was the idea that you should be able to do certain things on your smartphone: book some holiday, look at your calendar for the year, and see who’s on leave at the moment. If I’m sat at home thinking about when I want to go on holiday with my family, I don’t really want to go and sit in front of the computer – I’d just like to be able to pull it up on my phone at a glance.

So alongside launching Timetastic – which is getting closer to coming out of beta every day as we fix bugs and introduce new features – we’re building applications for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone.

I’ve been working on the API (which is the techy bit that means that mobile apps can hook up with the Timetastic website) and also starting to build the iPhone application, whilst Martin’s working on the Windows Phone application and Allan on the Android.

Here’s a sneak peak of what the iPhone application is going to look like! (As ever, these could change…)

Hello everyone, I’m James, and I’m the lead developer on Timetastic! That means I’m the person you can throw tomatoes at if things aren’t working as you like!

Things have been a little rocky in Timetastic beta-land this week! We’ve been rolling out releases in response to customer feedback faster than we know what to do with. So from now on, we’re slowing down a bit – every few days, there’ll be a new release, and we’ll write about it on the blog.

I’ll also make sure the last blog post has been updated with any issues we know about to try and keep everyone in the loop.

So, here goes for this release:

Changes since the last release

• Major speed improvements – everything should be much faster now!
• A new settings page: the add forms are hidden away until you want them, and then they nicely appear.
• A staff member’s calendar now starts from the start month of your holiday year, as opposed to always starting from January.

Coming soon

• A better “you’ve approved this holiday” page, and to work on mobiles too!
• Better colours for pending holidays, as well as different colours for different holiday types.

Known issues

• If you’ve got a holiday year start date set that’s not January, holidays aren’t being deducted from allowances properly. (This is high on the priority list to fix.)

As ever, if you’ve got any feedback, or find any issues, please get in touch on hello@timetastic.co.uk. We’re really pleased with how it’s shaping up – we hope you are too!

Yesterday saw the first public release of our online staff leave planner Timetastic, otherwise known as a “beta release”

It’s the first time we’ve opted for the soft launch approach and the benefits so far have exceed our expectations.

What is a beta launch?

We believe the most important thing in bringing a new product to market is getting the product out in the market as soon as possible. A beta launch is effectively launching as soon as you are comfortable to do so. This differs to delaying launch until every piece of functionality in a spec is packed in and fully tested.

To do this we focus on the core functionality only, in the case of Timetastic this is:

1. A booking form
2. A calculation system to keep track of your days
3. A calendar so you can see your booked holiday

The benefit to a beta launch is getting the feedback of real users as early in the product life-cycle as possible.

It’s highly likely that although you believe you’ve solved the major problem, the chances are real users will view the problem ever so slightly different. Finding out what makes users tick as early on in the process will help you save masses of development time and produce a much stronger product.

Has it worked?

We’re only 24 hours in but already we’ve had valuable feedback from good sources. We’ve straightened out a few bugs and are already reworking elements of user experience to make the whole system feel more intuitive.

So yeah, it worked. Why don’t you join us too, the beta is available to anyone, and we’d love to get your feedback.

You can signup here.

When I started at mediaburst I was put in charge of managing and recording staff leave, the system went a bit like this.

• Staff member wants a day off so completes a holiday form
• Staff member takes completed holiday form to manager
• Manager signs form (when they get around to it of course, and assuming it doesn’t get buried under a pile of paper)
• Manager passes the form to a Director to sign (again,when they get around to it)
• Director passes it back to Manager
• Manager passes it back to Staff Member
• Staff Member passes it to Payroll Administrator
• Payroll Administrator photocopies it and passes one copy back to Staff Member
• Payroll Administrator stores one copy
• Payroll Administrator updates an excel spread sheet of holidays to record how many days each person has remaining.

What an unbelievable amount of messing around just to take a day off. But believe me, this is normal for small businesses.

Bigger companies have complex HR management systems, some develop their own in-house. But small businesses are left in the cold.

There must be a better way to manage staff leave, and there must be something for small businesses.

Well, we dug around the web. We found a handful of applications to help you manage this system. The problem we found is they’re all too complex, poor design is the norm, most are littered with unnecessary functionality, they aim toward helping you manage your entire HR department. None of them felt like they were for “us”, a small business.

We wanted something simple and well designed, no frills, quick to get running, easy to use, inexpensive.

We just want to request leave using an online form, and all the information be stored automatically. We don’t want to be filling in and passing paper forms around. We don’t want spreadsheets or a huge wall planner cluttered with sticky stars and different coloured dots.

And we want access any time, anywhere. I plan my holidays at home with my wife, why do I have to be in the office to book the time off?

That’s why we’re building Timetastic.

You’ll be able to rip up all the forms, manage everything from within your web browser. Authorisations done by email, everything recorded instantly. No more paper shuffling or losing forms under piles of paperwork.

Development has started and we expect to launch in late May.

In the meantime you can register to stay in the loop and get more information as and when it becomes available.

http://www.timetastic.co.uk