Moving to mediatemple - April 17, 2008 -
In the next few days, I’ll be moving this site over to mediatemple. I’m pretty excited to be hosting with them, any contact I’ve ever had with the company was positive — they seem to be really great people.
I don’t anticipate any, but if there is any downtime in the next little while — that’s why.
I had a complete nightmare experience with my current host, something that I’m going to write up in the next few days (not here, but probably as a case study over on Industry Interactive.
Twitter & update - April 13, 2008 -
If you’d prefer to follow Mailmanagr on Twitter, you can follow along here.
I ran into a little hitch with my hosting this week, but I’m working with them to get it resolved. Should be ironed out soon. At the risk of completely shooting myself in the foot, I’m going to aim to have that beta ready for you all at the end of the week. That may be Friday, or it may be Sunday, or it may be next Wednesday (just kidding… I hope). I’m really dying to get some people on it and testing it out.
Other application offerings - April 11, 2008 -
I’ve gotten a couple of comments along the lines of:
I use Product X because it already does this and more, you should check it out…
Thanks folks, I appreciate the suggestions. The fact of the matter is that I’ve looked at most other project management apps, and for me, Basecamp’s the one. One product that’s come up repeatedly because it deals with e-mail natively is Wrike.
I have three major problems with Wrike:
- The UI. I mean come on, emulating the a Windows Explorer file/folder tree as the UI for a project management application? That’s a borderline bad idea for an online file management app (like Box.net). Who thought that would be a good idea? It’s like someone said “Windows has one of the most beautiful and intuitive interfaces ever… let’s copy it!”.
- Gantt Charts. I can’t stand these bloody things. As a PM on projects, I don’t enjoy spending time explaining to clients what they mean and how to read them. If I wanted Gantt charts, I’d use MS Project, and there’s no way I’m going to do that.
- Reports. It seems like any application that thinks it needs more features throws in a “Reports” section. My opinion is that if it’s not evident what’s going on by looking at the open tasks list, milestones left to do, and messages posted, a report isn’t going to clear things up for you.
I’ve played with a lot of PM apps, both desktop and online. The bottom line is that they address the wrong problem. Basecamp was created to help communicate project status among team members and clients. Other PM apps just complicate that.
Highrise talks to Basecamp - April 7, 2008 -
I learned a couple of things today:
- I get distracted way too easily.
- The Basecamp API is WAY better than the Highrise API.
- APIs really will save the world and bring peace and harmony to the masses.
The only problem I ever had with Highrise was that if you added a task there you had a separate task list going from Basecamp. Now to see what I have to do, I have to go to two different places - Basecamp and Highrise. Of course, using the API, I can fix that, right?
Yeah, kind of. I’ve run into a couple of problems:
- There’s no way to get category names out of Highrise. The only thing it will give you is the category ID. So things like “Call” are 545154. The screenshot above is a hacked together solution that will only work on my specific Highrise account because I’ve statically mapped the numbers to English definitions. If I change “Call” in Highrise to “Skype” or something, it will still show as “Call” in Basecamp. Far from ideal.
- The way due dates are set on tasks in Highrise. Through the API, Highrise gives you an “alert-at” datetime. So something that’s due tomorrow gets an alert-at of 7:00PM today. Tasks marked later don’t get an alert-at at all. I’m not completely convinced this is a problem yet, but I need to do a bunch of testing to see if there are designated times for each of the timeframes. Then I’ve got to figure out how I want to represent that in Basecamp.
- Both companies and people are identified as “parties” in the Highrise API. I had originally planned to drop in a URL to the associated area in the Basecamp task — but people have a /people in the URL and companies have a /company in the URL, with no way to distinguish between the two in the API.
It’s not doing the two-way sync yet — it’s only pulling outstanding tasks from Highrise and dropping them into Basecamp. Making it sync though is pretty trivial though.
At least I can have that unified task list I’ve always dreamt of. Sorry, I know it’s completely unrelated to e-mail integration with Basecamp, but I figured if anyone would be interested it would be readers here. It just goes to show you another thing that can be accomplished using the API.
And now, back to our scheduled programming (no pun intended).
I need your help! - April 7, 2008 -
I’ve noticed that different e-mail clients format forwarded messages in different ways. I’m trying to build a little niceness into Mailmanagr that will handle the formatting of mail messages nicely, so that you don’t end up with piles of garbage in messages posted to Basecamp.
If you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, help me out by sending a new message, and forwarding a message to info {at} mailmanagr.com. In the message, just let me know what client software you’re using (or webmail client). Hopefully then I can build in some nice processing to keep things clean.
Logo - April 6, 2008 -
While waiting for disk utility to check over my computer today, and hopefully fix some of the random crashes the Finder’s been giving me, I started to sketch out some logo ideas.
I wanted to play off of the Basecamp logo a little because, really, Mailmanagr isn’t much of a product without Basecamp. Here’s a (very preliminary) sketch of what I came up with:
Looking at it now, I think the mailbox needs to stand up straight, instead of slant downwards like it does. Let me know what you think of the concept in the comments.
