25th
RailsRumble 2009. Paperback: A Post Mortem evaluation
So, to make life easier to the judges of my application, I will straight down the main features and the issues I’ve found along the way. We start now.
What it supposed to be.
Paperback in one sentence: “A day activity log manager with twitter-like interface”.
Paperback may look very similar to twitter when you log in, please be patient enough to pass through that. Paperback is intended to do something different.
1. You use Paperback when you are stating some activity you are doing in your day to day work
You will have the entries organized by date, so you can navigate to an specific day and see what you did for audit purposes.
2. You can categorize the entries
Some entries are related to projectX, some others to bug #123 of projectY. With categorization is easy for you to check entries related to an specific activity.
3. You specify time factor to the entries:
- You can state an entry representing an activity that took you H hours and M minutes to complete
- You can state an entry representing an activity that you think will take you H hours and M minutes to complete
This way, you can do time estimates on your entries, and actually get some useful insight data out of it. Sadly , we didn’t have enough time to represent good charts about that data we are recollecting :-(.
4. Entries can be Todo items:
Entries that had an estimation date could happen to be todos, so you could go to a pending page when you see all this entry representing a todo list instead of an activity log entry date. The only way you could check an entry as completed, was when you specify the actual time you took to finish it.
5. The social twitter factor
Normally you would use this as an activity log, but what would happen if people actually care of what you are doing, say your supervisor or team members?. I wanted to use twitter for this, but I considered that people that followed me for other reasons (social life, ruby community, etc) wouldn’t care about my progress on the bug #123 from the project XYZ. With Paperback we made explicit in which channels I want to follow a person.
6. Keep your identity
As I said before, We wanted to use twitter for this, and in some cases we still want to, that’s why we use the Twitter authentication in the first place, to keep the identity you have from twitter. We added OpenID just to support more ways to get you in the project for judging purposes, as soon as the competition ends, the OpenID authentication will go out.
What we have.
Sadly everything is not there, as its supposed to be on the final product, but we are proud to say that at least the core features are there, not polished nor well designed, but there.
The bad
- Header titles… there is not a single one, it hurts so bad to see it
- The update entry feedback is not well behaved, the entry will be updated, but you won’t be able to see it that well.
The Ugly
- We didn’t specify user Timezones, we gather the info from OpenID and Twitter, but we didn’t actually assign the Timezone to the framework, you will find out pretty quickly if you are way off UTC (as in my case)
- Public pages are not working, a last minute change added the current_user username on the rightbar, when there is no authenticated user it stills try to get the username, causing a NoMethodFoundError on the Nil class.
- The update process won’t work if you don’t specify a valid command, as soon as you hit update, you will see the throbber rolling and rolling.
- The OpenID process seems to fail, probably a last minute change added a bug
To finish the entry, I will post a short screencast showing some of the features, we hope you find this product helpful, we surely do, Thanks for syntoynizying.
