Dear TrackRecord customers,

For the past two years we have been dedicated to delivering the best Basecamp time tracking application for the Mac. We’ve spoken with many of you and heard just how essential both TrackRecord and Basecamp are to you and your clients.

We’re writing to you today because, as some of you may have heard, 37signals have recently announced the imminent release of the next iteration of their Basecamp product. They’re calling it Basecamp Next and are currently rolling it out as a separate product.

Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to us, 37signals have chosen to entirely remove time tracking from their Next product. You can view a list of the other services they will be removing on their official blog (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3110-basecamp-next-the-goodbye-list-and-the-hello-list). While we fully support the development of Basecamp as a service, and are excited to see where the Next product takes us, we’re also fairly shocked that 37signals would terminate time tracking support so abruptly.

So where do we go from here? The good news is that Basecamp Next is currently an opt-in service. Meaning that the Basecamp we know and love will continue to be supported by 37signals for the foreseeable future, and will continue to work with TrackRecord. It’s important to note, however, that users who choose to migrate to the Basecamp Next service will no longer be able to track time.

While 37signals have mentioned that they will consider adding time tracking support for Next in the future, we’ve been given no estimates as to when (or even if) this is likely to happen.  As such, we urge you to contact 37signals to let them know exactly what kind of impact the loss of time tracking will have on your business, and to formally request it be reimplemented in the Next product.

To do so, you can create a support ticket at the following address: http://help.37signals.com/tickets/new, or alternatively you can reach 37signals directly by email at email@37signals.com

While there is no immediate threat to TrackRecord or Basecamp users, we feel it would be beneficial for all involved to get a clear and concise response from 37signals regarding the future of time tracking support in Basecamp.

TrackRecord is used on a daily basis by teams all over the world. Which is why, starting today, we’re revising our pricing options to make TrackRecord an even better fit for people buying in bulk. Whether you’re a small team or a much larger outfit, it’s now possible to see savings of up to $10 per license depending on the quantity of your order. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Orders of 4 or more licenses will see a saving of $5 per license.
• Orders of 7 or more licenses will see a saving of $10 per license.

Paired with our exceptional support, there’s never been a better time to purchase TrackRecord.

TrackRecord 1.3 is the single biggest update we’ve made to TrackRecord since its debut almost two years ago. For the 1.3 release we looked at exactly what made TrackRecord the best Basecamp time tracking experience around, and then we set out to make it even better. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Project list filtering
You asked for it, and we’re happy to deliver. TrackRecord now comes with filter support, allowing you to selectively hide projects that you’re either not involved in or aren’t actively timing against. It’s a great way to de-clutter and prioritise.

Todo filtering
Only want to see the to-dos you’re personally responsible for? TrackRecord comes with a handy responsibility filter. Toggle it on or off to instantly breakdown your project listing.

Manual time editing improvements
Entering time manually shouldn’t be a chore. That’s why TrackRecord 1.3 comes with support for multiple time formats as well as improved error handing. Whether you like to deal in hours, minutes and seconds (02:00:00/02:00) or prefer Basecamp’s native approach (2.0), there’s something here for everyone.

Time tallying
TrackRecord now comes with a timer tally in the application’s bottom bar. Select one or more timers and we’ll total your time. Perfect for quickly checking how much time you’ve spent across a project or a particular period of time.

Drag & Drop
Want to start a timer quickly? Just drag a project or to-do from the project pane onto the timer list and TrackRecord 1.3 will automatically create an associated timer.

New networking class
We’ve totally rewritten TrackRecord’s networking class from the ground up. You’ll see faster connection times and better error handling.

UI updates
Our 1.2 update brought the application up-to-speed in the interface department, and TrackRecord 1.3 continues the trend. We’ve completely removed the restrictions surrounding project pane resizing, making it even easier to read those long to-dos.

Lion fixes
TrackRecord 1.3 fixes a number of Lion-specific rendering-issues, and we can honestly say it’s never looked better!

Just a quick update…

We’ve been working hard on the latest update to TrackRecord which we are going to be launching on the 15th June. This update will include big changes to the UI, better system preferences and we’ve fixed a number of bugs. We know it has been a while since the last update and hope its been worth the wait.

There are of course more updates planned for the future and if you have any comments or suggestions please do let us know.

Please note that the price is going to increase on the 15th June for new licences, existing licences will be able to upgrade for free.

More updates available on our website and via Twitter.

Whenever we add features to TrackRecord we discuss the impact those new features will have on our customers. To date, we’ve always tried to spend our development time wisely, working on features that will be appreciated by the majority, rather than the minority. This often involves admitting that not everyone likes to work in the same way. As a result, TrackRecord tries (wherever possible) to allow you to customise its time tracking behaviour.

The majority of this customisation will occur in TrackRecord’s preference pane. Today we’d like to give you a quick run through of the options available to you. To open the Preference pane, use the keyboard shortcut , or select ‘Preferences…’ from the TrackRecord menu.

Here’s a run down of the options available to you under the General tab:

• Add TrackRecord to the menu bar. As we discussed in a previous news post, this option toggles the existence of the TrackRecord menu bar item.
• Hide timer badges in the Project pane. Project pane badges are handy for keeping track of timers which have unposted time against them, but some people don’t like the visual distraction. The preference pane makes it easy to hide them.
• Remove timers after they have been posted to Basecamp. If selected, TrackRecord will remove timers from TrackRecord after they’ve been posted to Basecamp.
• Let me edit a Timer’s description immediately after it is created. Get started quickly by editing your timers description.

Under the Basecamp tab there are a number of options for Basecamp specific settings:

• Hide to-dos and to-dolists marked as ‘complete’ in Basecamp. Great for completionists, TrackRecord lets you hide anything you’ve marked as complete within Basecamp.
• Automatically set posted times to the current date and time. This one has tripped a few people up. It’s selected automatically and ensures that whenever you post time to Basecamp, the timer is updated to today’s time and date. Handy for people who don’t enjoy manually updating timer dates.

Today we’ve covered just a few of the options available to TrackRecord users. Please feel free to grab a copy yourself and give them a try. TrackRecord is built to work the way you want it to. If there’s something you think we’re missing, why not drop us a line?

Here in the office we’re all big fans of Panic. Being a Mac-based web design agency, we use Transmit on an almost daily basis and absolutely love it. We especially loved their Panic Status Board and knew that when we released our first Mac application, TrackRecord, we wanted to take a shot at cooking up our own status board solution.

Sadly, while we don’t quite have the budget for a nice, wall-mounted Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display, we do have an office iPad. The result is the TrackRecord mobile status board.

It runs from our local webserver and makes use of a healthy helping of HTML5 and CSS3. We grab site visits from our Mint installation, with the number of application downloads, sales and revenue generated from our own logs. We even calculate the number of trial copies due to expire today (and those due to expire the day after). Running in the background is a Google Map which we use to plot recent sale locations. And at the bottom we’ve even got a twitter activity ticker to let us know when we need to get back to people.

All data is updated via AJAX calls at set intervals, to keep things nice and fresh. Rest assured, though, that all of the information you see in the above pictures has been faked. Visitor counts, downloads and purchases have been (unfortunately) massively inflated, and purchase locations have been randomized.

TrackRecord v.1.1.5 is out now and available for download via our website or through in-app update. The update addresses a number of smaller issues as well as introduces TrackRecord’s new system menu bar.

The system menu bar is a quick way of accessing TrackRecord to perform basic timing tasks without having to interrupt your workflow by opening the main application window. While TrackRecord’s original system menu bar did its job, we weren’t totally satisfied with it. We wanted a menu bar that would let us seamlessly stop, start, clear and post timers without ever having to magnify the application window. Here’s what we came up with:

The new menu bar lists all of your timers (complete with a digital display of their current time), and gives a clear indication of your currently active timer. Performing actions on a timer is as simple as selecting it from the menu and choosing an option from its submenu.

We hope you enjoy using the new system menu bar as much as we do. If you have any questions or further suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

TrackRecord keeps a handy local cache of your Basecamp projects and to-do lists. This helps to keep things snappy and responsive when you’re working with timers, but what about when you need to refresh your local cache to reflect changes to your Basecamp account?

TrackRecord makes this process as simple as possible using something we like to call contextual refresh. Just added a new item to one of your to-do lists and want to see it appear in TrackRecord? Don’t wait for TrackRecord to update your entire Basecamp account. Just select the to-do list or project you’re interested in and hit refresh!

TrackRecord lets you get back to the work as quickly as possible.

TrackRecord 1.1 is out and available now via in-app update or from our homepage. Version 1.1 introduces a number of new features and fixes a few minor post-launch toothaches. Below is a breakdown of the stuff you’ll find in the latest updates:

Project time tracking

One of the most popular requests we’ve received since launching TrackRecord has been to include the ability to track time against projects as well as to-dos. We’re happy to announce that this is now possible. Whatever your workflow, TrackRecord should now have you covered. Not only that, but users who like to time against a project aswell as its to-dos will also notice that we’ve updated the badges on the project pane to give a clearer indication of how many timers you’re tracking, and how they’re allocated.

Not a fan of the project pane badges? Feel free to turn them off via the Preferences window.

Manual time editing

TrackRecord is now smarter when it comes to manually editing your timers. If invalid characters are detected, TrackRecord will now automatically remove them from the Time Spent column without zeroing your existing time. So long, butterfingers!

Better error handling

TrackRecord was already fairly good at handling connection issues, but 1.1 brings support for catching user errors such as incorrect protocols when accessing SSL-enabled Basecamp accounts and other such geekery.

Thank you

Finally, we’d just like to say thank you to everyone who has emailed over the past few days with comments and suggestions. We hope you enjoy TrackRecord and are looking forward to future updates. As always, we’re available to answer any questions you may have (just drop an email to support AT trackrecordapp.com).