After a long period of starting and stopping, I’m pleased to be able to introduce the Daily Timeline report for Simple In/Out.  This feature has been in the back of our minds for over a year now, but just today we’ve finally released this to the public.  

The Daily Timeline answers a frequent request we’ve received, which was to see a more granular view of your users’ in/out activity.  Our other report (which we’ve now renamed as Time Card) offers an easy way to see how many hours a user was IN.  Many of our users wanted to know more.  When were their users coming to the office?  When was their lunch break?  When did they knock off for the day?  The Daily Timeline is our first attempt to help answer those questions.

Under the same Reports link as our other report, the Daily Timeline features a similar interface.  Simply pick a date to run, a group (if you have groups) and click Run Report.  You’ll be presented with a line chart for every user that shows their in/out status changes.  Here’s a taste:

When the line is up and blue is shown, the user is IN.  When the line is low, the user is OUT.  We also placed little dots signifying every status update.  Those dots can be hovered over to see the exact time and message the user left when changing statuses.

Like our other report, the Daily Timeline has an export to CSV option that will print out all the users’ raw in/out data for the given date.  This has also been a big feature request from users who would love to parse the data themselves.  

If that isn’t enough, there is one more thing.  Starting today, all users now have access to reports for the first time.  Previously, non-admin users could never see the reports.  Starting today, non-admins can see reports but only for themselves.  This answers another big feature request, which was allowing users to monitor their own in/out history easier than the 7 day history that we already offer.

I hope everyone feels the Daily Timeline was worth the wait.  I’m personally excited to have this one out the door and can’t wait to dig into the next new feature.  As always, please email us your feedback by using contact [at] simpleinout [dot] com.

Startup Weekend Fargo

Last night, Simple In/Out received a big improvement to it’s Full Screen Mode.  The Full Screen Mode, available for some time already, is a great way to view just the board and avoid the logged-in user’s data.  While it was good, it’s an order of magnitude better now.

We focused on adding a few awesome new features:

• The colors are now inverted, which looks great from a distance and saves on energy.
• The fonts are now much bigger, and get bigger when you have more HD space to work with.
• We optimized the layout to fit 3 users wide on the popular HD sizes, so you can fit a lot more users on the screen.

Also included in this update is the change of the “out” dot on the website to a rounded square instead of a circle.  This is a subtle change for our colorblind users, who can now more easily distinguish in from out.

To accomplish these updates, much of Simple In/Out is now Retina-screen aware, so it looks stunning on recent iPads and MacBooks.  It’s also faster, as we’ve removed a lot of redundant images.

One final bonus, the new Full Screen Mode looks wonderful on the iPad.  We’ve received requests for better support for users who wanted to place an iPad on a desk to show the board.  Now with our new Full Screen Mode, an iPad for display looks awesome (and updates automatically every 5 minutes).  Here’s a quick, albeit blurry look, from my iPad last night.

M.O. Interview with Bill Burgess

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Idea Mensch Interview with Brandon Medenwald, Co-Founder of Simply Made Apps

We are happy to announce a big update for our iOS users today. Version 3.2 is now available and we have some great new features included with this update.

• Geofence Notifications – Now you can enable a notification when you trip a geofence. The notifications are optional for users that want that extra level of feedback from the geofences.
• Sound Effects – We haven’t bombarded the app with a ton of annoying sound effects, but we did add a few audio cues on errors and status updates to let you know when things are working right. These can also be turned off if you really want to. And as always, we respect the mute switch, so mute means we will keep quiet.
• Voice Over Support – We have added some much needed support for Voice Over. This will help our visually impaired users get the most out of Simple In/Out.
• Custom URL Handling – We will have a separate blog post on using this new feature. The long and the short of it is we now support custom URL’s to create shortcuts in the app. Specificially, update status, enable/disable geofences, enable/disable notifications, and enable/disable sound effects. We will consider adding more as the need arises.
• Custom Character Support – This one probably falls under bug fixes, but it is worth mentioning that we now support all special characters in status updates. Before we only supported specific punctuation, but as our overseas users have pointed out, one size doesn’t always fit all. So we are happy to fix this oversight and enable all special characters in the status update messages.
• Bug fixes – This is probably the most bug free version of Simple In/Out we have ever shipped. It is next to impossible to test for every device on every software version, but we feel we have gotten all of bugs that have been reported as well as a bunch we found (hopefully before anyone else noticed them).

We really want to thank all of our beta testers as well as our existing users that have reported issues and sent in suggestions. Almost everything in this build is based off of user requests or bug reporting. We love hearing from each and every one of you. Not only do we enjoy hearing how Simple In/Out has helped out, it helps make it a better product for everyone. So keep those suggestions coming.

We will have another blog post dedicated entirely to setting up the custom URL handling feature. Once it is done, we will link back to it here.

Working with your BFF: How to keep a friendship solid in the crucible of running a small business

Our latest iOS update patches a pretty big bug found by A LOT of our users surrounding the geofence feature. The update is now live in the App Store.

It is suggested that you double check your geofence settings to make sure everything is set correctly after the update. You can toggle the on/off switch to completely reset your geofence settings to be absolutely sure.

We greatly appreciate the patience and understanding by our users. This has been a very stressful week. We have a nice case of carpal tunnel from typing out apology and explanation emails over this issue. This issue has taught us a couple of very good lessons. One, pay closer attention when shipping updates. And two, we have some great, understanding users. So thank you so very much for your patience and understanding.

As always, if you are having any troubles or issues after the update, just shoot us an email and we’ll do our best to take care of it.

Simply Made Apps

We have discovered (thanks to many helpful users) that our last update caused geofences to stop working for some iOS users. We have identified the problem and have implemented the fix. It will take a few days to get approved by Apple, but should resolve any issues you might be having in regards to failed updates with your geofences. We are very sorry for any inconvenience.