Tuesday 27 September 2022

MrTickTock has a new owner

I'm pleased to announce that MrTickTock has been acquired. 

The new owner is excited to begin working on the platform and is committed to keeping the service running indefinitely. There will be no stoppage in service. The new owner has a solid vision for the next evolution of MrTickTock, and more information will be provided in the coming days.


Monday 29 August 2022

End of MrTickTock

<UPDATE 27 September 2022>

I'm pleased to announce that MrTickTock has been acquired. 

The new owner is excited to begin working on the platform and is committed to keeping the service running indefinitely. There will be no stoppage in service. The new owner has a solid vision for the next evolution of MrTickTock, and more information will be provided in the coming days.

</UPDATE>

<UPDATE 21 September 2022>

The EOL date has been prolonged to November 17th, but there is a good chance that MrTickTock will stay available longer, maybe forever. 

I'll come up with more information in the coming days. 

</UPDATE>

<UPDATE 14 September 2022>

I am trying to sell MrTickTock on the microacquire.com site. If it is successful, the service will operate as usual, and no EOL will happen.

If there is no buyer, I'll share the code on GitHub and make it free for personal and internal use. 

I'll come up with more information in the coming days. 

</UPDATE>

MrTickTock.com will be discontinued as of November 17th, 2022.

Why?

MrTickTock was created as a need for a lightweight and agile way of tracking time within the company I co-created and worked at. 

At the same time, it became my first publicly offered service that I tried to commercialize. It was a stunning business lesson and a fascinating journey of creating my own product. I learned how important it was to listen to customers and try to engage them, implement innovative features, pay attention to details, keep the cost of maintenance low, work remotely, and many more. 

Since the creation of MrTickTock, I left my company and focused entirely on a new business. The new company, HeroCoders, turned out to be very successful and fast growing. But I committed to it my whole time and even more. 

As a result, the active development of MrTickTock stopped in mid-2016. No new features have appeared since then, and only minor maintenance and bug fixing have happened. 

It could not last forever because SaaS apps need attention. Library and frameworks upgrade, DB maintenance, performance tweaks, UX improvements, and more. 

With great sadness, I admit I have no time to keep the project running. Therefore, MrTickTock will stop working from October 7th, when the current SSL certificate expires. Soon after, the domain and hosting will expire, too, making the service unavailable. 

What will happen to the data?

All data will be destroyed and disappear when MrTickTock shuts down. 

Please use the "Reports" tab => "Show report" button => "Export to..." button functionality to back up all your data if you need it. 

The export size is limited (I had no time to fix/extend it), so you might not be able to export all the data at once. Please divide it into smaller (e.g. monthly) chunks in that case. 

Payments

All payments will be cancelled on Oct 7th. If you don't need MrTickTock access sooner, please make sure to cancel your subscription at "Account" => "Manage subscription" link as presented below. 

No refunds will be made for payments prior to Oct 7th










Epilog 

Thank you for being my customer for all those years. Thank you for all the feedback, feature requests, and for creating an iOS app. It was an exciting and memorable journey that had come to an end. 

Cheers,
Jacek Jaroczynski

Sunday 10 July 2016

MrTickTock 3.5 - "report reader" role



MrTickTock 3.5 has just been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

This version brings only one but well deserved change requested by many of our customers:


  • "Report reader" role introduced
    MrTickTock offers few access levels for its users to satisfy most common needs.
    In this version we have introduced "Report reader" role that gives a user access to all reports but does not allow for wider administrative access nor time reporting.


 What's next?

In next versions we will focus on internationalization of MrTickTock.

We are also waiting for your suggestions and ideas! Please drop a comment below or browse our feedback system.

Follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.


Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Saturday 7 May 2016

MrTickTock 3.4 - security and usability improvements



MrTickTock 3.4 has just been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Here is what we have added and improved in this version:

  • Display absence subcategory name
    Subcategory name is now explicitly displayed in all places across the application. Previously we displayed only "Other" indicating sub-category but without specifying particular name. Improved behaviour is more legible and less confusing.



  • Assignee picker improvements
    Assignee picker on the task popup is now rendered under the button that triggers the picker and it can be closed with a mouse click anywhere outside the picker.



  • Last report date fixed
    Last report date in task popup is now correctly calculated. Now it indicates last report of any user and not current one.


  • Task name in tooltip
    When task name is trimmed on Tick-Tock page because it is too long, then full task name is isible in the tooltip.
  • Invite user improved
    When administrator tries to invite a user who has an account in MrTickTock already, we used to display generic message that email address is already registered. It caused confusion among our customers and they had to contact us directly for precise instructions.
    Now the message clearly says that user being invited must deactivate their account first.
  • Security fixes
    We have improved MrTickTock security by fixing few vulnerabilities discovered when performing code reviews and testing.

 What's next?

In next versions we will focus on internationalization of MrTickTock and introduce new role for accessing reports only.

We are also waiting for your suggestions and ideas! Please drop a comment below or browse our feedback system.

Follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.


Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Saturday 24 October 2015

MrTickTock 3.3 - assign users and project tracking improved



MrTickTock 3.3 has just been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Here is what we have added and improved in this version:
  • Assign users
    It is now possible to assign users to task right from the task popup.
    That is a quick and convenient way to assign multiple users to task from one place. This action is available only to admin.


  • Project tracking
    Project progress bar showing hours worked versus hours estimated has been present in MrTickTock since almost forever (available on project popup).
    Now, it is possible to see progress of projects on customer popup. Only active projects are displayed (with time reported and estimated time set).


What's next?

In next version we will again focus on UX, bugs and usability improvements.

We are also waiting for your suggestions and ideas! Please drop a comment below or browse our feedback system.

Follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.


Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Sunday 14 June 2015

MrTickTock 3.2 - security is important



MrTickTock 3.2 has just been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Here is what we have added and improved in this version:

  • New accepted time format
    Speed of time storing is one of our strongest points. Keyboard shortcuts and general UX excellence of the Tick-Tock page is our top priority.
    This time we have added one more option for time format, i.e. [0-9]{4}. It means that we can skip colon when typing full 4 digits entry, e.g. 0230 means 2:30 (two and half hours) and 1000 means 10:00 (exactly ten hours).

     
  • Security improvements
    We pay a lot of attention to security on a daily basis when developing the app. Nevertheless our experience in software development told us that we should do even more.
    Thanks to Salman Khan from dezignburg.com we found few issues in both configuration and application code. Solving them allowed us to move MrTickTock and our users data security to the next level. Now we all can sleep even better :)
     
What's next?

In next version we will again focus on UX, bugs and usability issues and features.

We are also waiting for your suggestions and ideas! Please drop a comment below or browse our
feedback system.

Follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.


Enjoy,
MrTickTock team

Saturday 22 November 2014

MrTickTock 3.1 - improvements and bugfixes



MrTickTock 3.1 has just been released and published at http://mrticktock.com.

What's new?

Here is what we have added and improved in this version:


  • Time off approval
    Initially this feature allowed to accept time off requests no older than from last month. Some of our customers reported a need to access older items so here it is:



  • Keyboard navigation
    Daily view on Tick-Tock page allows to filter tasks. That is a very handy feature if you work on a number of items.
    Now you can use down/up keyboard arrows to move the caret not only between time input fields but also to the task filtering field.
     
  • Main page refreshment
    Feature carousel, support page and other minor changes appeared on our website.

We have also fixed some issues and added UX and performance improvements for the most frequent actions. 

What's next?

In next version we will again focus on UX and bugs.

We are also waiting for your suggestions and ideas! Please drop a comment below or browse our
feedback system.

Follow us on Twitter if you haven't already.


Enjoy,
MrTickTock team