I’ve been using fogbugz for a while, we put in place at work to handle issue tracking and after using a slew of different bug tracking solutions (ok it’s like 6 or 7 but that’s slew enough for me) I have really become very happy using fogbugz. Plus, fogcreek sounds like an amazing place where the sofas are made out of donuts and the water fountains have perfectly carbonated mexican coke. The thing I really like about it though is the api. Knowing that there’s a way out in case some feature doesn’t work the way you want it to is a very comforting feeling. And having worked with it a little in the past I know it’s a very capable api that’ll allow you to code up quite a bit of functionality.

Having said all that, there are some things in fogbugz that don’t work well for me. Namely, time tracking. At work, we don’t use EBS, we use the time tracking feature to bill clients. Since we do that, we have to track every minute of our day. So, this takes some discipline to always remember to set the “Working on” which apparently I’m the only person in the world who has issues with this because I’m always forgetting and having to go back to fix it. When I was designing a small app to help me with this, I came across a few other features that I’d like and it started to develop into an actual app. So here I am, writing a fogbugz interface. Here are the features I’m throwing in here:

Phase 1:

1. Quickly list,add,edit, and view cases.
2. Case search
3. Case history (keeping a running tab of the cases you have looked at)

Phase 2:

1. Automated time tracking: What ever the current case is that you are looking at, that is the case that gets time tracked to it. Switch case, new time entry.

It’s totally not a fleshed out attempt and it’s something I’m doing in my spare time so I don’t know what this will turn into – but – in the end I’m hoping to have a solution for me (and people like me) to easily track time in fogbugz. It’ll be an Adobe AIR app and will most likely be coded out in Flex. I’m wanting to really focus on the ui to create something a little slicker that what I usually do so having a Flash desktop app is the way to go. And considering I’m booted into Windows during the day and OS X at night, I need something that will work on both platforms. We’ll see what happens, I’ll keep you updated!