This is still pretty rough because I’m still hashing out where this whole thing is going. I figure it’s kinda hard to go wrong with wood and paper right? I keep choosing and un-choosing what language I’m writing this thing with, I should actually do a post on that someday! Just wanted to make sure that you knew that I was still up to something.
In starting to write a fogbugz app, I thought this might be an ideal time to really start learning how to use Flex 4. Wow, I’m glad I did – although – there’s definitely a learning curve moving from 3 to 4. It’s a good thing though, I see where the developer is given a lot more freedom in creating and styling the components in the Flex framework and it’s nice to see states work in a way that is really useful. Here’s how it looks in my really really early early first stab at creating an item renderer:
<s:states>
<s:State name="normal" />
<s:State name="hovered" />
<s:State name="selected" />
<s:State name="normalAndShowsCaret" />
<s:State name="hoveredAndShowsCaret" />
<s:State name="selectedAndShowsCaret" />
</s:states>
<s:Rect left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="0">
<s:fill>
<s:SolidColor color="black"
alpha="0"
alpha.hovered="0.4"
alpha.selected="0.4"
alpha.selectedAndShowsCaret="0.4" />
</s:fill>
<s:filters>
<s:DropShadowFilter />
</s:filters>
</s:Rect>
You can see where I’ve cleanly defined the states and how the properties correspond with each state. No more addProperty and removeProperty, just nice clean awesomeness. Yay!
As for the actual app, things went fairly fast today. I already was working on a small base of code but I ended up trashing it so I could start clean in Flex 4. I was able to create models for all of the FB objects and was able to knock out the login, syncing FB details (projects, areas, fixFors, etc) and getting the search to work in a fairly rudimentary way. Tomorrow I’m hoping to really clean up the case list area and start working on the view you see when looking at a specific case. Huzzah!
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!