Bubble_timer

Take a Letter, Maria

The long promised notes feature of BubbleTimer was made available this morning.

There is a note that applies to the whole day. Click the icon at the top left to create or edit a note:
 


Hover over the note icon to see what you previously noted:
 


To the right of the bubbles there is a note for each activity for that day. Again click the icon o create or edit a note, and hover to read:
 

Notes are included in print outs and exports. I can't wait to hear about what interesting uses you come up with for notes.

The notes feature has been "done" for about a month now. Why the month delay in getting it to you? This morning was the first time that there is nothing about the notes implementation that I would change.

I'm still figuring things out, but it's now clear to me that everything I add to BubbleTimer has to be perfect. If it's perfect in my eyes, and from my perspective, then at least it probably doesn't suck to you from your perspective.

A case in point: the planning bubbles. Unfortunately I released the planning bubbles before they were perfect to me, which means they sucked at first for many people. It took 4 attempts to get them right in my eyes and now it seems like they at least don't suck for most people anymore.

So what kind of things weren't perfect with notes? Since the feature has been working, the activity note has been in 4 different locations. Each location wasn't quite right until I finally found a spot for it that I like (just to the right of the bubbles).

There have been 3 different versions of the note icon. I like this one. It also now has 12 different versions of writting on it rather than one, so each note looks unique, sort of like the penciled in bubbles.

Another annoyance was that the bubble tooltip library that was used for showing charts in BubbleTimer could not handle variable width content. That meant if you wrote a short concise note, you still had a wide (and mostly empty) bubble tooltip when you hovered. That just can't be, so in came a new tooltip library.

There were countless other little things but I won't bore you any further. I hope I've nailed the simplicity, elegance and polish you've come to expect from BubbleTimer, but if I'm off the mark in anyway, or if you find any problems in your browser environment, be sure to give me a shout here, on the forums or by email.

Next up on the never ending list for BubbleTimer is activity categories and better charting.

Posted by Sean Johnson 02/04/2009 at 06h30


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