TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

As someone who often takes part in meetings out of the office, one of the areas of TeamworkPM that I use the most is the main calendar. This is because while at a meeting I need to schedule the next appointment and to make sure both parties are free.

To avoid forgetting, or worse double booking, I usually create that next meeting straight away. To do this I have to login to our TeamworkPM site, via the browser on my phone, and although this view was not bad for checking times, the real issue came when having to create or edit events.

Today I’m really happy to announce that the days of struggling to create new events while out on the road are over thanks to the release of an integrated calendar for Teamwork Mobile. This update now makes entering new events so simple.

Take a look at this short video to see the new mobile calendar in action: 

Or if you'd prefer a bit more detail here are a some screen shots taken from my iPad:

Continuing our Meet the Team campaign, this month it's Dan's turn to crawl out from his programming pit, blink wildly at the bright sun and say "Hello" to you all...

 

Many of you may have conversed with me over the last few years so I better introduce myself formally....

I'm 32 years young, married 7 months and live in the beautiful Irish countryside in Co. Cork. I love programming and Teamwork is one of the biggest parts of my life. 

Every waking moment is spent thinking about the product, the programming, our customers and future features.

When I was young, my father dragged home a Wang IBM PC (286) from work and there began my foray into computers. Nintendo's were not something we had as kids and while everyone was busy playing the latest video games, I had my head buried in Basic manuals trying to create my own games on the sly while avoiding homework.

The 286 progressed to a 386 and I progressed to Turbo Pascal. My games were rubbish but the sense of achievement was massive. It felt like I was changing the world, even though the only people I had to show were my sisters. That all changed when I met Peter in college. We decided we were going to build games. He was the first person I met that had the same enthusiasm as myself and to top it off was a damn good programmer. We used to have competitions such as who could make the best 2D tile based engine using C++ and DirectX (3!). Peter won ;-)

That was 12 years ago and we're still working together. The aim of the game has changed but we are just as passionate about Teamwork now as we were back then trying to create games!

Peter filled in the early days of our consulting company Digital Crew (See Peter's meet the team entry) so I won't delve too much in to that but I will say that it has been the best learning curve ever. Every single feature or decision in Teamwork is based on the 12 years of experience we have built up working on large scale be-spoke applications. While alot has changed since we started web development, the principles are solid.

My role in Teamwork is also lead developer. Peter and myself work closely with each other building new features. Sometimes we take a whole section each, sometimes one starts a feature and the other improves it. The Calendar is a good example of pair-programming. I started the feature, spending weeks of sleepless nights as Timezone issues and event spanning issues plagued me. It took a few hours of Peter's fresh eyes to fix the problem areas.

Some of the areas of Teamwork I am responsible for include:

• Desktop Timer App (Flex)
• Diff-ing of Notebook versions (Java)
• Reply by email (Brain juice)
• Email Dropboxes (C# connector)
• Resource's section
• Markdown support (Java)

I use multiple different programming languages. It's a case of the best tool for the job. In Teamwork, there is ColdFusion, Java, C#, Javascript and for the desktop apps Flex. I enjoy a programming challenge and once you have a good grasp of programming fundamentals, you can pick up any language and produce some good work.

Some of the things I'm working on right now which I shouldn't tell you about:

• Dropbox integration - I really enjoyed the challenge in this and officially know the Dropbox API inside out
• Android App - It's early days but I'm making progress - Please don't ask ;-)

In my spare time I enjoy reading. I especially enjoy books on tech companies, some of my favourites include:

• Master of Doom (The id software story)
• The Perfect Store (The ebay story)
• The Paypal Wars (The paypal story)

I'm also a movie fanatic and a bit of a Mac fan boy ;-)

Most of my spare time goes towards "challenge programming" where I pick some area of interest and muck about with it. Most of our fun recreational hacking turns into real features in Teamwork! The great thing about my job is that it's also my hobby! I actually get great satisfaction out of programming for pleasure. 

I also like to answer feedback. While Sam is the main face to our customers, I read every single feedback item that comes in. I think it's extremely important for the developers of an app to engage with customers and see the pain points people have with a product. Also, if it's a support issue a developer is in a much better position to advise on a solution to a problem. (Invariably we create the problems ;-))

With the rise in smartphones, and email always available, there is no excuse for a feedback email to be left un-answered. We all have iPhones and iPads. I always like to think of it as if I am the person requiring answers, what would I expect from support. While working on our Dropbox integration I was on the receiving end of super-fast answers to my questions and I liked it. It gives you a good feeling about the product, company or service you are interacting with.

One thing I always like (kinda voyeurism) when reading about a developer is finding out what tools they use, so here's mine:

Office Computer(s):

• 3 x 19 inch screens
• Dell with duel-processor and 3GB RAM
• Large screen iMac for testing our wares on Mac

Software

• Homesite as an editor
• Navicat for MySQL
• Flex Builder 4.5.1 for AIR apps and Visual Studio for C# work
• Teamwork Project Manager (In a custom tabbed shell I made)
• Hipchat (for inter-office communication)
• Dropbox and SVN for sharing code between machines
• IE8 & Chrome mainly

At home I have an Alienware Beast with 16gb RAM, SSD drive and 1 gig GFX card. I like to game! Currently playing Call of Duty: Black Ops and waiting for Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3.

That's all for now! If you have any questions on anything above, can relate to me in any way or just want to throw a curve ball question, don't be shy! Ask me in the comments and I'll reply ASAP.

To make your lives a little easier when it comes to starting out with TeamworkPM I thought I would start a new set of videos based round the, How do I do that? theme.
Over the next few weeks I will post videos up showing how certain sections work within TeamworkPM.

The video below shows you how to change your default language for the interface per user.
El video a continuación muestra cómo cambiar el idioma por defecto para la interfaz de cada usuario.
La vidéo ci-dessous montre comment changer la langue par défaut pour l'interface par l'utilisateur.

Note: if the translations above are wrong, you can blame Google :-)

Please let me know your views on the videos and if there is any areas in particular you would like to see or know how to user within the App. Let me know via the comments below.

Peter, AKA Topper, has been working away like a Golden God (his words not mine) on getting our latest new feature for TeamworkPM out the door. It is of course the ability to assigning tasks to multiple people.

I must take my hat off to him as it's looking pretty bloody sweet at this stage. I have just been in his office checking out how it looks and and how it's working.In fairness when he has his moments he's good ;-) it is a savage piece of work. Between Peter and Dan fighting it out they have done an amazing job in keeping this feature really simple and easy to use and I have to say I can't wait for this feature to launch as It's something I have needed myself loads when working on projects.

Below is a screen shot I stole off Peter's computer a few minutes ago when he had his back turned. It's just a quick shot of where the new feature is going to appear on the task screen.

Peter wanted to be the first to post up screen shots of his work but I couldn't resist beating him to it :-)
He has a load more screen shots that he will be posting up along with a nice detailed blog post here, in the engine room blog, in which he will outline how this feature works and looks. Hopefully his post will be up over the weekend for you all to read.

Until then enjoy my stolen pic.

One of the great things about running an online business is that you get to interact with so many people from all types of business throughout the world and that you get real time feedback from them. You get to hear about what they like, and what they dislike as well as suggestions about how they think certain areas of TeamworkPM should work.

The other great thing about feedback is that you do get the comments like this one below that keeps us driving ahead to produce the best online project management application out there.

It's great to get receive emails and comment like this from time to time and it's always good to know that we are competing well with market leaders in the space such as the mighty Basecamp.

To all our users who have sent us feedback, thanks and keep it coming.

I thought a few of you may be very happy to see this quick video I made. I stole the iPhone off Mike, our App developer, on Friday just to quickly show you how the iPhone App for TeamworkPM is turning out.

I have also asked him for a screen cast of the App so you can all get a better idea of how it works screen by screen. Until then he is a quick rough video I captured on Friday of TeamworkPM working on the iPhone.