Im Rahmen unserer Medienarbeit im deutschen Sprachraum berichten uns verstärkt freiberufliche Journalisten und Dolmetscher von ihrer Verwendung von timr. Gerade bei Journalisten und Dolmetschern ist timr mit seinen mobilen Applikationen sehr gut einsetzbar. Diese beiden Berufsgruppen sind von Natur aus viel unterwegs und verwenden bei Interviews und Gesprächsterminen timr vorwiegend über die BlackBerry App.

Auch die Deutsche Übersetzer und Dolmetscher Plattform http://www.lektorat.de , die viele Tipps für Freiberufler in diesem Bereich anbietet rät zur genauen Zeiterfassung, um keine Arbeitsstunden auf Grund von Ungenauigkeiten unverrechnet zu lassen.

Wir freuen uns diese interessante Zielgruppe für timr begeistern zu können!

“timr – Nie mehr unbezahlt arbeiten” schreibt die OÖWirtschaft in der Ausgabe 12/13 from 26.03.2010. Dem ist nicht mehr viel hinzuzufügen, alle Infos zu timr, unserer Lösung zur Zeiterfassung für Arbeitszeit-, Projektzeit und Fahrtenbuch finden Sie hier.

and not only the weather is getting nicer. Last week troii attended the Springsource S2G Forums in Munich to get some updates on current Springsource activities – and boy, there is a lot of great stuff going on there!

While Grails development is really making progress with version 1.3 just around the corner it is also nice to see the ongoing improvements to Spring Roo. The talks in Munich showed how “unintrusive” Spring Roo can be used and I really like the concept of just being around on compile time and not at runtime.

Other very interesting projects out of the Spring context are Spring Integration and Spring batch. We had a nice presentation of these two projects and how they work together last week in Linz at our eJUG event. Mark Fisher and David Syer did a great introduction and I got some ideas where we could use these projects in our products like timr.

We already upgrade all the projects we are currently working on to Spring 3 – which was not to hard. I am really looking forward to use the features this new version provides, especially in the MVC area.

You can think about Ribbons whatever you want but if I just want to allow users with Access 2007 to use an Access front end like they did with Access 2003, I don’t want to create Ribbons instead of the menu bars.

Therefore, I was looking for a solution that allows me to still use my menu bars in Access 2007 wihout the “Add-In” Ribbon. Finally I found this solution:

A2003: “Tools” / “Startup” / “Allow Built-in Toolbars”

select your menu bar in “Menu Bar”

A2007: “Office Button” / Button “Access-Options” / “Current Database” / “Ribbon and Toolbar Options” / “Allow Default Shortcut Menus”

select your menu bar in “Menu Bar”

Yesterday the launcher we developed for blackberry.pocket.at was approved for the BlackBerry App World and it is now available for free download via this App World link.

A launcher like this provides an easy to use entry point for users interested in the news provided by blackberry.pocket.at. Additionally BlackBerry users browsing the BlackBerry App World will eventually find the launcher in the News & Information section which will generate new visitors for blackberry.pocket.at.

If you own a web site providing content and information and you want to provide it in an optimized way to BlackBerry users feel free to contact us!

Don’t miss the troii team interview, talking with BlackBerry App Reviews about our time tracking application timr.

With the BlackBerry developer conference RIM held last week in San Francisco they showed that they are really trying to improve their already great platform. First they created a perfect system to push email to mobile devices in an optimized format that allows viewing large attachments without having to download the whole file. Then the transformed their devices from things that looked like calculators to good looking, modern smart phones with rich media features.

There are only two important things in which some competitors are better: the mobile browsing experience and the available third party applications. One of those two things should be solved within the next year when RIM will bring a Webkit based browser to their devices. Unlike other Webkit based browser on other smartphones (like the iPhone for example) the BlackBerry devices will soon be able to play flash application and movies too.

For solving the problem of getting more applications to their customers RIM is doing two things: the first one is to preinstall their App World on all devices running OS 5 – which are all new devices coming within these weeks. The second one is to get more developers to write applications.

To get more developers writing applications the BlackBerry OS 5 will offer some very cool new features that are available via the API and a new set of development tools was created.

As a developer writing BlackBerry applications in Java now for nearly two years I am glad to see the improvements they made. Starting with their JDE was a real pain. Being used to Eclipse it was hard to write code in a thing like that. I was an early adopter of the Eclipse plugin the provided in different versions last year. Although it was nice to write my applications within the Eclipse editor there were some issues with building the application and deploying it to the simulator (especially if the application had alternate entry points).

At the developer conference RIM presented the new version 1.1 of their Eclipse plugin which is available as a Beta version already. They said that they rewrote the whole plugin and my first tests looked very promising. An import operation allows importing legacy projects that are converted to the new layout. It is possible to make code changes without having to restart the simulator. The only drawback at the moment is that there is only an OS 5 component available and it is not possible to create legacy OS versions. I hope they provide the necessary components soon.

It is interesting that after RIM made their Desktop Manager available for Mac OS a few weeks ago they also announced that their development tools will be available for Mac OS too. Currently the compiler and simulator only works under Windows operating systems.

Another great improvement for developing BlackBerry applications will be the cell based location service that RIM will make available through their API. We are using GPS locations services at the moment for our product timr and we will add the cell based location service as soon as possible because it will our users allow to get current position faster and in a less power consuming way.

All in all we at troii are very much looking forward to make use of all these great now things RIM showed at the developer conference and we cannot wait to get next generation of devices for our daily use.

Within the last days we brought systems around our software development process to a whole new level.

Since the last years we were using various open source tools for different tasks company. For bug/issues tracking we used bugzilla for many projects and trac for the development of our time tracking system timr. The nice thing about trac was the integrated wiki which was used for documentation. We additionally ran a media wiki instance for storing company internal documents.

Two weeks ago a tweed of Michael Plöd made me aware of the new starter license model of Atlassian. They are now selling their products with 10$ licenses for startups with up to ten users. This was perfect for the size of our team. So we bought the whole set:

• JIRA – issue tracking
• Confluence – Wiki system
• crowd – user management and single sign on
• fisheye – source code explorer
• bamboo – continuous integration server
• greenhoper – JIRA plugin for agile software development

The whole install process is covered in a guide named the Atlassian Dragon Quest where every level of the quest relates to installing on of the products. It took about two days to install all of the components and to integrate them with each other but the effort was definitely worth it.

We decided to not follow the guide in two things:

- we used our existing MySQL server instead of the recommended PostgreSQL
- we wanted to install the applications as WAR files into our existing Tomcat server

Using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL was no problem at all. We just created databases and corresponding users for all the products and configured them in the setup wizards.

Unfortunately not all the products are available for WAR/EAR installation. Fisheye has to run as a separate instance in its own Java VM. Additionally we ran into a kind of dead lock when we tried to connect JIRA and bamboo as described in the setup guide when they were running in the same tomcat instance. The JIRA bamboo plugin tries to contact bamboo on startup and gets no response because the tomcat is not started.

After all the new systems were running we started to migrate the old content. We were very happy about the mechanism JIRA provides for importing bugzilla issues. Everything we had to do was to define the MySQL database connection and to answer some questions of the import wizard.

Getting the tickets from trac into JIRA was a bit more difficult because we were using MySQL for trac too instead of sqlite. We had to adapt the perl scripts of trac-to-jira-migrate for using the MySQL database.

Thanks to the Universal Wiki Converter importing the content from media wiki and trac worked like a charm.

The last setup step we made was to use crowd as authentication service for apache and subversion. Therefor we installed
the Crowd Apache Connector and followed the detailed descriptions in the crowd documentation.

Stay tuned for some experience reports which will follow.

Wir freuen uns über einen Bericht zu timr und troii in der ORF Futurezone. Den Artikel findet man hier.

Besuchen Sie uns auf der Messe Braunau von 18.09.09-20.09.09 jeweils von 10:00 bis 18:00 Uhr.

Sie finden uns zusammen mit unseren Innsoft Kooperationspartnern in der Halle 3 Stand 1.

Außerdem würden wir uns freuen Sie zu unserem “Come Together” mit Buffet und Getränken am Freitag 18.09. ab 18 Uhr bei unserem Messestand begrüßen zu dürfen.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihren Besuch und interessante Gespräche!