QUESTION: (referring to the boss)”...The time entry feature will be great for us, but he will want to know if can it be integrated into his billing process. Basically, does it have the ability to go beyond project communication and management to reporting and billing?”

ANSWER:
I think a lot of this answer depends on your particular workflow, and tools. Here are a few random thoughts that might help:

Staction has a robust API just dying to be integrated with some quick code into the billing app of your choice.

Even if you go for a manual approach, the reporting in Staction is great. -But you have to customize it for your needs.

-Since you can create “saved views” in Staction, you can grab any info you need quickly over the day. Like “all time entries for Paul this week on Projects X,Y, and Z.”

-If you hop into the “projects” tab up top, you can see detailed time reports for every project you have going. You can also click the little
icon to get a summary of hours by person, recent entries, and todo status.

-If you hop over to the “people” tab up top you can pull date range reports of hours logged for each person on your team.

-Don’t forget tags! Staction has it’s own built in tagging system, but we encourage people to take it further… Using #hashtags in your entries is a great way to track job status… Try tagging posts with #done #revisions #jobcost to get even more out of your posts. If you do, then you can pull cool reports like: “all jobs with a post that has the keyword “#done” in it that have time entries logged this month”

To be honest, Staction’s flexibility, and complete lack of rules is what we’re so incredibly proud of about the app. But also to be honest, it’s what keeps a lot of people from adapting it into their flow. It’s a blank slate… You can do almost anything you want with it, -but you will have to get creative.

Thanks for getting in touch. It means a lot to us when our customers take the time to write. Please send us an email any time you like.

Thanks for using Staction!
-Joe
-Paste

One thing however that it’s not so great at (in our opinion) is session management. The default garbage collector from PHP isn’t perfect, and consistently removes session files that it shouldn’t, almost totally ignoring whatever setting you have for expiration time. It’s frustrating for us, and often causes untimely logouts for our users.

A few weeks ago we started working on a bespoke database driven session system for Staction. The first part came together much easier, and better than we expected. But we still had a problem. After launching the new programming on our dev server we were still getting booted and timed out. Or more to the point, I(Joe) was still getting booted out.

I’m a long time Safari user, and Brian, who was working on the programming, is on the Chrome side of life. Not everyone here was having the problem on Safari, so we started thinking maybe it was just me. After resetting Safari totally, the problem still persisted. Brian, who had also started using Safari as a daily browser for testing, started experiencing the problems, too.

Lots of research, and trial-and-error later we wound up here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12078357 -10 pages long of people with the exact same problem. Safari occasionally, and arbitrarily sends a new HTTP header without any session information. So after our WTF moment, we started thinking of a workaround.

After a couple other ideas that were non-starters, now once in every 50 calls (approx.) we regenerate the session data, duplicating it into a new session, wiping out the old data and sending the browser a new cookie.

We’re incredibly happy to tell you that since making that change we haven’t been logged out once on our dev server. On Safari, or any other browser.

This morning we pushed out the new session management programming to all Staction accounts. We hope to push it to all the other apps in the next couple weeks.

As we always like to learn from an experience, here are our takeaways:

• Don’t always assume the problem is with what you’re doing. Check external factors too.
• When you start to work on solving a problem, be prepared for the problem to evolve as you learn more about it.
• Make time for solving the little problems with your app. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about improving our session management programming. We can’t say “With sessions that actually keep you logged on!” on our sales site. But we think improving the foundations for these things helps make the app more satisfactory to use. You’ve got to do them, even if it would be more fun to work on email-in on Paprika, or new Jumpchart import/export features.

“I’ve been a staction user for a while now, and I started to “get” the flow of using staction after a few days.

With paprika, I got one of the free accounts, but I haven’t really been spending any time in it. For me, the mark of a good productivity app is whether I willingly jump into using it in the course of a normal day.

I find myself reaching for staction to put post-it notes, todos, and it’s a pretty smooth experience.

I would like to get to know paprika better, but the thought of having to retype or copy and paste over my notes from staction makes it a bit of a chore.

Now that the product has been out there for a bit now, what kind of workflow feedback are you seeing from your users? Any suggestions or tips?”

A legitimate question, and one we were happy to answer!

“To be honest, – we’re not too sure about everyone’s workflow so far. We’re trying to gather info via support, but we haven’t done any surveys, or customer interviews yet.

But here’s how we use Staction and Paprika. 80% of everything we do still gets recorded into Staction. But those occasional projects that have buttloads of todos, or lots and lots of notes have never fit well inside of Staction. It’s an admitted weakness. Staction is for short bursts, and quick communication check-ins. But it’s not great at the long-form. So when we don’t want to cloud the stream with long posts, or too many posts at once, we create a Paprika project, and share it in the stream via a link.

I think of it like a folder inside the project. Share a link, mark it as a todo. Visit the Paprika page, and mark all the todos complete, then hop to Staction, and mark that whole link complete.

But Paprika is much more a personal-use tool right now. I use it tons for my non-work-related tasks, and notes. I use it for my “do this today” stuff that the group really doesn’t need to know about. I share little lists with my wife. I hope with some upcoming updates, we’ll make Paprika even more friendly for quick notes, and better sharing. It’s a small app, and not everyone needs it now, but we have some really exciting plans to grow it over time.

Thanks for writing. You have no idea what it means to us when people care enough to write to us about our apps.”

Do you have any additional tips you’ve picked up while using Paprika?

Unfortunately, we had a big problem. The Staction website is designed to be used with a keyboard. The whole application is built around using the mouse as little as possible. But on the iPhone the keyboard is, well, small. Using a tiny keyboard to bang out tags, and a clunky half-visible auto-completer just wasn’t the experience we wanted to give our users. It wasn’t the experience we wanted for ourselves… It just wasn’t great, – believe us, we tried it.

After lots of experimenting, eventually we realized we had to rely on touching and scrolling for tag input. Like with lots of ideas, -it seems quite obvious looking back.

As of Today

As of today, all of our paid accounts have access to the Staction web app. Simply visit your normal account URL, and you’ll be directed to the optimized site. (You can still access the regular site if you like.)

Once logged in, you’ll have access to all the most commonly used features of Staction. Creating todos, logging time, and keeping up with your teammates.

Make sure to tap “+” and add Staction to your home screen, – it works really well that way.

If you want to see the web app, but don’t have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad you can visit your normal account URL and add a /m at the end like this:

http://accountname.staction.com/m

We think you’re really going to like the web app experience. In some ways it’s the best Staction experience yet.

Why Not the Free Account?

We’re going to be honest in a way that I don’t think most companies would. We really hope that the web app drives upgrades for us. By far the biggest portion of Staction users are on the free account. It seems that when we created our plans for Staction, we gave away too much on the low end.

It’s no problem, -we’re happy to have our users, on any account that fits their needs. But we do have to make money to keep our jobs!

Talking over the problem, we came up with a plan that we hope will make sense to you. As we add new features to our apps, you’ll probably see most of them added only to the paid accounts at first. As we recoup the cost of our development time through the upgrades that the features drive, we hope to trickle the features down to the free accounts as well.

We’re hoping this is a sustainable system that can keep everyone happy. Paid accounts just get the features a bit sooner than everyone else. We hope you’ll think it makes as much sense as we do.

But this left us with a problem. How do you see groups of related posts that occurred at different times on the same screen? The project tags that are at the heart of Staction were the first step, but we thought we could push it further.

What’s a project in Staction?

A “project” in Staction is really just a collection of posts with the same meta information. When you click on a project, Staction does the equivalent of searching all posts and showing you only the ones that meet the criteria: having the selected project tag.

So in effect, all “projects” are just virtual collections of posts plucked out of their chronology and presented together. Admittedly we do treat projects just a bit differently on the backend, so that we can pull reports on time, manage permissions, and prepare for some possible future updates- but the effect is the same to the user.

Once we visualized a project as just a virtual collection of posts, we thought we could take it further.

Enter “Saved Views”

If we could present projects as virtual collections based simply on meta information, it seemed like an easy next step to create all sorts of virtual collections. Every virtual collection consists of any unique combination of the following attributes:

• Which project(s) does your post relate to?
• Who created the post?
• Who was the post sent to?
• When was the post created?
• What type of post is it? Todo (incomplete, or complete), Time entry, or a post that has a file attached,
• Plus, you can search for terms, and have them included as a criteria.

There’s a lot of power hidden beneath those simple criteria. After experimenting with it, we realized we could create several incredibly useful views:

• All my time entries from today/this week.
• All the todo’s I’ve assigned but that are not yet complete.
• X coworkers’ posts for the day.
• All the time entries today for x coworker.
• All the posts with a file attached on a specific project.

These basic views recreate virtually all the various pages that most project management applications hard code. Instead of navigating to sections, and sub sections, you just resort to your stack of posts to see what you need.

We’ve talked before about how we used our apps a long time internally before releasing them to the public. Staction was an extreme case. We used it for a very long time and went through several incarnations and a long beta before launching it. During that time, we learned more about the real power of Saved Views.

We learned that simply emulating the concrete collections of information in other project management applications virtually was not the true power of Saved Views. The true power occurs in how you can extend your criteria to see all sorts of views that are impossible within other applications. Being able to see disparate types of information caroused multiple projects on one screen let us see our workflow in all sorts of new ways.

Enter Tagging

We had a phase two plan to implement another level of superficial tagging. In fact, if you type non-project tags in the meta box in Staction now, they still work in searches, even though they’re not added to the auto-completer. But as we experimented with Staction and became increasingly creative with our own workflow, we started instinctively using #hashtags like in Twitter. Not within the meta box, but within the body of the post itself. Pretty soon we were using all sorts of additional tags to track our workflow.

• #done
• #logins
• #ideas
• #jobcost

To name a few. The combination of searching for a #hashtag and combining it with other search criteria opened up even more doors for us.

• See all the projects finished today (marked #done) that have files attached. A great way to review work as an art director, or project manager.
• See all projects with a #jobcost tag this month. Great for end of the month billing.
• Show all posts marked as #ideas on a specific project.
A simple and easy way to go back to old ideas on a project.

So How Do You Do It?

Saved views are weaved throughout the interface. There are lots of ways to run into them. The first and foremost way to interact with them is with the “Sort this view” slider located at the top of the stream.

This is the primary way to create a new Saved View. By clicking the link, you can get access to this panel:

This panel lets you add as many search criteria as you would like. Simply select your criteria via the drop-downs, and use the +/- tools to keep adding and subtracting criteria. The really cool thing is that as you select criteria, the stream below is updated live based on what you select. It’s an incredibly powerful way to search.

The “Saved” part of Saved views happens when you give the criteria you selected a name, and press “save.” After pressing “save” your view will be updated, and you’ll be taken to the virtual Saved View you just created. Instead of “Full Stream” being at the top of the stream, you’ll see the name of your Saved View to let you know you’re viewing a subset of the full stream.

You’ll still have access to the “Sort this view” button, but this time when pressed, it will show you the criteria this view is based on preselected. You’ll also have a brand new button labeled “Close” that is essentially a shortcut to get out of the Saved View, and get back to the Full Stream.

Something else subtle you might notice is the little “Project View” indicator that’s now located next to the name of the view.

These little indicators, if you’re not familiar, are links to a special consolidated project view. Just like with a regular project, any Saved View can become a virtual project worksheet showing you quickly, and easily all the most relevant information about your view including:

• incomplete/complete todo’s
• Attached files
• Time entries
• Who’s participating

Another very important thing happened when you created your new Saved View. It was added to your sidebar underneath the “Saved Views” slider.

This is the easy way to always return to your virtual view of your workflow. With one click you can re-sort the stack based on your pre-selected criteria.

We mentioned earlier that you can combine Saved Views with Search for even more powerful sorting. To do this, first perform a search using the Search field at the top of your sidebar.

Once you press enter, or click “go” the stream will be sorted based on your search term being found in either the meta information of the post, or the post itself. When the stream refreshes based on your search, you’ll see that the stream is now referred to as “Full Stream – Searching whatever you searched for“

You’ll also notice that the “Sort this view” link is still available. Which means that you can add additional criteria on top of the search. More powerful still, you can store that view of combined search, and post parameters into a new Saved View.

Something you might not know, even as an advanced user, is that the same is true in reverse. If you have selected a Saved View, you can search within the Saved View. In fact, the Search box is always context specific to whatever you’re looking at- even on the Projects, and People pages.

Wrapping Up

Lots of things make Staction different from traditional project management apps. The concentration on chronological recording of information rather than putting information in predefined pockets. The concentration on being on one main screen, and interface. The fact that the entire app is built on only a few simple rules. But the thing that makes Staction truly unique is the way you can sort your information and see it in virtually any way you choose.

Staction is not an application for the type of person that requires blanks to fill in, or needs the comfort of predefined structure. Staction is built for the people who need the speed and flexibility other applications simply cannot provide within their more rigid structures. The flexibility of Staction, and its true power lies in the user’s ability to create virtual collections of information in any way they see fit. That power lies in the ability to create Saved Views.

• You might already know, we’re a dispersed team; we’re rarely/never in the office at the same time. Staction makes an ideal meeting place for us.
• Unlike other IM apps, Staction does not require immediate attention if you don’t want it to. Staction saves the recent posts for when you’re ready to see them. This allows spontaneous conversations to occur within our team, while allowing us to concentrate on work.
• We use the project summary pages a lot. When we first built Staction, we considered them fairly unimportant- so the icons aren’t very big- in later designs they’ll probably grow in emphasis because they’re a great way to look at your work. See all your images in one spot including your todos, and even recent correspondence.
• Also unlike other IM apps Staction lets us swap todos, and track time easily. We’re not a butts-in-seats kind of company, so it’s a great way for all of us to see who’s doing what, when.
• Staction splits that middle ground between IM, and PM. IM gives us communication, but no accountability. PM gives us accountability, but makes communication a burden. And in general PM apps are slow, and antiquated.
• With Staction, we can post, reply to a post with a todo, and reply to a todo with a time entry. See how many clicks that takes in a traditional PM app…
• We use hash-tags to keep track of miscellaneous non-project-related information in Staction. Some of our favorites are: #logins #links #ideas #later #done #research #projectcost #movies #games. Combine these with the really great project tag system in Staction, and your saved views become a more powerful tool than you’ve probably experienced in PM before. Start with a search, and end up finding exactly what you were looking for using filters.
• Most of the time we send files directly through the Staction attachment system. This leads to a really great archive of the work that’s been done. Every time you finish something, upload a screenshot, or a link. You’ll be stunned at how useful that archive becomes over time.
• We usually use direct messages, rather than project permissions to isolate pieces of the conversation. Drinking from the firehose is great, but when topics only relate to certain members of our team, we don’t hesitate to make it personal.
• We use Staction for everything that needs done in our company. From bug reports to normal project work. When communication needs to be long form, we usually just attach a more in depth text document to a post. But it’s not uncommon for a post to be dozens of lines long. Twitter limits your character count; Staction doesn’t.
• Yes, we still use email. Since lots of requests come in via email, you have to have an organization system that can deal with them. It’s common to see todos that contain the subject line of an email, or a sender’s name. Staction is still the spot where work gets recorded and talked about, but we often refer to items outside of its reach.
• We can’t stress enough how useful Saved Views are… Project tags will handle 90% of your communication effectively, but when you combine them with #hashtags, search, and filters it’s an amazingly different view on your work. Did we mention that every saved view has an RSS feed? Our workflow doesn’t dictate this sort of immediacy- but if yours does, you can be notified of almost anything via all the existing RSS tools available today.
• We reply a lot. I bet 75% of the posts made in a day are replies. It makes it nice for backtracking since you can always go back and look at an individual thread view regardless of how many projects, posts, or people it contains. It’s nice to see that type of arbitrary but succinct chronology outside of the main thread.
• While the file upload system in Staction is great, we also use apps like tinygrab to quickly share links to work in progress without having to wait on an upload.
• We’re a small team, but we work on lots of projects at once. Usually we set all our projects to default permissions where everyone gets to see everything. For many teams though, project permissions are an important way of keeping the main stream manageable. When you tag a post with a project, only the people on that project see the post. Lots of groups of people can share the same account, but still see company wide posts when they want.

Outside of design related tasks, there’s very little that can be achieved with a mouse that can’t be achieved (usually faster) with a keyboard. Knowing your key commands improves the speed and fluency of interacting with your computer.

On that note, we thought we would share some of our favorite indispensable key commands. We bet you know a lot of them- but we also bet you don’t know all of them. So for the 5 seconds a day, 2.5 minutes a month, and 30.4 minutes a year we just saved you, you are most assuredly welcome. 

(BTW. These are Mac shortcuts, but the PC equivalents are usually close)

In iTunes, you can quickly move forward or backward within a song by hitting command + option + arrow.

Hitting command + right bracket ( ] ) takes you to the next page in the iTunes Store.

Open your iTunes Preferences panel by hitting command + comma.

Visit the help section of iTunes for many, many more like this.

In most other programs you can hit command + (arrows) to navigate around on the page.

Use command + shift + (arrows) to navigate between tabs.

In many applications, command + option + shift + v removes the formatting from the text you’re pasting, and matches the style of the target document.

Use command + r as a quick way to reply in Mail.app.

Command + delete removes entire lines at once.

The combination command + option + arrows will hop whole words.

We use command + shift + d to send mail in Mail.app.

Don’t worry- we wouldn’t forget to throw in a few shortcuts for Staction and Jumpchart:

Jumpchart:

If you want to add a page to your jumpchart, just hit Control + a.

Control + x will open the export panel so you can export to WordPress.

Want to add a file? Just hit Control + l.

To make a comment on a project you have access to, use Control + m.

To go to the next page in the site structure, hit Control + k. To go to the previous page in the site structure, use Control + j.

Staction:

Control + r quickly refreshes the page, bringing up any new content in the browser version. In the AIR version, Control + r quickly lets you reply to another post.

To edit a post in Staction AIR, right click on the post. The options to reply to an entry, edit an entry or delete an entry will pop up.

Today we’re excited all over again to announce the Staction widget for the Mac OSX Dashboard.

Learn more about the new widget, and download it here.

The first step towards that goal was the Staction API. The second step was built from the first, and we’re very happy to announce it today: The Staction AIR app.

Now Staction can live on your desktop, outside of your browser. The app encompasses all the most important features of the Staction web app, as well as some desktop class features like keyboard shortcuts, and update notifications that we’re very excited for you to try out.

We hope this is only the first of many new ways to access your Staction account via the API. We’re working internally and with outside developers to make sure that we push the Staction experience as far as possible…

Learn more and download the Staction AIR app here.