Hi, guys. Recently Riter was updated to version 0.7.0. Discover new features here, and then visit your company tracker page to try them yourself. You will find:

• Useful features which are supposed to simplify your work on projects.
• Fixes of some detected errors and ambiguities.
• Performance optimization for better application response.

Timezone difference

Riter is a product designed for all kinds of teams regardless of their strength and location. Whether you live in Atlantic, European or any other time zone, the tracker needs to adjust to you and remain user-friendly. The local time of each team member can be different, that must not complicate the interaction within projects.

So, we decided to use a time zone of the company owner on all statistics pages. This will allow to synchronize the work progress of all users and see the whole picture regardless of the differences in time. In the nearest future the owner of the company will be able to select the time zone that should be used as commom one for statistics from the project management page. Now it's set automatically. You can look through projects statistics on the corresponding pages where it is grouped by weeks from Monday to Sunday.

Note, that users will still see timeintervals in their own time zones. Thus, each developer will work with local time while this does not affect others. Now timeintervals will be sorted by their finished_at field, not only by day as it was before.

Adding aliases to topics

During you work on projects and separate tasks you probably often use topics to simplify your interaction with them. A task becomes clearer with appropriate tags so as filtering and navigation become faster. That's why each developer is able to add topics to stories he or she is working on. But in the new version it will be even easier due to a new feature - aliases to topics.

If a story has a lot of developers and topics you have to spend time checking if an analogue of your new topic wasn't already added. Now Riter does this for you. For each topic it generates an array of synonyms (aliases) which are not shown on the story pages. If somebody is trying to add one of them to the story, Riter detect that and prevent adding similar words. This will allow the whole team to use common terminology and avoid duplication. At the same time, you needn't remember all topics you use. While searching stories or projects by a topic, you can specify any of its aliases. For example, a topic may be named as "bug" while its aliases will be {"mistake","error","defect","flaw"} and so on.

Riter demo company

With a new version of Riter you are able to try all its features without registration of your own company. You don't need to waste time on adding users, projects, stories and other details to find out how they will look like and work - everything is already prepared on our demo company page! Use credentials for the role you are interested in to log in demo company tracker and test available functionality.

There you will find some projects at different stages of development, with their own sets of stories, users, topics and development progress. Depending on your needs and a selected role, you can estimate Riter, learn how to work with it and try new features before using them in your projects.

Fix bugs: what was changed

Thanks to your support, we quickly discover bugs and fix them. In the latest version, the following mistakes were fixed:

• Changing story status during its editing.

  You could notice that if you opened a story and started editing its title and/or description you could not change the story state or set a question mark to it correctly before you saved changes. Otherwise the edit form was closed. Of course, this was not the result you expected. Now the problem is solved: the story state can be changed while it is editing, the form will not be closed until you ask for this yourself.

• Limiting allowed project names.

  Now you are not allowed to use some words as project names. This is necessary to avoid possible errors and coincidences with words reserved for other needs. We hope that you did not plan to use such words as, for example, "index" or "user" as a project name and this will not seriously upset you. Anyway, if you can not set a project name one day, try changing it so that it does not look like a reserved word.

Performance optimization

We are happy to inform you that our application has become even faster! We revised the principle of generating AJAX-requests to the server, reduced their number and fixed cache usage.

How does it work now? Imagine that some developers from your team are working on a task together. Several tabs of Riter are opened while they are discussing a project. To check for possible updates on opened pages the application generated AJAX-requests for each tab and each user to refresh the content. The more tabs are opened, the more time Riter required. The number of requests can be reduced to decrease the load on the application. That's what we did:

• Generate an AJAX-request each minute if a tab is not active.
• Stop AJAX-requests if a tab is inactive for more than five minutes.
• Restore an interval when a user opens the tab again.
• Generate the only AJAX-request for tabs instead of a separate request for each one.

We have also fixed invalid html-partials cache on ajax requests. As you can guess, we could significantly optimize websockets performance. See for yourself!

We get a lot of tips and ideas on how to make Riter even better from our users. Thank you for using our product. Stay aware of the latest Riter updates with the Blog.

Riter development team