Yesterday, Panic released Status Board, an app for the iPad to show exactly the status of everything you're involved with. Of course, the plethora of RSS and iCalendar/vCalendar feeds in Heap CRM work out of the box, but it also allows us to extend the places you can see pipeline reports:

Now, this link respects the users, category and label setting you have specified (continuing the idea that in Heap you always export what you are looking at). This means you can have a pipeline graph at any degree of filtering you want.

Here is how the pipeline looks in status board. Below the pipeline you see a budget report from Torch.

Status board is a nice addition to our existing notification systems through iCal and RSS feeds, browser extensions and webhooks.

Yesterday, Panic released Status Board, an app for the iPad to show exactly the status of everything you're involved with. Of course, the plethora of RSS and iCalendar/vCalendar feeds in Torch work out of the box, but I thought we could do custom feeds in a few areas:

My Pinned ToDos

Torch has a notion that events can occur on a particular day, or just have to be done at some point. While all of this is included in our feeds, some calendar apps don't support the TODO variety. For this reason a custom status board for your pinned events have been created.

Budgets

Much more importantly, you can now get status board updates on your active projects' budgets. Just like the Google Docs, Google Visualizations and CSVs, you can select to get this status information at any drill-down level.

Edit, April 12th:

Additionally, by popular request, you can now have charts of the complete vs incomplete tasks, by person, project or category. Just like the budgets this info can be grabbed at any drill-down level.

Here is a couple of example graphs showing task completion status of employees as well as by project:

Here, we see the person has selected to track a specific projects tasks (Website Design) instead of a summary of all projects:

Status board is a nice addition to our existing notification systems through iCal and RSS feeds, browser extensions and webhooks.

As some of you may know, Alfred 2.0 was released this week. To make sure everyone can upgrade and take advantage of the new features all of our extensions (now called workflows in 2.0) have been upgraded. Links to the new workflows are in the knowledge base articles:

Using Heap CRM from Alfred >
Using Torch Project Management from Alfred >

You can now trigger an additional email as part of your automation scheme by using the following command.

[message:Title of Message: Body of Message]

The body can run onto multiple lines, but it must end with nothing else on the line except the ending "]". E.G.

[message: Notes about the Client: This is some notes about the client:
1. They are nice
2. They don't like e-mail]

If all this automation talk is new to you, take a look at our automator Ninja article.

About a year ago, I announced a feature that allows the mobile user on Torch Project Management to take a picture of a receipt and attach it the expense. Which was great for Android users on Ice Cream Sandwich, but that was a very small number of people. With the release of iOS 6, the number of people has greatly increased.

Here's how it works (on ICS):

Under the expense area, add an expense and press "Add Receipt":

Take the picture:

The receipt is now attached:

Under iOS it works the same way:

Press "Add Receipt":

Take the picture and the receipt is now attached:

I have some great news for Heap CRM or Torch Project Management users that also use MacPorts to maintain their command line tools: HeapCL and TorchCL can now be installed by MacPorts.

Instructions:

1) Makes sure you have the latest version of the ports tree. In the terminal type:

sudo port -v selfupdate

2a) Install HeapCL. In the terminal type:

sudo port install heapcl

2b) Install TorchCL. In the terminal type:

sudo port install torchcl

And that's it!

For those of you looking at the Google Drive interface improvements to Torch Project Management with a bit of jealously, the same type of improvements are now in Heap CRM.

When you create message, simply start typing the name of the file you want (on your Google Drive) and list will appear:

You can add as many files to a message as you want. Heap is smart enough to adjust the permissions of those files so that all of the users in your Heap account can see them.

If you are using a modern browser it is now stupidly simply to upload files to Google Drive. Just drag and drop on the create message area:

Additionally, in any place you compose e-mail or e-mail templates within Heap, you can now use this same search feature to insert links to files in Google Drive:

And, like messages, you just drag and drop file onto the window to upload files to Google Drive.

Using the "Snippet for Torch Project Management" Safari Extension, users of Torch Project Management can quickly select content from any website and save it as a message in Heap CRM. This is the Safari equivalent to the "Save to Torch Project Management" Chrome Extension.

The extension works offline and periodically syncs with the Torch service. This means that the interface is always snappy and it even works on unstable connections.

Oh, and the extension is updated to look great on retina displays.

Install >

Using the "Snippet for Heap CRM" Safari Extension, users of Heap CRM can quickly select content from any website and save it as a message in Heap CRM. This is the Safari equivalent to the "Save to Heap CRM" Chrome Extension.

The extension works offline and periodically syncs with the Heap service. This means that the interface is always snappy and it even works on unstable connections.

Oh, and the extension is updated to look great on retina displays.

Install >

The new retina display on the iPad and MacBook Pro present a challenge for web application developers. It means designing special graphics for a relatively small number of devices. There is another approach: vector graphics (which look good at any resolution).

Firefox, Safari and Chrome have support SVG graphics (a vector format) for many versions. But due to a lack of support in Internet Explorer, using SVG on a wide scale wasn't particularly practical. That changed last year with the release of IE 9. Now all major browsers have support for SVG and there has been a sufficient amount of time for people to upgrade.

So, as you might have guessed by now, Torch Project Management's graphics have been recreated in SVG. Not only do people with higher resolution displays benefit, but anyone can zoom the interface and the graphics still look great; and vector graphics will still look good regardless of what resolution a vendor might release next. Let's take a look at how this looks (screenshots taken from a Retina MacBook Pro):

Messages on the Dashboard:

Budgets:

Messages:

Some events showing new loading graphic:

Finally, the Safari Extensions have also been updated to display properly on high resolution displays:

As always with these sort of updates, if you aren't seeing something or something is behaving strange, empty your browser cache.