Sean Johnson's dashboard

A comment on the question "What one thing would you add?" in Snooty Monkey:

George,

I'm just waiting to get confirmation from them that at $19/mo the ads go away. I've actually longed criticized them, that their paid plans start so high, so I'd like to support their decision to move "down market" with a lower priced offering.

Your account transfer is complete.

I very much agree that an iPhone version would bring some visibility. I don't think I'd charge anything for it in the app store, but you'd have to have a paid subscription to the website to use it beyond the 14 day trial.

If only I had the time to do it right now. (Ironic, huh?)

Thanks,
Sean – Sean Johnson, on October 22, 2009 11:15

Sean Johnson marked one of sgeorgii's replies in Snooty Monkey as useful. sgeorgii replied to the question "What one thing would you add?".

Sean Johnson set one of Sean Johnson's replies as an official response to "chime.mp3 downloading instead of playing?" in Snooty Monkey

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 11:10 to the problem "chime.mp3 downloading instead of playing?" in Snooty Monkey:

Joel,

I wouldn't get too worried about the Chrome/Chromium thing. I looked it up and Chromium is just the name of the open source project that creates the Chrome browser. So not every developer build will be called Chrome, but it's the exact same code base (they use a different logo for official Chrome builds I guess).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium...

Seems like this could be related to your Chromium problem:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/iss...

So they are aware of it and are likely going to fix it soon (apparently the new Facebook chat tries to play MP3s so all of a sudden good, seamless MP3 support is an important bug). I'd keep trying it each time you get a new Chrome/Chromium build and I suspect it'll just start working for you again with one of the updates.

Thanks,
Sean

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 10:17 to the problem "Impossible to click boxes on 1024x768 screen" in Snooty Monkey:

Eric #1,

So, by "red dot" I assume you just mean any color dot. It's red if it happens to be the current time, black if not.

Can you tell me what your font is? (Preferences -> Appearance) I have the defaults for Safari 4.0.3 and mine is Times 16 and Courier 13.

Eric #2, you also have Times 16 and Courier 13?

Thanks,
Sean

A comment on the problem "Impossible to click boxes on 1024x768 screen" in Snooty Monkey:

Almost... I'm sure he doesn't want to always hide his red dots! But you're right, knowing the exact element causing the twitching means we are closer than ever to a solution. – Sean Johnson, on October 22, 2009 10:14

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 10:12 to the idea "Didn't know where to click to show avanced charts + Android app?" in Snooty Monkey:

Marcin,

I forgot to mention. I do have a Web API defined and it won't take to much to implement. I'll announce it pretty widely when it's available and if you'd like to take a crack at an Android app., that'd be awesome!

Thanks,
Sean

Sean Johnson set one of Sean Johnson's replies as an official response to "Didn't know where to click to show avanced charts + Android app?" in Snooty Monkey

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 10:06 to the idea "Didn't know where to click to show avanced charts + Android app?" in Snooty Monkey:

Marcin,

Never apologize for your English. I'm a native speaker and I butcher the English language as much as anybody. On top of that, I can't speak/read/write or understand any other language at all. So anyone that manages to communicate in more than 1 language has my instant respect.

Don't feel at all bad about #1. I get countless emails asking me for this feature from people that haven't found it. The aesthetic of BubbleTimer, keeping things close at hand (1 hover or click away) but out of the way until you need them really works against new users finding all the features. I really have to address this because I think a staggeringly large number of new users leave the application thinking it just doesn't do what they want.

I plan to add an interactive tour for new users that's just 4 or 5 extra clicks before you get started, but that points out the hidden stuff.

As for #2, I'll probably never do a native Android version, even though a native iPhone version is planned for sometime in the future. Eric and a couple of other users have confirmed the iPhone web version works on Android's browser so that's probably the only nod to android. Maybe I'll add the subdomain android.bubbletimer.com and do the same auto-detect of Android browsing as we do for iPhone. That's not a bad idea.

Thanks,
Sean

A comment on the question "What one thing would you add?" in Snooty Monkey:

Hmm... I've been long planning for the eventual "real" iPhone application. The most ironic part, is that I'm an iPhone developer and I wrote a book on iPhone development. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672...

The idea of push notification for the chime... I love it! Hadn't thought of that. Maybe that's enough to push me into action on this app. You'll be the 2nd to know George if I do get started on it soon.

Thanks,
Sean – Sean Johnson, on October 22, 2009 09:51

A comment on the question "What one thing would you add?" in Snooty Monkey:

Up until recently, the lowest priced supported version of Get Satisfaction (to remove the ads) was $99 a month. BubbleTimer does not bring in the kind of revenue (or support needs) that can justify $99/month for support forums. So we just had to live with the ads. Recently the ads have gotten more prevalent, larger, and more intrusive (inline ads). Not good. But they also now offer a more affordable $19/month community plan. That's something I could maybe justify if I was sure it would make all the ads go away. I asked if it does here: http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfa...

Thanks,
Sean – Sean Johnson, on October 22, 2009 09:45

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 09:41 to the idea "feedback on the in-line advertising" in Get Satisfaction:

Do the ads go away at the new $19/month community level? Why isn't "ads/no ads" listed in the feature comparison matrix?

Sean Johnson set one of Sean Johnson's replies as an official response to "Clicking through time in bigger steps" in Snooty Monkey

Sean Johnson replied on October 22, 2009 09:33 to the idea "Clicking through time in bigger steps" in Snooty Monkey:

Qrystal,

Yeah, that's a good idea. And it's much easier to implement than the scrolling (which is maybe ultimately the way to go). I'll look at some graphical treatments of a fast forward/backward arrow and if I can make it so it doesn't look too busy/confusing then this is one I'll put in there (I would use it for sure).

Thanks as always!
Sean

Sean Johnson replied on October 13, 2009 10:16 to the problem "Impossible to click boxes on 1024x768 screen" in Snooty Monkey:

Eric #1,

Let's make sure we do EXACTLY understand the behavior your seeing. We've matched the browser version, screen resolution and activity name length, but maybe we aren't doing the same behaviors.

I assume it doesn't twitch while you just have the window open and aren't interacting with it. What do you do exactly when it twitches? Is there anything you do that's similar but doesn't cause a twitch? Ex:

If I mouse over an activity name that spans more than 1 line it twitches. When I mouse over a one line activity name it doesn't twitch.

Thanks,
Sean

A comment on the problem "Impossible to click boxes on 1024x768 screen" in Snooty Monkey:

Eric #1,

That's interesting... "zooming down the font". When you say that, do you mean to smaller than the base size? Or do you mean smaller than what you typically use, which is zoomed larger than the base size?

The reason I ask is that there are known twitching issues with running BubbleTimer with a zoomed font on every browser. It's really meant to be run at the normal font size only.

Let us know.

Also, I appreciate the offer to help us out, but I don't know that noodling around in Safari debug would be fruitful. When the browser "twitches" like it sometimes does, usually nothing is happening in the DOM or the Javascript or anything. It's just internal to the browser, as it is deciding it needs to re-render portions of the screen. I'm guessing that those twitches would be entirely transparent to anything you can see in Safari debug. You'd have to be noodling in the Webkit source code to really see it happening (and I don't recommend that!)

Thanks,
Sean – Sean Johnson, on October 13, 2009 10:11

Sean Johnson replied on October 12, 2009 20:21 to the problem "chime.mp3 downloading instead of playing?" in Snooty Monkey:

Joel,

Were you using Chrome before the upgrade as well? For a long time, the Chime not chiming on Chrome was a a known issue:

http://getsatisfaction.com/bubbletime...

Then, at least for Qrystal, it started working (probably after a Chrome update?).

One thing to think about, especially if it was working before the upgrade to Windows 7, is that the browsers don't play MP3's on their own, they use something you have installed like Windows Media Player or QuickTime or VLC that has registered itself with the browser. It can't hurt to try installing (or reinstalling) one or more of these to see if you can get your audio chime back.

Ultimately I may just need to switch the chime over to flash to make it more reliable (though Flash brings along with it it's own issues).

Thanks,
Sean

Sean Johnson marked one of Qrystal's replies in Snooty Monkey as useful. Qrystal replied to the problem "The chime is not chiming for me.".

Sean Johnson replied on October 12, 2009 20:17 to the problem "The chime is not chiming for me." in Snooty Monkey:

Qrystal,

Is the chime still chiming on Chrome on Windows?

Joel seems to be having an issue with it (Windows 7).
http://getsatisfaction.com/bubbletime...

Thanks,
Sean

Sean Johnson replied on October 11, 2009 13:23 to the idea "cluster activities" in Snooty Monkey:

Fellows,

We've had categories done for quite a while now to be honest. I've been sitting on it for 2 reasons.

First, I want to make sure it's up to snuff. As of this moment, it doesn't yet have category daily and weekly goals (that work on a rollup of the contained activities). It's probably best to get everybody categories w/o this, but it's how I would want to use categories and I feel it's pretty essential.

The 2nd reason is performance. Performance of the AJAXy parts of BubbleTimer (click a bubble being the canonical example) is for the most part reasonable, but loading a new day is just way too slow. Categories puts even more work into that process and until I can get the performance up, I'm just not willing to slow that down even more.

The good news on this is I have some time boxed out to work on performance in the next couple weeks, which is great on it's own, we'll all benefit from a faster BubbleTimer, but it means I can release the category feature too (with or w/o goals).

So, there is the update. Sorry that this #1 requested feature has been so slow to surface.

Thanks,
Sean