Something I’ve been planning for a long time is the ability to track attendance for events. Just basic head counts collected over time. Every Sunday at church I see a volunteer in the back, pen in hand, counting each person and writing the tally down. Perhaps it gets put into a spreadsheet, perhaps just written down in a book. Either way it’s nice information to have and I thought Stafftool would be a great place to keep track of it all, however, it wasn’t something that made it into the initial launch. Recently, though, some of the great users in the support forums were asking about and discussing Event Attendance Tracking and it got me excited about it getting it going now that it looked like it was indeed something that people needed. So, I’m happy to announce a first pass “preview” of attendance tracking.
Archive for the 'Stafftool' Category
Stafftool, being a web-based application, of course runs in your web browser with nothing special to install or keep updated on your computer or servers. In fact, that’s one of the best parts of using web apps.
However, there’s a certain appeal to having a specialized program on your computer for some things…it makes it feel a bit more “real” to see a program icon in your dock, waiting for you to click on it to get some serious business done. Also, it would be nice to have something productive like Stafftool or your Gmail account open in something that won’t be affected by something like a Rickroll gone bad or someone’s bloated MySpace profile page that takes your entire browser down. It would be great to be able to separate the things you need open from the things that are nice to have open…but how?
The answer? Site specific browsers. In this post I’ll show you how easy it is to create a Stafftool “application” on your Mac.
Continue reading ‘Announcing Stafftool.app (well, kind of…)’
Just pushed out a couple really cool features.
First up - Improved Searching.
You can now search in the iPhone version. Need to look up someone’s info really quickly but don’t know their last name or don’t want to go through a few pages of contacts? Just search!
Simply click on the search icon and a search form will appear. Just type in what you’re looking for and click the go button. If your search results in one contact match, you’ll be taken directly to that person’s page, otherwise you’ll be shown a list of results.
Now, if you use Firefox, you know it’s a great browser. You might even know there are other search engines available in the search field where Google usually sits. And, if you’ve really dug into Firefox, you’ll also know that you can add other search engines to that list. I’ve got good news - you can now add your Stafftool account to that list of available search engines for easy access to your information at any time.
Adding Stafftool is easy…just go to your account in Firefox and you’ll notice that the drop down menu will have a bit of a glow to it:
Click on that glowing menu icon, and you’ll see this:
Click the Add “Stafftool” menu option and you’ll be greeted with the Stafftool specific search box!
Now, as long as you’re logged into your account, you can enter anything you’re looking for, such as someone’s first name, or the name of an upcoming event. Type it in, hit enter and you’ll be taken to your Stafftool account with either a listing of results or the person you’re looking for.
Next up - iCal Organizers
The ability to add organizers to events was recently added. However, it didn’t carry over to the public iCal feed that is available to subscribe to. So, that’s been added. Now, when you view an event that has an organizer (iCal only allows one organizer per event to the best of my knowledge) they’ll show up and you can email them.
Much easier to see who to contact with any questions.
Enjoy!
Just a quick little post to let you know that the latest iPhone and iPod Touch update lets you save websites directly to your home springboard screen with its own icon. So, Stafftool now has its own custom icon when you save it. To try it do the following:
- Make sure your iPhone or iPod Touch is updated to version 1.1.3
- Go to your Stafftool (http://yoursubdomain.stafftool.com) in Mobile Safari
- When you’re on your dashboard screen, click the + icon on the bottom bar
- Click the “Add to Home Screen” button
- On the resulting dialog, shorten the name to just “Stafftool” and wait until the image of the dashboard on the icon turns to the Stafftool icon
- Click the “Add” button
You will now have a button that will take you directly to your Stafftool right from the home screen!
One of the things I’m most proud of with Stafftool is the iPhone version. I’ve even had a beta tester say he may end up using it more than the normal web interface. As an iPhone user, I’m always really happy to find a version of a tool that I already use that works really well on it, so I naturally wanted to provide one myself with Stafftool. A few of my favorite web apps are the iPhone versions of NewsGator, Twitter, and Facebook. I use the NewsGator and Twitter sites all the time, and even though I’m not a huge Facebook user, like the tester said I probably use the mobile version of it more than the normal site.
I always knew I wanted to do a mobile version of Stafftool and the iPhone was a perfect first step - nice big screen, standards compliant browser with great CSS and Javascript support, and good integration with other services such as the phone and Google Maps. In this post I’m going to go over the features and benefits of the iPhone version, and in a future post I’ll go over how I did it.
I wrote up the other intro post about the story of Stafftool up until now without really welcoming you to the new blog. Now that Stafftool is getting near to the finish line of launching, I figured I better start getting the word out and sharing my experiences and goals with it. This blog should help with that. It’s still running the stock themes (as is the new user forum), but I’ll get to a more integrated design soon. To help kick things off, here’s a (rough, lo-res Youtubed) introductory screencast I made a while back. Expect more of these to come!
By the way, if you’d like to see a much (much!) nicer Quicktime version of this screencast, grab it here. And sorry for the fan noise…I’ll get a real mic soon 
I’ve been working on Stafftool for a long while now and am deeply familiar with it, so I often take for granted just what Stafftool is and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. So, I’ll try to lay that all out as best as I can here.
Stafftool started out when I realized that my church had basically no internal system for keeping track of everything they were doing. Being a Mac based church (woo!), the options available to them were pretty slim — most church-specific software tends to be built solely for Windows, or is some hideous port of an ancient Filemaker Pro standalone database. They’d been having a weekly meeting where they attempted to synchronize their activities and news, and proceeded to maintain their own address books, icals and emails. After poking around a bit, I learned that a lot of churches (even ones much larger than our smallish church) were basically running the whole show by emailing Excel spreadsheets around and hoping to keep in sync. I decided to try to do something about this. Being a web developer (of the Ruby on Rails variety), I naturally figured that a nice web app would be the best approach - cross platform, inherently networked, accessible (almost) anywhere, and potential usable by much more than the staff in the future with an API of some sort. So, I set out to work building the app in my copious spare time.
I started out designing the interface and decided that it would have to be a combination of familiar simplicity in the 37signals vein, but also have some new ideas to make the entry and retrieval of records as effortless as possible if this was to become a tool that much of the staff was going to be using day in and day out. Soon, the first design concepts were complete, and included the notions of “sheets” for both entry and retrieval. This would allow records to be entered and viewed from pretty much anywhere within the site. The initial interface designs have evolved and been tweaked much over time, but remain, for the most part, intact with the initial vision.
I had a nearly complete working version after a couple months, and was happy with the progress I had made…but after attending RailsConf ‘06 and learning about the new directions Rails was taking and the beauty of a RESTful core, I knew I had to do something drastic…so, I basically scrapped what I had and started the back end over from scratch. And, even though it made everything take much longer, I’m glad I did.
They say you should always throw out your first attempt at a project, and that rang true. The new version is so much better in terms of the architecture that it’s a much better foundation for the launch and the future that I have so many plans for. It truly is much more of a platform now that has so many possibilities for expansion and integration with other viewports than just a desktop-based browser, and I’m really excited to finally be nearing the point where you all can start using it to make your churches, non-profits, small groups - whatever you have in mind - much easier to manage.
I plan on writing a bunch more on the development of Stafftool, features I’m excited about, and anything else that I feel is important to the product and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. Hope you enjoy.
