Unfuddle - Home

Unfuddle Mylyn Connector

2010-01-14T20:42:00Z

Many of you have written to us requesting integration with Mylyn for Eclipse. Mylyn is an Eclipse interface that, among other things, allows you to manipulate tickets for your projects without ever having to leave your IDE.

Today, we are proud to release the Unfuddle Mylyn Connector, giving you access to all of your Unfuddle tickets right from within your favorite editor. The connector was made possible through the efforts of one of our newest Unfuddlers, Andronic Trandafir. Thanks Andronic!

The Unfuddle Mylyn Connector is compatible with Mylyn 3.0, meaning it is available in most Eclipse-based editors.

We hope that you enjoy the new connector. Please let us know what you think!

Custom Ticket Fields

2009-11-10T21:46:00Z

Many of you have asked for the ability to create and set custom fields for your tickets in Unfuddle. We are happy to announce that this is now possible!

Every Unfuddle project now provides three totally customizable ticket fields. Each field can be assigned a custom title and any number of values. These values can come from a list, pre-specified by an account administrator, or they can be arbitrarily specified during the creation or editing of a ticket.

Smarter Ticket Interface

Each custom ticket field can be marked as active or inactive indicating whether or not it should be shown in the interface. Along with this, we have also hidden any unused fields (Severity, Component, and Version) from the ticket interface to remove unnecessary clutter. This means, for example, that if you have no Components defined for a project, the “Components” field will not be displayed for tickets in that project.

Unfuddle API Integration

As with all other aspects of your Unfuddle account, custom ticket fields can be modified via the Unfuddle API allowing for even more flexible integration with outside tools.

As always, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to share comments and feedback. We are excited to be working on a number of additional enhancements and additions for release in the near future.

Some Time Tracking Updates

2009-10-08T07:46:00Z

For those of you who have time tracking enabled on your projects, we have just rolled out a number of changes to time tracking.

Powerful Commit Messages

We have added a few time tracking related actions to our Powerful Commit Messages. It is now possible to specify how many hours you have spent on a ticket using the following syntax:

  > svn commit -m 'spent 5.5 hours on #498'
  > svn commit -m 'resolved #47 spending 2:45 on #47'
  > git commit -am 'worked 3 hours on #99'

The keywords that will trigger the creation of a time entry are: spend, spent, spending, invest, invested, investing, work, worked, working.

Please note that the ticket number must always be specified in association with one of the above keywords and they must always be separated by either the word "on" or "hours on" (i.e. "5:30 on #43" or "5.5 hours on #43").

Time Entry on Ticket Resolution

When resolving a ticket, it is often necessary to create a time entry representing the work you put in to close the ticket. Previously, this was a 2-step process. Now, you can simply specify the amount of time spent resolving a ticket right from the ticket resolution form.

Additionally, as you may have noticed from above, it is now possible to use a more natural ":" separated notation everywhere you enter hours. For instance, instead of having to write 10 minutes as "0.1666", it is now possible to simply write "0:10".

Unfuddle Screenshots with Freshlog

2009-09-11T11:07:00Z

I don’t know about you, but when I create a ticket in Unfuddle, I often want to attach a screenshot illustrating the problem. We recently reviewed an application developed by one of our customers that makes the process of creating a ticket with a screenshot much easier.

Enter Freshlog

Freshlog is a Mac OS application that makes it very simple to take a screenshot, crop it, annotate it and upload it to a new or existing ticket within your Unfuddle account. Launch the app, enter your Unfuddle credentials and then ticket creation with attachments is only a keyboard shortcut away!

For more information on the app, visit http://freshlog.com.

Textile and Markdown Editors

2009-07-04T06:27:00Z

Today, in response to your feedback, we are releasing an update that provides a number of changes to editing formatted fields in Unfuddle.

Editor Toolbars

Let’s be honest, Markdown and Textile can be a bit daunting for non-technical users. When editing a formatted field (such as ticket description), you will now see a custom toolbar depending on your markup of choice. This toolbar contains buttons for some of the most common formatting tasks (bold, italic, strikeout, etc) making the specifics of your markup language much easier to remember. The toolbar also includes buttons for inserting links to Unfuddle tickets, changesets, repository source code, etc.

Per Field Markup

Every formatted field now independently stores the markup language in which it was authored. This means that you can also change the markup used for any text field at the time of edit. This has some interesting implications. For instance, if you previously authored all of your Unfuddle content using Textile, but decide to switch to Markdown, all of your old content will still render correctly.

We have also made it possible for each person to individually specify their desired markup to be used when authoring new content from the Personal Settings page. Now, your Textile fanatic can finally have his way. However, you should note that it is possible to restrict which markup languages are available to your users from the Account Settings page. In this way, you can prevent any new material from being authored in a markup that you find undesirable.

Text Preview

Many of you have asked for the ability to preview a ticket, message, or notebook page before posting. Well, now you can! Simply click the appropriate button in the toolbar and you will be shown a nearly instant preview of your formatted text.

Please enjoy the new editing ease and be sure to let us know what you think!

Recovery Strategy Improvements

2009-06-08T08:17:00Z

As we intimated in our previous post, the outage we experienced offered us an opportunity to evaluate our disaster recovery plan under pressure. While I am glad to say that no data was lost in the hardware failure, our team was convinced that there was definite room for improvement. After bringing the affected customers back online, we immediately began work on evaluating alternate systems and processes that would have shortened this week’s downtime dramatically.

We are now taking snapshots of all customer data at 5 minute intervals. This provides us with two distinct advantages:

As many of you may know, Amazon EBS volumes are already redundant, a hardware failure on an Amazon EBS volume usually means a drastic reduction in speed, not a complete failure. This was the case on Wednesday. In the case of reduced performance, we can take down the affected server, take a final snapshot capturing any disk activity since the last 5 minute snapshot. This should go fairly quickly even on a volume experiencing problems.
In the case of the catastrophic failure on an EBS volume, we can very quickly restore customer data from the last snapshot losing only 5 minutes of data.

If we had been using the 5 minute snapshot scenario before Wednesday, the downtime would have been lessened to approximately 30 minutes – the amount of time for one of us to manually snapshot the affected volume, create a new volume from that snapshot and reattach it.

I want to thank all of you for your support and suggestions since this outage. Know that we are committed to the integrity and availability of your data and we will continue to evolve our systems and processes to make Unfuddle even more solid.

Automated Backups with Amazon S3 Support

2009-04-23T06:03:00Z

Since the launch of Unfuddle, we have always considered it one of our highest priorities that our customers would have direct and immediate access to their data in the form of project backups. Downloading comprehensive project backups has always been possible with Unfuddle. However, automating this process has always required writing some custom code against the Unfuddle API.

Automated Backups

We now provide the ability to schedule automatic backups of projects, removing the potential tediousness of going through the Unfuddle API. Any project or account administrator may now setup a project to be backed up daily, weekly, or monthly.

Additionally, with Unfuddle now running entirely on Amazon’s infrastructure, it seemed only natural to allow for these automated backups to be sent directly to Amazon S3 buckets. You can now specify your Amazon credentials along with an optional bucket name and all new backups will automatically be sent to your S3 account for your own storage.

Message Bumping and Comment Attachments

2009-03-09T01:53:00Z

Based on comments we have received from you, our Amazon EC2 migration has been a huge success. As promised, we are ready to start rolling out enhancements to Unfuddle. Today, we are deploying the following features along with some smaller interface updates:

Message Bumping

Unfuddle messages typically function as a blog for your project. However, as message comments can often be a natural place for discussion of the message content, we have decided to move to a message sorting model similar to most forums. Now, whenever a comment is made on a message, the entire message will move to the top of the stack making the activity more obvious.

Comment Attachments

Many of you have asked for the ability to add attachments to comments. Because you asked, it is now possible to attach files to your comments throughout Unfuddle. Additionally, please note that the attachment interface has been updated throughout Unfuddle.

We are looking forward to turning more of your suggestions into enhancements to Unfuddle over the coming months!

Infrastructure Upgrades and Amazon EC2

2009-01-27T03:45:00Z

After some very long nights and a lot of very hard work, we are proud to say that Unfuddle is now running wholly on Amazon EC2 servers. Vast amounts of Unfuddle code have been completely revamped to scale horizontally and to take advantage of the Amazon approach to hosting. Site performance has improved significantly across the board with virtually infinite room to grow.

Along with this infrastructure upgrade, a number of relevant software updates are now available. Most notable of these is that all Unfuddle Subversion repositories have now been upgraded to 1.5.x, bringing you new features such as Subversion merge tracking.

In choosing the Amazon platform, Unfuddle is effectively saying goodbye to Rackspace, our previous hosting provider. Rackspace was an excellent partner that served Unfuddle and its customers very well over the years. However, we simply needed to move on to an infrastructure partner that could better grow with our needs.

The Unfuddle team is very excited. Now that there is no longer an imminent need to upgrade our infrastructure, we can return to improving the feature set of Unfuddle. Many of you have been waiting patiently for more updates to Unfuddle – your comments have not gone unheard and we have some very exciting features that are now literally around the corner!

Unfuddle Welcomes Jayson Minard

2008-12-02T08:47:00Z

Despite being quiet on the blog lately, we have been very busy here at Unfuddle. The first piece of exciting news is that the Unfuddle trio is now a quartet!

For the first time since it was founded, Unfuddle is adding a new team member – Jayson Minard. Jayson has agreed to serve as the new Chairman of the Board of Unfuddle and will be primarily focused on business and product strategy.

Jayson has been in software development for over 20 years. He has worked for Zend, Novell, BEA, StarBase and Borland – where Jayson was the Chief Architect of JBuilder. More recently, Jayson was the CIO/CTO of AbeBooks which was acquired by Amazon. He currently runs MindHeap Technology consulting to technology groups focused on high scalability systems.

There are many exciting changes just around the corner. Jayson has a strong background in highly scalable web applications and software development processes. We believe Jayson to be exactly the person who can help us better serve the increasing number of software programmers who use Unfuddle.

Jayson, on behalf of all Unfuddlers – welcome!

Joshua, David and Cary

Git Hosting and Repository Improvements

2008-05-18T04:50:00Z

Today, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Git hosting on all Unfuddle accounts. For those of you have not yet heard of Git, it is a distributed version control system that can have some distinct advantages over Subversion for certain teams.

The release of Git comes with a number of exciting improvements to repositories in Unfuddle:

Unlimited Repositories. Each Unfuddle account may now have an unlimited number of Subversion or Git repositories. Mix and match as you will!
Project/Repository Associations. Each Unfuddle project may now be associated with any number of repositories. This means that you can have a mix of Subversion and Git repositories associated with each of your projects.
Repository Browser. Unfuddle now sports a slick new repository browsing interface that makes it simple to view and analyze the contents of your repository right from your browser. One of the coolest things about the new interface is seamless syntax coloring for most commonly occurring file types.
Repository Callbacks. Many of you have build or deployment processes that regularly “ping” your repositories to see if a new commit exists. In order to eliminate the need to “ping” at all, we have implemented the concept of a repository callback. If you provide us with a URL to which we can post, we will notify your servers of any commits that happen on your repository immediately after the commit occurs. Now that’s continuous integration!

To learn more about Git support in Unfuddle and how to get started, please see our Git Documentation, or just click on the new “Repositories” tab in your account. Please note that the Unfuddle API has also been updated to represent the new repository model.

Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to share your feedback. Unfuddle continues to grow with our industry and we have many new and exciting features on our roadmap!

OpenID Support and Other Random Tidbits

2008-04-06T11:53:00Z

Earlier this evening, we rolled out a number of updates to Unfuddle. The most visible of these updates, and in direct response to your feedback, is support for OpenID.

Unfuddle currently supports OpenID as a means of authentication when accessing the web interface of your Unfuddle accounts. While OpenID has many benefits, one of the biggest advantages to Unfuddle users is a single signin that spans multiple Unfuddle accounts.

This means that you can setup each of your Unfuddle accounts to use the same OpenID. Once you have successfully signed into an Unfuddle account using your OpenID, you will then be able to access all of your other Unfuddle accounts associated with that same OpenID without having to sign in again.

To setup your OpenID for use with Unfuddle, simply sign into each of your Unfuddle accounts using your username and password. Then, click on “Personal Settings” in each account and enter your OpenID URL. Once you have saved your changes, you will be able to use either your OpenID or username and password to sign in to these accounts.

Additionally, we have added a number of export formats (like CSV and iCal) for both ticket and time tracking reports, accessible directly from the web interface.

Another notable change with this release is that, for the first time since the launch of Unfuddle, many of the URL’s within Unfuddle have been changed, increasing their uniformity and similarity with the Unfuddle API. Please note that this will invalidate any exsiting links you may have out in the wild, including RSS and iCal feeds that you may have referenced from your clients. There is a new version of the Unfuddle Widget now available for download that references these new URL’s.

Project Archives and Plan Upgrades

2008-01-30T21:00:00Z

Our customers are growing and Unfuddle is committed to growing with them. Many of you have asked for more projects as well as the ability to archive projects that are no longer active. We are happy to say that we have added these features today.

To archive a project, an account administrator need simply click the “Archive” link on a project from the Projects tab. This places the entire project into a read-only mode, including its associated Subversion repository. If needed, the archived project can also be easily reactivated.

In addition to the project archival feature, you will find that we have upgraded our plans across the board, adding more people, storage, and projects for the same price to our customers. Of special note is that our FREE account now supports 200MB of space and two users. For a full plan comparison, see our plans page.

Thanks again to those of you who have shared such valuable feedback with us through both the community forums and emails. This feedback has truly grown Unfuddle into the product that it is today!

acts_as_conference: Rails Minds Unite

2008-01-16T05:24:00Z

There is no doubt that the Ruby on Rails community has developed faster than any of us could have imagined. How does one keep up with it all?

Why, acts_as_conference in Orlando, Florida on February 8th and 9th, of course! This is going to be a concentrated time of learning and connecting for Ruby on Rails developers from all over. You’ll be brought up to date on the latest happenings in the Rails community, discover how Rails can play nicely with others, and hear insightful discussions on the business and philosophy of software development.

We are really excited to be both sponsoring and attending acts_as_conference. We have already heard that a number of Unfuddlers will be there too. If you are planning on being there, please be sure to drop us a line. We would love to meet you in person. We’ll be the ones wearing Unfuddle T-Shirts. Oops, so will all of you, since we are handing them out at the conference.

Trac2Unfuddle: Trac Import Tool

2008-01-08T18:59:00Z

So you are still using Trac, eh? You’d love to switch to Unfuddle but you can’t bear the thought of having to move all that data over manually?

Well, we have the answer to your prayers. Trac2Unfuddle, our newest little utility based on the Unfuddle API, is a small Ruby script that will import your existing Trac projects into your Unfuddle account.

We all knew that the introduction of the Unfuddle API would make for some exciting new creations. Well this is one of them. Head on over to the Unfuddle Tools section of our website and get that Trac project moved into Unfuddle today!