InGeniusBlog.com

Fuzzy Time is a recent meme in the blogosphere - some design firm built a mockup of a clock that told the time - sort of. Instead of an exact time like 5:16pm, it would show “Five Fifteen” or “Quarter After Five.”

This sounded kind-of cool, so I built an HTML version of this clock. (Open in it’s own window, then resize the window to about 2 or 3 inches wide)

The app has a pretty decent list of time variants. Each minute it scans through all the time variants, chooses the ones which apply now, and then chooses a random one of the candidates to be displayed as the time. The whole source for the thing can be seen if you “view source” - check it out, and let me know if you come up with some time variants I haven’t thought of!

It’s nice to run this clock in a window on your desktop - and to do that, check out Bubbles! Bubbles lets you run HTML applications as though they are PC Desktop apps.

For more fuzzy clocks:

• http://store.artlebedev.com/office/verbarius/
• http://code.google.com/p/fuzzyclock/

InGenius is proud to be one of the finalists for a VON award for our innovative online application - the Mitel Application Builder. Winners will be announced at the VON show.

Application Builder is a tool used to build HTML applications which run on Mitel’s large-screen 5330 and 5340 phones.

Currently, you can build screen saver applications, and hospitality applications - and we’re planning to add many more applications over the next year.

Application Builder is innovative in that dealers or customers can sign up for free, and build trial applications for free. The tool supports online demos - you and your customers can see what your application will look like in our online phone simulator - then when you’re happy, download the application to your Mitel 3300 switch, and phones.

InGenius is happy to be in the company of many excellent finalists, including Alec Saunder’s iotum, another Ottawa firm.

Update: Well, we didn’t make the top 10, but we’re pretty happy with the exposure and recognition of our hard work. Thanks VON!

Check out Innocentive.com - this site matches “idea people” (solvers) with “seekers” who have a problem they need solved.

Most of the solutions pay between $5000 to $50,000 - some much higher.

For some reason, this meme keeps coming up lately - I guess with the Netflix Challenge coverage in Wired…

Nice to see that some of the challenges are designed to benefit 3rd world countries such as lighting ideas, and mosquito control using solar energy.

I’m a bit afraid of this one though: A stretch activated aroma... Invent something that gives off a pleasant odor when an elastomer is stretched…

We are just starting a new project here at InGenius, and needed a way to import a ton of cases into FogBugz (our bug tracking system).

Here’s our project workflow for now:

• First, develop a fairly detailed spec, then break the spec down into detailed work items. The idea here is not to come up with a complete detailed design, but to come up with a pretty good spec of how the app should work, the flow, the things we want to see on screens etc.
• The work items usually end up in a table in Word, since it’s easiest to edit this way.
• We then involve all the developers who add detailed comments and add their estimates in hours.
• This Word table is imported into excel, saved as CSV, then we run this app to import into FB.
• In FB, each area has a default developer assigned, so the work gets assigned this way.
• Once in FB, I select ‘em all, convert to Features and schedule items where appropriate.
• And we fine-tune the work assignments to balance the workload among developers.

The flow seems clunky, but it preserves the ease of editing and group sharing and input for as long
as possible, then it’s into FB, where it’s actually DONE.

So, based on one of the example apps that comes with FogBugz, we built a quick little CSV importer which makes it pretty easy to populate the cases for a project.

This work is in the public domain. Go ahead and modify and improve. Please send me a copy of your improvements!

Known Issues:
No error checking. VERY little testing. Basically, it worked once for me, and I’m happy.
WARNING: This app is a thrown-together hack done in about 10 minutes. It worked for me the one time I used it.

The columns in the excel spreadsheet I used are:
The Project,Area,Title,Description,Hours

Expects a file in EXACTLY this format:
Iceberg,Dev Items,test,Description of the ‘Item’,10
Iceberg,Dev Items,test2,22222,20
Iceberg,Dev Items,test3,”333′ ‘3′3 ‘3′”" “” 3rd Item, that I think is cool”,30

I think that project and area should match exactly the definitions in the FB database.Note: Saving as CSV in excel will automatically escape any embedded “’s as shown below. Nice.

So, with that preamble, HERE’s the app, and .Net project. I hope you find it useful!