Hi,

For a school project, my team and I are developing a widget to interact with your Basecamp account. You will be able to perform many of the most common interactions with the site straight from your desktop.

• Overview page with most recently updated items.
• Access to multiple projects on the same Basecamp account.
• Time page showing your last week’s time entries. Easy add/edit/delete of entries.
• Support for time estimates to track on-time completion of tasks.
• One-click time reporting generates a report of all time entries and estimates of the entries team for the time period specified, complete with a summary of totals.
• Timer to keep track of time working on a project. Clock in/clock out and easy submission of time worked.
• Next upcoming milestone shown at all times at the top of the widget.
• Messages page showing the most recent 25 messages and comments (number can be changed via preferences to decrease loading time.
• Easy access to posting a new message or comment to an existing message.
• Todo page with all open todos, plus the ability to filter by current user.
• Contact page showing all contacts on the current project, and easy exporting options so you can import those contacts into your email program.
• Links to IM programs for contacts with defined IM screenname.
• The best part: it’s FREE!

Screenshots and download link available on the website:

http://rook.hss.cmu.edu/~team06s07/

The widget is not finalized yet (currently at Alpha release), we still have another couple of weeks to finish the project. Most of the major functionality is there, though. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

Daniel

I’m not into Y! widgets but it looks like a nice piece of work. You should contact 37s and get them to list it on the Extras page .

Looks very interesting! Can you elaborate on how you’re storing the data for the time estimates?

Stickman, we’re planning to do that as soon as the project is completed. Right now, all we’re interested in is getting people to use it and give us feedback so we can improve the widget and fix bugs.

Chris, the time estimates are stored on the Basecamp server as well. There is no data that is stored locally. We add the time estimate at the end of the description field, using the format

description [[est .5]]

so we can parse it out when displaying it in the widget. This is still readable so anybody looking at it on the site can understand it too.

Looks like a great effort! Do drop us a note when it’s complete and we’ll add you to the extras page. Thanks for spending your time putting this widget together.

Chris, dbroekman,

Basecamp 3rd-party API developers should probably standardize on the format/syntax in which we add data to Basecamp. I know we’ve chatted a little about this before on the old forums, but I can’t remember what we had come up with. The [[name value]] syntax is good, though perhaps [[name=value]] might be better (avoiding using space as a delimiter). I’d want to stay away from colons because of confusion with time-information. Chris, what syntax are you using to tag items with QuickBooks catgories?

Bring the power of Basecamp to your desktop! Project Recon is a widget for Windows XP that sits in the system tray and allows you to keep track of hours without taking your mind off the project at hand or opening a browser.

Good points Peter, I have started a new thread for this: http://forum.basecamphq.com/forums/8/topics/340

Sounds rather cool.

http://www.pqdvd.com/rd.php?n=2

Interesting to bring up this old thread. For those of you who are interested, the project has finished, and is available for download at the official site at http://www.avalanche-widget.org.

Daniel—We started having problems with Avalanche connecting to BC yesterday, can you help? Anyone else having this issue?

It gives us this weird error: The URL you entered is invalid. Please double-check the URL you entered and try again.
Problem is occurring on both windows and mac and several unrelated machines

Tried many fixes but no luck. Help anyone?

Avalanche should be working fine again. This was actually a problem on our end and nothing to do with Avalanche. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.