When travelling with your laptop or iPhone across time zones, it can be inconvenient to have to log out and then back into LiveTimer in order to force it to recognize the time zone change. Therefore, we've begun checking your time zone every time you start or stop the timer.

In order to identify your time zone, LiveTimer checks with your browser, which in turn checks your operating system. Unfortunately, some browsers, such as Firefox, seem to cache the time zone once they've been started. Therefore, it may be necessary to close and reopen your browser for changes to your operating system's time zone to be recognized by your browser.

We've confirmed that dynamic time zone recognition works in the following platform / browser combinations:

• iPhone / iPod Touch: Safari
• Mac: Safari 3.2, Fluid 0.9.5
• Windows: Internet Explorer 7

If you travel quite a bit, consider using LiveTimer from one of these browsers. After all, jet lag is enough to worry about!

Southern New Hampshire has been struck with an ice storm that has left hundreds of thousands without power. The ice is continuing to build on trees and power lines, so the situation may worsen. The regional power company has predicted multi-day outages.

Our hosting facility, based in Manchester, NH, has kept our service running smoothly despite the adverse conditions. We're hopeful that their backup generator and redundant Internet connections will prevent any outage.

We apologize in advance if this situation does result in any LiveTimer outages, or hinder our responses to support requests. We'll try to post Twitter updates as the situation changes.

We've enhanced our reports in a couple ways that should be useful for teams distributed across multiple time zones:

• Custom time zones can now be specified for reports - When configuring a report, you can now specify a time zone different from the time zone in which you logged in. This custom time zone will be used when applying date filters to your report. This allows everyone on your team to see the same results when running a report filtered by the same dates.
• Detailed listings can now be shown with times converted to the same time zone - Previously, times could only be shown in the time zone in which they were entered.

Both of these options are available from the Configure tab of reports. Of course, you can memorize reports with these options in order to quickly run them again without reconfiguration.

We recently launched LiveTimer Mini, a compact version of our most frequently used features. We created LiveTimer Mini by reworking our iPhone interface to be compatible with every desktop browser we support (Internet Explorer 7+, Safari 3+, Firefox 2+, and Google Chrome). In the process, we also boosted the performance and improved the look of our iPhone interface.

In order to try out LiveTimer Mini, just click on the Mini link in the lower left corner of your LiveTimer account. This should resize your browser and load LiveTimer Mini (note: because Google Chrome does not allow web sites to resize your browser, it may be necessary to resize your browser manually). Once in Mini mode, you can return to full sized Standard mode by clicking on the Standard link in the lower left corner.

LiveTimer Mini currently has all the capabilities of the iPhone interface, including a small version of the Timer and Time Ledger. You'll notice that the Time tab looks a bit lonely at the top. It will soon be joined by an Expenses tab for expense tracking, a feature that many of our users have waited for patiently.

Many Integration Options for LiveTimer Mini

Although LiveTimer Mini runs just fine in desktop browsers, you may appreciate integrating it more closely into your Mac or Windows desktop. Options include:

• Mac Dashboard Widget - Browse to your account in Safari, switch to Mini mode, and then right click and choose "Open in Dashboard...". Select the entire page, from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, and then click Add. Voila! LiveTimer Mini has become a Dashboard Widget.
• Fluid Application in Mac OS X - If you'd like a visual indication of when your timer is running right in your Mac's dock, try running LiveTimer with Fluid. The simple instructions are described in this article and this video, and work for both Mini and Standard modes.
• Google Chrome Application in Windows - Creating desktop applications with Chrome is simple: Browse to your LiveTimer account, then click the Page controls in Chrome, and then "Create application shortcuts...". As mentioned above, switching between Mini and Standard modes in Chrome is a bit tedious because it requires that you manually resize the window, but that's the only downside we've found.
• Firefox Prism Application in Windows - Firefox 3 has an add-on named Prism that can be used like Chrome to create a desktop version of your favorite web applications. A future blog post will be dedicated to running LiveTimer with Prism.

We will soon post video tutorials that explain each of the above techniques in detail. In the mean time, don't hesitate to ask for help if you have trouble with the brief instructions provided here. Also, please let us know how LiveTimer Mini works for you!

Cameron Chapman of SmashingMagazine included LiveTimer in a roundup of 15 Useful Project Management Tools. He wrote:

Thanks for the write-up, Cameron!

Several of our users began testing LiveTimer with Google's new Chrome browser soon after it was released in Beta last month. We've just completed some testing of our own and have fixed all of the incompatibilities we encountered. Even though Chrome is still in Beta and therefore liable to change rapidly, we will do our best to support this exciting new browser.

Chrome is a compelling browser for many reasons, including:

• Speed - Chrome's Javascript engine is very fast, which makes dynamic sites like LiveTimer feel even more smooth and responsive.
• Security - Chrome periodically downloads blacklists of malware and phishing sites, and warns users before visiting a site that could be harmful.
• Stability - Chrome creates a separate process for each site that's visited, even on different tabs, so that a problem in one site will not affect others.
• Simplicity - Chrome has a clean look and elegant features like the Omnibox for entering URLs.

Only time will tell how successful Chrome is against the market leading browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. If you're interested, try out LiveTimer with Chrome and let us know what you think.

We've just completed another maintenance release, which includes the following refinements to LiveTimer:

• Selectors remember the open / closed state of nodes - This applies to all selectors for hierarchical classifications, such as clients, projects, and tasks.
• Search within selectors - You can now search for classifications by name or ID directly from selectors, such as those within the Timer.
• Selectors are always visible when opened - When opening a selector near the bottom of the page, it will open "up" instead of "down" so that the page does not need to be scrolled to view it.
• Improved report filters - Multiple filters can now be added to your reports without repetitively clicking "Add Filters".
• Simpler management filters - The filters in the Manage section are now more accessible and easier to understand.
• All outstanding Google Chrome problems resolved - We expect to announce official support for this new browser very soon.

Thanks to everyone whose feedback made these changes possible.

We've just completed an update to LiveTimer, including the following improvements:

• Notes now display characters remaining - Most notes, such as those for time entries, can be up to 255 characters long. You can now easily tell how many characters you have left as you type.
• Fixed auto-saving of Timer's notes - In some browsers, including Fluid for the Mac and Safari on the iPhone, changes to the Timer's notes weren't properly saved when leaving the Time Entry page.
• Improved time zone detection - The process of retrieving your time zone from your browser has been made more robust.
• Improved handling of simultaneous browser sessions - LiveTimer now prevents you from overwriting your most recent changes to the Timer. This is especially important when using multiple browsers simultaneously, such as Safari on the iPhone and Safari on your desktop.
• Better parsing of times - "a" can be used to indicate "am" and "p" to indicate "pm" when typing times. For instance, the following times are all equivalent: 10:00pm = 10pm = 10:00p = 10p = 22:00 = 22.
• Google Chrome problems resolved - Even though we don't yet officially support Google's new browser, we have resolved the problems that have been reported to date. We're currently doing QA testing with Chrome ourselves, so please feel free to report problems if you're feeling brave and want to test LiveTimer on Chrome.

More refinements are coming very soon! Thanks to everyone for your patience as we continue to improve LiveTimer.

LiveTimer is now on Twitter! We joined Twitter to convey up to the minute reports about our service, such as what we're working on at the moment. We also wanted to open yet another channel of communication with our users and potential users. For "official" and timely support requests, please continue to use the Contact form in the Help section of your account.

If you're interested, you can follow us on Twitter or just check our latest "tweets" in the news sidebar at the right.

We've finally added comments to this blog, courtesy of the popular web comment service Disqus (pronounced "discuss"). After experimenting with several options for blog comments, we settled on Disqus because of its ease of use and community-focused features.

Please feel free to comment on any article we publish. We look forward to hearing your opinions and suggestions!