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.

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!

We're proud to announce that LiveTimer will soon include expense tracking and invoicing. These features should be the perfect complement to LiveTimer's time tracking and billing features, which currently include billing rates (in multiple currencies) and billing reports. Soon, you'll also be able to generate and track customizable invoices that include your billable time and expenses. We are intent on making LiveTimer a complete online time and billing solution!

We've been working hard on these features, which we expect to complete this quarter. We're making this announcement now because we've been asked many times about our support for expense tracking and/or invoicing. We feel that our customers and potential customers deserve to know our plans so they can make more informed decisions themselves.

There's one last piece to this announcement: LiveTimer's pricing will stay the same! We hope you agree that time and expense tracking, plus invoicing, for $5 per user per month is a great value.

Firefox 3 has just been released today by Mozilla, who is attempting to set a world record for the most downloads in a day with this release. If you're a Firefox user, we highly recommend that you help them out and download Firefox 3 before 11:16 am PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18.

We've been testing the beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 3 with LiveTimer, and have been very impressed with its improved speed and memory usage. For instance, the weekly bulk entry view of the Time Ledger, which is the most memory-intensive part of LiveTimer, is noticeably more responsive using Firefox 3 than it is with Firefox 2 on both Mac and Windows.

We are not recommending a switch from Internet Explorer or Safari, especially if you're pleased with your current browser. However, if you're a Firefox user, we definitely recommend trying out Firefox 3.

LiveTimer is now listed in Apple's directory of iPhone web applications.

Thanks to Apple for naming LiveTimer a "Staff Pick".

LiveTimer has also been selected by Apple as a Featured web app for iPhone:

On April 7th, we started using the excellent uptime monitoring service Pingdom to keep an eye on the availability and performance of LiveTimer every minute of every day from locations around the world.

After all of the work we've put into our infrastructure, we're proud to share LiveTimer's current status and uptime history with our customers.

We're proud to now offer a 50% discount on LiveTimer for non-profit organizations. In order to qualify, your organization must have 501(c)(3) status.

If you qualify, please email us (support AT livetimer DOT com) the following:

• Proof of your non-profit status (a scanned copy of your confirmation letter from the IRS)
• Your EIN (employer identification number from the IRS)

Alternatively, you could send this information by postal mail to our address. After we verify your status, we'll be glad to offer LiveTimer at the very low cost of $2.50 per user per month.

We'd love to hear how LiveTimer is working for all of our clients, non-profit and for-profit. Please email us at support AT livetimer DOT com to share your story.

We're happy to announce the conclusion of the LiveTimer Beta. Thanks to our many users who have made the Beta period so successful. Your valuable feedback has helped shape LiveTimer into the product it is today, which we hope will meet your time tracking needs for years to come.

Now that the Beta is complete, all existing accounts have been transitioned to the standard 30 day free trial period. If you wish to keep your account beyond the trial period, we will begin accepting credit cards soon. We will email further instructions soon to everyone listed as a Billing Contact in your account (which can be verified through the Users tab).

Even though LiveTimer is out of Beta, we will not stop refining and improving it. Please continue to check our News page (or subscribe to our RSS feed) for updates.

It's taken more time than anticipated to develop some of the features we'd like to have completed before the beta period ends. As a result, we're extending the beta period for several more weeks. We hope that you'll find the new features to be worth the wait.

We're excited to announce that the Beta period for LiveTimer.com will be ending June 30, 2007 [Update: We've recently extended the beta period - please stay posted for a new end date]. Thanks to our Beta users who have helped us test and refine LiveTimer.com since we opened this site to the public on March 31.

The coming weeks will see a flurry of development as we look to add a number of features to LiveTimer.com.

Remember that your 30 day free trial won't start until the Beta period ends, so you still have plenty of time to evaluate LiveTimer.com free of charge.

This is the first post on our News page, which we created to inform everyone of the latest news, features and updates for LiveTimer.com. You can subscribe to the RSS feed (what is RSS?) by clicking here to receive updates in your favorite feed reader.

We've also added a page of Frequently Asked Questions (or FAQ), which we hope will be useful if you're considering signing up for LiveTimer.com.

For users of LiveTimer.com, these pages will complement the Announcements and FAQ pages available in the Help section of your account, which will continue to focus on operational details of LiveTimer.com.

We've got quite a few features coming soon to LiveTimer.com, so keep an eye out for updates!