I feel honoured and blessed that so many people around the world have decided that MyChores is a service they can use and enjoy. Thank you to all of you … all 1000 of you who have joined. :)

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It makes me so happy that people are using and appreciating MyChores. Thank you.

I have been quite busy lately and haven’t had time for much MyChores development. I do, however, have a little bit of news: the source code is now protected by Git version controlling software. I haven’t quite got the hang of how it all works, but it should help me to track what has changed. It is also a step in the right direction for MyChores going open-source one day.

I have also downloaded RSpec and Spec::Rails … i am finally in the process of creating some tests for MyChores. Something we have needed for a very long time!

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I’m not about to give MyChores away to anyone - it will remain entirely in my control, and i will continue to work on it in my free time. I am quite sure that it will benefit enormously from the skills that i will learn from my job. I will be learning Behaviour Driven Development and testing using RSpec so i will be very excited to apply the same techniques to MyChores.

For me personally it is totally ideal … working on a small hut on a farm surrounded by fields, a 15-minute walk away from my home. How lush is that?!! I am very excited, and can’t wait to begin!

Aimee.

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Lucky dip

Then, if you don’t like the task it picks for you, you can just press the button again and get another one!

Yesterday was a very busy day on MyChores with 230 tasks completed. That is a record - it’s the first time we’ve ever gone over 200 tasks in one day! So good work everyone!! This is turning out to be a very good month with at least 100 tasks being completed pretty much every day. Yay, the world is becoming a cleaner place! ;)

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If you have a lot of tasks to do and don’t really know where to start, try the Lucky dip! It will choose a random task that is assigned to you and either due today or overdue. Just as if you’d picked it out of a hat!

I was inspired by this: Computerized “Job-Jar”?. It seemed to me that MyChores wasn’t exactly what this person was looking for, but now with the new Lucky dip feature, perhaps it could be! :)

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No more entering ‘H6a38G’ or whatever code it was that i mangled in the GIMP several years ago! I had quite a few emails about that, from people who couldn’t read the code and there was no alternative. Now we get a nice simple easy-to-understand box like this:

Several things are nice about this:

1. If you can’t read the text you can re-load for another try
2. It is accessible - there is an audio alternative
3. It is secure, tried and tested on many sites
4. It was easy-peasy for me to implement!
5. You don’t have to get it exactly right, just near enough
6. It apparently helps to turn old books into digital format

Pretty impressive, hey! I was most impressed by point number 5. I entered ‘Manhatten’ instead of ‘Manhattan’ and it allowed it. I also missed an ’s’ off one word and it still worked. Only if you get it drastically wrong does it fail and ask you for another try. I am pleased by this.

In other news, i am working on extending the MyChores API. I am trying to see whether it is possible to re-write MyChores Mobile to use the API, which would save me having to maintain two codebases. If it works, i’ll also make a proper effort on MyChores for Kids.

Oh yes, whilst i’m thinking about MyChores for Kids … would it be useful to anyone to have a currency field where you could enter an amount of pocket money that could be earned for doing chores? When i get on to reporting i could include a pocket money report … let me know if that could be useful!

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I have added the simple DHTML plugin to the OpenID registration screen, which works a dream, and makes it very easy to register and login using OpenID.

I am a huge fan of OpenID, and anything that makes the web easier to use, so i have made a quick video demo of how to register on MyChores using an OpenID.

For anyone who wants to associate their existing account with an OpenID, to login without needing a password, you can do that here: Associate your account with an OpenID.

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I thought somebody had suggested this, but in fact it looks as if i thought of it myself! If anyone wants to stake a claim to this suggestion, go ahead! I’m sure this will be particularly useful to the ‘advanced’ users with many teams and many people to manage.

The refresh also works on the calendar, hot map, collage and statistics views.

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So i’ve got the vacuum cleaner out and i know i’m going to be ticking off all my vacuuming tasks, i can simply search for ‘vacuum’ and get the results like this:

If you have JavaScript enabled you can have the tick-and-fade effect just like in the workload list, meaning you don’t lose your search results. I think this will be very helpful.

I guess i’ll be off to vacuum the kitchen then! :P

Oh, there was one other change. When exporting tasks to a spreadsheet, the description field is now included too. I forget who asked for that feature. I hope it is helpful. It doesn’t handle multi-line fields very well due to the limitations of .csv files, but hopefully it will suit most peoples needs.

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The American English spellings are ready and our friends in America should already see the changes. It’ll be a while before we can start to translate into other languages because i need to make all the files aware of the globalization plugin. For now i have just done the words phrases that we needed for American spelling.

Please visit our new statistics page to see the glorious new Google Charts. I am really pleased with these! Your personal statistics page should also look a bit prettier for you now, with a nice little sparkline chart showing the tasks you have completed recently. This is mine:

I guess i do most of my chores on Sundays, heh! :)

MyChores Mobile is lagging behind, but i don’t think anybody uses it. I am planning to completely re-write it, making it use the API instead of having its own separate code-base. I’m not sure when this will happen, but it probably needs to be soon.

If you find anything wrong please do get in touch!

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