Can an AJAX-powered user interface help you ship your software on time?
Written by on November 17th, 2006 in Ajax, Ajax Applications, Reviews.
“Shipping great software on time is a difficult but not impossible task.”
– Jim McCarthy, Microsoft Corporation
(From 21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time)
If you are looking for a program that could possibly help you ship your software in a more timely manner, you might want to consider checking out OnTime by Axosoft. They offer a free 5-user 3-month trial of their software and have paid upgrade options for companies that prefer to work with a vendor instead of using other options like the open-source Bugzilla or Trac. Axosoft supplies a competition comparison chart that you can use to compare features of other commercial bug and incident tracking systems.
Their screencasts demonstrate a fairly well polished application that makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to provide a more desktop-like experience. The signup process for their free trial went super-fast. They provide a first-time wizard that is quick and easy and gives nice options (like pre-populating your dashboard with sample data so you can see how to use the application.)
There’s two reasons to check out OnTime:
- You’re interested in improving your ability to ship software on time
- You want to see how a commercially successful company is using Ajax to improve the web experience
Some issues that I noticed in my brief exploration of OnTime so far: All the Ajax-enabled windows take a little while to load whenever you click on a tab. This is pretty typical for Ajax-enabled apps, but you’re still left with a feeling of slightly more latency than would be totally optimal. There are a LOT of different tabs and features baked in to this product. If you’re a fan of Joel Spolsky you’ll notice that Axosoft has made some decisions regarding offering many super-customizable form options for bug tracking that run counter to what Joel would recommend (keeping in mind that Joel’s company Fog Creek Software is a competitor to Axosoft).
All in all, I’d say it’s worth a look (at the very least you can check out their screencasts to get an idea of how they solved building an Ajax-enabled user experience).
It looks like they’re using Atlas for their Ajax toolkit.
http://www.axosoft.com/products/HostedSignup.aspx
This is a sponsored review.
Leave a comment if you have used OnTime and have any feedback about if it really delivers on it’s promises or not.