Dan Podsedly's blog
We've added some new features to Pivotal Tracker.
Activity Feed
There is a new activity feed on the dashboard. The feed lets you quickly view recent events that have occurred in all your projects including new stories, comments and stories that have been accepted and rejected. You can subscribe to this activity feed using any blog reader that supports Atom. Click the Subscribe link above the feed or the feed icon in the browser address bar and your browser should handle the rest. Recent activity data is also available via the API.
Project Velocity on Dashboard
Another new feature on the dashboard is a small graph that shows the number of points accepted per iteration. The current velocity for each project is also displayed. If you hover over a project, you'll see links to some of the more commonly used project pages, including members and settings.
Improved Project History
The project history panel should now be more readable. Event timestamps are relative now (for example, "2 hours ago"), and updates to the same story within a short period of time together are bundled together. For example, if you add a new story, and immediately move it to the backlog, this will appear as one entry in the project history. You can also subscribe to a project's history feed by clicking on the feed icon in the browser's address bar.
Follow your project on Twitter
To give even more visibility to the activity on your project, Tracker can now tweet project updates. Create a Twitter account for your project (or choose an existing Twitter account), and configure your Tracker project's Twitter account settings on the Project Settings page. Remember - by default, Twitter accounts and tweets are public and searchable, so if you want to keep your project information private, make sure you enable the "protect my updates" option in your Twitter account settings.
Remember Me
If you select the "remember me" checkbox on the sign-in page, Tracker will do just that and you won't need to sign in again after re-opening your browser. To clear this "remembered" state, log out or clear your browser cookies. Resetting your password will reset "remember me" on all computers where you have previously signed in.
Time Zones
Tracker now supports time zones, allowing you to see all dates in your local time zone, and giving all project members a consistent view of iteration boundaries. Every user has a default time zone (based on what your browser tells us), but it can be overriden on the My Profile page. Projects have time zones as well - this defaults to the time zone of the user who created it, but can be changed as well, in project settings. The project's time zone controls when iteration boundaries occur. If a project's iterations start on Mondays, and it's time zone is PST, that means new iterations will start Mondays at midnight PST, and everyone in the world, will see the new iteration at that same time, even though they may be in different time zones. Someone in New York, for example, won't see a new iteration until 3am their time.
More information about what's new is available on the Pivotal Tracker recent updates pahge.
We're starting a Tracker Users Group in New York, and the first meetup is on Jun 30, at 6:30pm, at the Pivotal Labs office on Chambers St. Click the link below to become a member of the group and RSVP. We hope to see you there!
Our favorite recipe site Cookstr, developed by Pivotal Labs, has received two nominations, and been named an honoree for the 13th Annual Webby Awards. The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.
Cookstr is a nominee in the Best Practices category, along with NYTimes.com, Digg, WebMD Health, and The Daily Beast. Cookstr has also been nominated for the Food and Beverage category, and has won an Honorary Mention in the Lifestyle Category.
We'd like to congratulate the Cookstr team on this achievement, and encourage everyone who's a fan to vote for Cookstr in the People's Choice Awards!
Pivotal Tracker has just been updated with new features.
Labels Enhancements & Saved Searches
There's a new panel on the project page that will help you organize and keep track of related stories in your project - Labels and Searches. Open it using the View menu, or with Shift-L. On this panel, you'll see all labels in your project, as links, with numbers indicating the number of stories that have yet to be accepted. Click on a label to see stories with that label.
You can now save any search, by clicking on the disk icon 
at the top of search results. Saved searches appear below labels, on the Labels and Searches panel.
The new panel also allows you rename or delete labels, and delete saved searches. Hover over a label or saved search, and you should see rename 
and/or delete 
buttons.
Ability to apply and remove labels to selected stories
It's now possible to apply labels to multiple stories, using the Actions menu at the top of the project page. Select stories using the small checkboxes to the right of story titles. The same action also allows you to remove labels.
Ability to export selected stories to CSV
You can export selected stories in the project, also by using the Actions menu. One possible use of this feature is to move or copy stories from one project to another. Select some stories, export them to CSV, and import that file into another project.
API: Get stories by iteration or iteration group
We've made it easier to retrieve stories by iteration through the API. You can get stories based on an arbitrary iteration range, done iterations, the current iteration, or iterations in the backlog.
See the API Help page for more details and examples.
http://www.pivotaltracker.com
We've added some new features to Pivotal Tracker, including:
- Cloning of panels
- Pinned search results
- Auto saving of panel layout
- Keyboard shorcuts
- Option to stack current iteration and the backlog
...and more! For details, see the Recent Updates page.
Here's some information from Engine Yard (our hosting service provider) about yesterday afternoon's data center outage, which affected a number of applications including Pivotal Tracker:
http://blog.engineyard.com/2009/03/31/march-30th-outage
We apologize for the inconvenience this outage caused, and appreciate everyone's patience. As detailed in Engine Yard's post, steps are being taken to ensure that this does not happen again.
If you use Pivotal Tracker for open source projects, and would like to increase visibility into what your team is working on, you can now do so by making your Tracker project public.
As a project owner, you can enable public access for your project on the Project Settings page, by selecting the Public Access checkbox. The public URL to the project is to the right of the checkbox, in the format http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/xxx, where xxx is the id of the project. You can also append a dash to that URL, with a more descriptive name of your project, for example http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/xxx-My-Cool-Project.
Anyone you give the project URL to will be able view stories in your project, without having to sign in to Tracker. They'll also be able request project membership by clicking the "Join This Project" button.
We've rolled out some new features in Pivotal Tracker.
New API Version
There's a new version of the developer API, with the following changes:
- support for ActiveResource
- responses no longer wrapped in an element, using HTTP return codes instead to indicate success or error
- ability to get a list of your projects
- you can now page through stories with a limit and offset
- it's now possible to obtain an authentication token by specifying a username and password (via basic auth or header parameters). This makes it easier to build interactive clients, for example a mobile app.
The previous API version (v1) is still supported, but will be deprecated at some point in the future. Please see the API Help page for more details.
Ability to change point scale
It's now possible to change your project's point scale, even if you've already estimated stories.
Demo Projects
New Tracker users will now see a link on the Dashboard to create a demo project, with example stories. You can also create a demo project from the My Projects page.
Story Comment Notifications
There's now an option (on the My Profile page to receive new comment email notifications for all stories in you project(s), not just stories you're a requester/owner of.
As always, we look forward to your feedback!
Michael Buffington has posted the first of a what will hopefully be a series of tours on Pivotal Tracker, this one about how Michael uses Tracker as a personal GTD-style task manager.
http://blog.grockit.com/2009/01/14/how-i-use-pivotal-tracker-for-gtd/
If you haven't heard of GTD, it stands for "Getting Things Done", a work-life "action management" method and book by David Allen. Read more about it here.
A lot of us here at Pivotal Labs have been using Pivotal Tracker as a personal productivity tool, and we're definitely getting more things done!
Thanks, Michael, we're looking forward to more tours.
It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means another outside.in + Pivotal happy hour, with beer and pizza, at outside.in’s offices: 20 Jay Street Suite 1019 (10th Floor), Brooklyn, NY (map)
If you’re planning on coming, please RSVP in the comments here or Cory's post.