LiveTimer has just added support for OpenID, a free and easy way to use a single identity across multiple websites. You can learn more about OpenID at OpenID.net, which also lists a number of ways to get your own OpenID. You may be surprised to learn that you already have an OpenID through another service you use!

Once you have an OpenID, it's simple to enable it within your LiveTimer account:

1. Click on Settings and then My Profile
2. In the Authentication section, click Edit Login
3. Click Use OpenID
4. Enter your OpenID and then click Update

It's easy to log in using OpenID:

1. On the log in page, click Use OpenID
2. Enter your OpenID and optionally check "Remember me?" before clicking Log in
3. You'll be taken to your OpenID provider to authenticate yourself, and then automatically returned to your LiveTimer account

Once you start using OpenID, I think you'll really appreciate the simplicity of a single online ID.

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.

LiveTimer was featured on the Tech Podcast Round Table on July 12th. During this program, I gave a demonstration of LiveTimer and answered some questions. Thanks to Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central and Andy McCaskey of Slashdot Review for inviting me on the show.

If you're interested, you can watch the video at TechPodcasts.com.

We've just completed a major upgrade of LiveTimer's reporting system. We've added new billing reports, new report grouping options, and a number of features that improve the flexibility and performance of reports.

The new report configuration page is shown below:

You can now convert a summary report to a detailed listing report, and vice versa, just by changing its "Style". Furthermore, detailed listings can now be grouped with the same options as summary reports. These options have been expanded to include a number of date-based groupings:

Our billing reports are brand new, and hopefully not too overdue for users who have been entering billing rates since the beginning of the month. Since we support multiple currencies per account, we also allow billing reports to display multiple currencies, each in its own column within the same report:

We hope that our new reports help improve both your revenues and productivity!

If you've ever wanted to run LiveTimer, or another site, more like a desktop application you may want to give a Site Specific Browser (SSB) a try. An SSB lets you use a web application like an installed application.

There are two options that I know of for this: Prism from Mozilla which runs on any platform supporting FireFox 3; and Fluid which runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and later.

On the Mac my preference is to use Fluid. I have Fluid apps created for LiveTimer, Pandora, and my web mail client. Fluid allows applications to show a small message called a Dock badge similar to how the Mac's Mail client shows unread messages. LiveTimer detects when you are using Fluid and displays the duration of the currently running timer.

To get started you need to have a Mac running OS X 10.5 or later. Install Fluid and launch it. It will launch an application which creates SSBs. To create your LiveTimer SSB you only need to enter two pieces of information. The first is your LiveTimer URL. This will be in the form of https://myaccount.livetimer.com, obviously replacing myaccount with your actual account name (copy this from a browser running LiveTimer). The second is a name Fluid will use when creating your application: LiveTimer is a good choice. Click Create and in a few seconds you will have a new application created. Click Launch Now and you can run it. Log into LiveTimer and you should be up and running. Use the "Remember me" option and on your next launch you can skip the login steps.

Are there any issues? There is one minor one that we've found, which is that Fluid doesn't alert our app that a page is unloading so we can't show you the option of saving your changes on an edit if you decide to switch pages. We're hoping the Fluid team will fix this soon.

If you don't have a Mac running OS X 10.5 you can give Prism a try. I'll write up how to use Prism in a future post.

UPDATE (July 26): We've added a video that demonstrates how to configure LiveTimer with Fluid.

We're pleased to announce the introduction of billing rates to LiveTimer. In order to enable these new features in your account, go to the Settings Tab, then Billing, and then click Enable.

LiveTimer supports 164 currencies and allows multiple currencies per account. You can even configure the format of each currency independently, including whether cents are shown.

In keeping with the flexibility of our classification system, we also allow you to specify the level at which billing rates are used. You can track billing rates per client / project / task, per activity, or per user.

Billing rates can be named and shared, or can be uniquely assigned.

We've also added the ability to mark certain classifications as "Not Billable". For example, if you've defined billing rates for clients / projects / tasks, you can mark certain activities as "Not Billable" in order to override the billing rates.

Please note: We've got quite a few more billing-related features coming in the very near future. The first will be reports that use these billing rates, which will make these new features truly useful. Rest assured, they're right around the corner!

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:

We're proud to announce the launch of LiveTimer's new iPhone interface, which makes tracking your time effortless when you're on the go. We've optimized LiveTimer to work smoothly and responsively on iPhone, whether you're accessing the Internet using Wi-Fi or the slower EDGE network.

In order to access the iPhone-optimized site, you'll need an iPhone or iPod Touch. Open Safari and visit your account's login page (e.g. https://myaccount.livetimer.com). You may want to check the new "Remember me?" option when you login to avoid having to re-enter your user name and password. Furthermore, you may find it helpful to add a LiveTimer link to your home screen (just click the + button, and then "Add to Home Screen").

Both the Timer and Time Ledger are available in LiveTimer's iPhone-optimized interface. You can even create new classifications, such as clients, projects and tasks, as you track your time. If you want to access all of the features of LiveTimer from your iPhone, perhaps to view a time report, just click "View main site" and you'll be taken to the familiar LiveTimer interface. Another click on "View iPhone-optimized site" will take you back.

We hope you enjoy tracking your time with LiveTimer's iPhone interface.

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.