Bee v1.5. This is the biggest release so far! Here’s a run-through of some of the new things that Bee does to make you more productive at work.

Custom Notifications

One of Bee’s most popular features are the notifications that are displayed whenever your teammates conduct activity on your issue tracker. Now you can customise exactly which notifications you see.

Just open the Preferences window (Command-,) and construct rules to filter out any unwanted notifications.

JIRA Issue Links and FogBugz Related Cases

I’m pleased to say that these frequently requested features are now available.

If you’re using JIRA, you can now create, edit and delete issue links. Epic links are also enhanced allowing you to click through to view the epic, as well as add and remove issues from the epic itself.

If you’re using FogBugz, you can now view all the related cases and easily click-through to them. You can also view other emails that the current sender has sent you.

A smaller enhancement that makes all the difference is that item windows open in a cascaded fashion. This makes its a lot nicer when you’re navigating through a handful of linked issues.

Here’s a short clip demonstrating issue links:

GitHub Task Lists, Issue Autocomplete and Commit Comments

Support for Task Lists is now available. Clicking on a checkbox does what you’d expect and updates the issue accordingly.

Typing ‘#’ in the body field or in the comment box now gives you an autocomplete menu so you can easily reference other issues.

And comments on commits are now shown along with the other usual events and comments.

Smart Pause

Smart Pause will pause your active task after you’ve left your Mac idle for a configurable length of time. ‘Idle’ in this case means no keyboard or mouse input.

The cool thing is, Smart Pause will also backdate your current worklog to the time before you left your Mac and send that worklog to your server. When you return to your Mac and start interacting with it again, Smart Pause will automatically being timing on the task you left it on.

Smart Pause is fully configurable via the Preferences window (Command-,) and is disabled by default.

Notes in Markdown

And one more thing! Your Notes list is now automatically highlighted in Markdown as you type:

Next Up

All of these features were requested by you.

To send feedback whether it be feature requests or bug reports - just go to the Help menu and click ‘Send Feedback’.

Work is already well underway for the next release which will include performance enhancements as well as more Smart List rules.

This was a quick run-through of some of the bigger features in v1.5. For a more thorough breakdown, take a look at the Bee release notes which detail the extent of the changes.

Tuesday March 18, 2014