This was an unusual week. On Wednesday we had a film crew over at Harvest HQ all morning. We were filmed for a video customer story for Voxel, the awesome hosting company Harvest depends on. Work went on as usual, except that we had cameras following us as if we’re in a reality TV show.

Our product team made great progress this week: an important system security update will be deployed this upcoming Wednesday, the Backbone.js project I mentioned last week is going strong (hope to have a beta release this month), and we’re about to begin an exciting integration, which you’ll be hearing soon.

A week’s worth of random findings, from our Co-op stream:

• Naama found this recent interview with John Pavlus on The Setup, and he said, “I rely on an extremely well-designed webapp called Harvest for my freelance backoffice tasks like time-tracking and invoicing… Harvest is a lifesaver, well worth the small monthly fee.” Thanks for the shout-out, John!
• What was your first program? Barry is too old to remember but he had a TI-99/4A.
• Over half a million Macs infected by a virus? This got our in-house security expert, Doug, all kinds of excited.
• A handy chart of German articles from Joschka.
• A way to view source on iPhone or iPad. We’re working on a project for the touch devices right now, and this handy bookmarklet is going to be useful.
• Not sure why Lettini would think that any Harvester would need it, but he reminded us that last Friday was get-out-of-jail-free-day in Brooklyn.
• Harvest FriTunes #72: Interjections! Featuring James Brown, Lionel Richie, The Long Winters (!), and Usher (twice).
• A here’s a moment of Zen: (happy) dots, by Evan, who also provided us with the animated gif of the week.

Friday was an important day for Jonathan Lane, who checks into Harvest each day from Mayne Island, BC, Canada (if you plan to visit, he asks that you first watch this video). Jon was a happy Harvest customer, and joined our support team one year ago. These days he leads up the Fireteam and diagnose potential bugs reported by our customers. We’re lucky to have the amazing Jon on our team!

There you have it. Hope your coming week is smooth, interesting and productive. See you soon.

A couple of days ago I read this article about the newly designed #taxioftomorrow that will start appearing on New York streets in 2013. There were a lot of interesting tidbits in the article, among them, the yellow color is going to be brighter, the floor mats will be made from recycled materials, and the sound of the honk is changing. But what really struck me was the story of how Nissan, an automotive manufacturing company nearing its 80th year of operations had to learn how to behave like an agency.

For the Nissan designers every decision needed to be vetted internally and then approved by the client. Some decisions that Nissan thought would be easy approvals became lengthy discussions. One such decision was the partition between driver and rider. Wanting to embrace technology, the Nissan team pitched the idea of an intercom system. David Yassky, NYC Taxi Commissioner, didn’t approve. In addition to worrying about sound quality, Yassky shared a widely held belief by Drivers – connecting with riders generally earns them a better tip.

In my previous life at a large corporation I was always on the client side of agency interactions. Giving creative feedback was never easy, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. However, as a brand manager I knew my job was as an advocate for the customer and the company. If my feedback was focused on customer insights, it was generally well received and aided in the creative process. The story about the divider reminded me of this. It’s a great example of a client and an agency working well together. Yassky didn’t tell Nissan that he didn’t like the closed divider, he told them about his customers’ needs. In this case the drivers’ need to make human contact.

For an old product company and a bunch of city politicians, this article portrays a relatively smooth process. I can’t wait to ride in the result!

We know. We’ve been a little sparse on the blog lately. Aside from taking a needed break last week to hack, we have been busy improving Harvest. Our product folks are split into three teams: one working on a big feature that is ready for an internal alpha next week, one pushing through a couple of big system updates (the recent Ruby upgrade and an upcoming security patch), and one team dedicated to squashing bugs and improving minor interactions in Harvest. We believe in continuously improving the application – so you, the customers, can have a smoother and better experience.

One little tidbit to share about the big project we’re working on: it’s using CoffeeScript and Backbone.js, both created by our fellow NYCers. It’s going to be cool, we promise.

Now, a roundup of the curious and interesting from Co-op:

• On Monday we welcomed Harvester #22: Ryan Bright, who has a very neat home office in Lexington, KY.
• Typeconnection, “a type dating game that is more like a mating game”, said Kim.
• Sri found a cool Keyboard Maestro script that will remind you to track time on Harvest during work hours, by Matt Henderson. Awesome!
• SXSW Ball photos are up! Head fake, head fake again, and Sri’s vicious defense.
• The new Rdio tells us who’s listening to which album, and Warwick found out who amongst us is listening to the Hoff. Is there a incognito mode in Rdio for me to indulge in Rihanna?
• A bunch of us are switching over to Sublime Text 2 and loving it.
• From Lettini: Flipboard designer decided to make a physical book out of all the design mock-ups for their new iPhone app. Guess what? It’s a thick and heavy book.
• Jon shared this beautiful iPad app called Paper, which lets you make beautiful (digital and weightless) sketch books.
• Oh, we had our first dodgeball game of the season and we won!
• Uh oh, @apttherapy editorial staff learned that animated gifs work in Co-op… and yes, we know what that means.

There you have it. We had another fun, interesting and rewarding week. Looking forward to the next! Talk to you soon.

This past week was our first Harvest Hack Week of 2012. Our team took three days off from the normal project schedule to hack on side projects and experiment with new technology. On Friday, we had a one-and-a-half hour presentation on the projects: two mobile web apps using Backbone.js, one Rdio integration, a Chrome extension, an embeddable JS tool, and an experiment with our system logs and stats. We also had a few people who took the opportunity to learn programming on Code Academy.

We’re super excited about the Hack Week projects! In the coming weeks, some of these will be released to the public, some will be in open source form, and some will become “core” projects (as in, made into the Harvest application). We will share some of the lessons learned on Tech Time, our recently released engineering blog.

In between the hacking and fixing small bugs from the recent big Ruby upgrade (for a faster, more stable and secured Harvest), we bantered on Co-op:

• Monday, we welcomed Evan to the team, who quickly won us over with a picture of an adorable Jack Russell Terrier.
• The Great Discontent, an online journal of interviews with “the mad ones“. Thanks, Sri.
• “Together” vs “Multiplayer”, a great article about language in design, via Lettini.
• A message from T.J. at 12:30am: “Want some nice white noise to go to sleep? Just drop a `rbenv install 1.9.3-p125` and LISTEN TO THOSE FANS GO WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR” We had some trouble with Pow and rvm after the Ruby upgrade, and we’re now using rbenv.
• It was Danny’s birthday and Doug built a little prank for him.
• There’s now a way to replace Gmail’s confusing icons with text. Patrick is very excited about this and has updated his original blog post.
• Awesome watercolor maps by the awesome Stamen.
• We played some hoops during lunch hours, after the Hack Week presentations. We didn’t have any trouble high fiving.

There you have it. We’ve had an exhilarating and productive week at Harvest! See you next week.

March Madness is upon us and we made a special Rdio playlist to go with it!

This week, a bunch of Harvesters travelled back from SXSW, and we have a few more cool comic strips to share with you (by our designer, Kim Ku). Barry, T.J. and Warwick have been working hard to prepare for the big Ruby upgrade this Saturday. Oh, and Harvest for Mac is now the number 1 top free app (in the Business category) in the Apple App Store, and received a 9/10 review on AppStorm!

A roundup of Co-op musings from the past week:

• We all enjoyed reading the awesome new Harvest customer stories from Kiva, Mutual Mobile, NodeOne, and Two Toasters.
• We received some customer love: a letter from Elite Web Labs, 25 months, 982.74 hours billed, 0 complaints!
• Naama found these amusing tiny, space-saving fonts and Warwick shared this cool webfont + JS to make sparklines.
• The Browser You Loved To Hate, via Karen. It caught our attention, but we still feel the same about IE as officer cupcake does.
• I wrote about Oink last December (3 months ago) and this week it was announced that it’s being shut down.  The team there is moving on to Google.
• Ok. Go. Do. Thanks, Scott.
• We’ll conclude with this adorable animated gif of Elmo. You know you love it.

There you have it. Another productive and crazy week at Harvest. Have a great weekend and see you next week!

A bunch of Harvesters left for SXSW this Thursday. Our very own Kim has promised to keep us updated with some comics (more to come). If you happen to be in Austin, TX – come meet the Harvest Team!

This past week, we launched the vastly improved projects section for the newly designed user profile and upgraded Co-op and the Harvest Forum to Ruby 1.9.3 (Harvest, coming next week).

Gleaned from Co-op from the past five days:

• Quick Brown Fox in different languages. Nice find, T.J.
• Christopher shared this video on the history of Keep Calm and Carry On. Did you know that Harvest has its own version of a Keep Calm poster?
• Doug sent us some (very fresh) venison and antelope meat from Montana, and Jae made us a big pot of delicious Guinness Stew with the game meat.
• “Pretty fascinating to see which applications are alive on the network by default when your Mac boots using Little Snitch,” observed Warwick.
• History and early sketches of Yelp logo, by Sri.
• Barry is excited that his beloved Timberwolves are sitting pretty at #8 in the Western Conference. Can they keep it up? Is there a better power forward than Kevin Love right now?

That wraps up another productive and fun week at Harvest. See you next week!

A bunch of us will be heading down to Austin again this year for SXSW, and we’d love to see you! RSVP to Meet The Team for coffee on Sunday, March 11 – we can’t wait to catch you!

FYI: Meet the Harvest Team is listed on Sched.org, if you’re using them to organize all of your RSVPs to official and unofficial events at SXSW.

Another week has come and gone here at Harvest. You thought time tracking couldn’t get any easier? On Tuesday, we took things to a whole new level by kicking off our Harvest Everywhere endeavors with the launch of Harvest for Mac. In addition, we’re also excited about two new integrations: ScrumDo and ZenCash.

Twitter was abuzz this week with a lot of excitement about Harvest for Mac. Here are just a few of the notably excited customers:

@awelfle – @harvest Especially with the new Mac App — I’ve been super accurate with being able to use hotkeys!

@peaker – The new @harvest desktop time tracker for Mac is super handy. Forgetting to stop the timer is so yesterday.

@chrismackintosh – Man I love the new Harvest timer on Mac: getharvest.com/mac *LOVE

@jensimmons – I’m loving the new @harvest app for the Mac. No more keeping a tab in my browser for timers. Toolbar reminds me I’m billing. It is faster.

@sahadeva Finally time tracking software that I will actually use: getharvest.com/mac (nav bar widget is awesome).

Otherwise, things went normally. We designed, we developed. And of course, we shared some valuable things with each other through Co-op and elsewhere:

• Joschka attended Hack ‘N Tell and learned about a new useful site called NYCinema, which uses our homegrown Chosen.
• Our office acquired a set of Siftables, computerized tiles that let you make a game out of words, math, music, and more. We’re excited to try them out.
• Shawn is excited about the new Windows 8 design, and sent it around on Co-op.
• Karen gave us all this gem of knowledge on how tracking your time keeps you honest and makes you #workbetter.
• Barry and Patrick made sure we got our fill of song remixes. Barry shared this computer remix of House of the Rising Sun, and Patrick sent along this Radiohead and David Brubeck mashup. Check ‘em out!

Until next time!

Just like that and we’re two months into 2012 (which I’m still referring to as the new year — is it time to stop that?). This past week, we released the new password section in user profiles, and we’re just about done with a brand new, interactive projects section. It’s a little behind schedule; here’s a great analogy on Quora that might help explain why that might be (we should mention that we’ve made it past Santa Barbara and we’re just a few miles away from LA proper – but you know, the traffic can be bad on Route 1). We’re also getting ready to release two exciting projects, both are done on our end, and just waiting for some feedback from others. One is the new and amazing Harvest widget for Zendesk. The other project looks something like this:

As usual, a round up of things Harvesters shared on Co-op and elsewhere:

• Danny registered Harvest for SXSW Ball! Looks like we will be against Gilt City in the first round.
• Barry found some music that would, supposedly, enhance your productivity while programming (we cannot guarantee success!).
• Our intern Joschka presented the new ticker he built (scroll down to the middle) at NYC.js. Yes, the ticker is completely CSS3 and using no graphics, (open source available soon).
• Design vs marketing, via Lettini.
• Our favorite alt text of the week: “divider lines are awesome”. Nice one, New Relic.
• Jon came across this Quora thread about best startup community managers. Our very own Karen made the short list. Take a bow, Karen!
• And lastly, something for you to think about: Design-time Versus Meeting-time. #workbetter

That wraps up another productive and fun week at Harvest. Enjoy the weekend!

Welcome to our weekly peek behind the curtain with Harvest Playback!

This week found the team a little under the weather, with Harvesters both local and remote falling victim to seasonal maladies of one sort or another. In hopes of making everyone feel a little better (sick or not) I made some cookies that went over pretty well. After being accused of “just trying to fatten everyone up,” I decided to take the healthier route and brought in some home-made kale chips on Wedensday. Don’t forget, folks. Eat more kale.

We spent the week gearing up to roll out the next phase of our new user profile page – coming next week! Additionally, Joschka made his first deploy as a Harvester. Check out the work he did on our updated Careers page (and see if you can find the secret link!).

Now for the fun stuff:

• This week’s Harvest Rdio Playlist is focused on the family.
• Linked from our #workbetter series on Twitter, we spent a little time thinking about manifestos of all sorts…
• We’re stunned and amazed by the rise of Jeremy Lin as Linsanity takes over New York City.
• Samara brought us more cuteness than we could stand.
• Television we enjoy is often the subject of lunchtime conversation here at HQ, and in addition to the current obsession with Downton Abbey, we’ve started watching (and loving!) Sherlock. And we can hardly wait for the return of Mad Men on March 25…
• Quick support note: Harvest will be closed this upcoming Monday, February 20 for Washington’s Birthday/Family Day. We’ll be back in action Tuesday after spending a little time honoring GW or just spending it with our families. See you next week!