Ok so there weren’t all that many rumors, but we have been away (from this blog) for a long time – and a lot has happened.

For one, Scott, Jesse, and I spent a month working/playing in Mexico with our families. We rented a house right on the beach and it was a blast. Some days it was hard to get into doing work but we were able to participate in daily scrum calls and work more or less by our own schedules.

Ben, Scott, & Jesse at Chichen Itza, Mexico

So we were in Mexico, we’ve been back for a couple months, what’s all this work we’ve been doing? Here’s a rundown:

We engaged with SMBLive last year to create CloudProfile. Along the way, SMBLive and thus, CloudProfile was purchased by ReachLocal. Jesse, Scott and I are a big part of their team and are helping to grow the Reach Local Digital Presence team here in Minneapolis. If you are an experienced Java/Grails or mobile (iPhone/Android) developer you should really hit us up for details.

Luke Francl and I just wrapped the latest MinneBar (un) conference held at the Best Buy corporate campus on May 22nd. We had nearly 1000 participants sign up and more than 600 came through the doors. At the event we announced the results of the first MinneSpark grant competition where 3 winners were awarded $2000 cash and nearly $4000 in services for their compelling ideas.

We continue the work on our two products under development. The idea management application, , is set to come out of beta next month with a few enhancements, with a bigger update this fall.

And then there is . We have a very significant update coming very soon as we roll our agile project tracking application out of “beta” as well. With a complete overhaul to the interface and dozens of improvements we are excited to see what people think. We still like using it more than any other tool we’ve seen out there.

And last but not least, Refactr has hired two new software engineers: Spencer Hartberg and Steve Vlaminck. If that last one sounds familiar, well, you’ll know why when you see him. We’ll have more formal introductions in subsequent posts. We still may have additional opportunities for an up and coming mobile developer and designer with client-side development chops.

We are always developing web applications for clients or for ourselves – and sometimes some sort of combination of the two as we are doing with SMBLive and the CloudProfile platform we have been working on much of the year. It has been great but the work has afforded us precious little time to devote to Lean-to, our project tracking application, and a little something new on which we have been working.

So when Jesse asked if I was planning to bring the Wii into the office during the traditionally slow time week between Christmas and New Year’s I didn’t even pause before I said, “If I can get free to play Wii I would rather use that time to work on Lean-to or MileMarker” an innovation management app debuting today. And it was true we love building web apps and we hope that love comes through in the interactions, features, and concepts of our products.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to highlight some of the features of MileMarker and the improvements being made to Lean-to. Maybe we’ll even be able to throw in some of the exciting news on the CloudProfile front such as a partnership with a Minnesota-based electronics retailer.

Our labor of love, the simpler project management tool, Lean-to got some new features this week. Scott, Jesse, and I as well as the rest of our growing team are excited to announce several new additions (and some important subtractions) to our favorite web-based software product:

• You can now attach files (images, pdfs, docs) to stories and bugs

• Stories and Bugs now have unique numbers that can be used for reference
• There are now more ways you can view your stories/bugs: From the Plan or Backlog views click “View only this iteration”.
• Burn up report now can show backlog stories and bugs or just those on plan
• You can now search within a project (plan and backlog) for stories and bugs

We also fixed a number of things that annoyed us (and probably you):

• Iteration boxes on backlog now allow you to click through to just see items in that iteration
• The UI has been modified to emphasize the project name and options and clean up interface as well as to demphasized the Lean-to branding.
• We cleaned up several workflow and interface issues
• We cleaned up some character issues in form fields

While these are the highlights there is even more to explore. And, shhhhh, don’t tell anyone but we have more on the way very soon!

Please let us know your feedback and share your stories of how you are using Lean-to. Oh, and by the way, we left one bug in there. Let us know if you can find it.

Lean-to is live! We haven’t done a great job of keeping the work we have been doing under wraps but we haven’t been promoting it either. Since we gave a demo of our agile project tracking application, Lean-to, at minnebar in May, we have been adding features and tweaking it until we were ready to start talking about it.

We wanted to let everyone know that we have pushed out some significant updates to Lean-to that we hope will get people excited. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Add people to your account and manage settings
• View plan and backlog views for your stories/bugs
• Track team progress with report views
• Get more info on list views with new context menus
• Add tests to stories in improved ways
• Assign stories or bugs to iterations from the backlog view
• Filter lists to show only those stories or bugs assigned to you
• More invite and project options
• Various interface improvements

We hope that you enjoy the new changes in this release and we ask that you don’t hesitate to use the feedback link to let us know what you like and don’t like about Lean-to.  We’ve got lots more on our own backlog, but we’d love to hear what you want from Lean-to.

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