Tails Beta Testing

I had recently been looking for a good bug tracker, in the run up to working on a couple code projects, a freelance e-commerce project, and a couple other miscellaneous projects. And while I've used trac and bugzilla before, and heard good things about collaboa, I'm really not all that terribly interested in bugtrackers, and as a result have very little interest in actually administering one. I'm lazy, and would much rather be looking up information on other things (like cocoa, which I've recently become interested in), rather than digging through bugtracker manuals.

Turns out, just through my random wanderings through the interweb, a casual acquaintance of mine from a message board I frequent fortuitously happened to be in the final stages prior to a beta launch of a bugtracker his company was building. So, as a result, I managed to get into the initial beta test of Tails, which purports (and seems to live up to) effortless bug tracking.

First things first. Tails is a hosted app. This is good for someone like me, who's not interested in having to deal with all the administrivia of setting up a bug tracker, and probably bad for people who are total (read: needless) control freaks, or extremely paranoid with their data. But, hosted applications aren't a new development, and given that Dan, the guy working on the app, is a good guy, I don't have any serious qualms with using Tails (more on privacy later). The picts below come from Dan's flickr account, and it might be handy to check out the notes that go with each image there.

Tails, being a bug tracker, does all the things that you'd want it to do, you can create projects, file bugs, request features, assign bugs to particular project members, etc., etc., etc. So now that we know it actually is a bug tracker, what's neat about it? Well, in terms of cool things for a linguistics/categorization geek, like me, it allows you to tag features/bugs/projects/the like. Now, before you cram any lead pipes down my throat for uttering a web 2.0 buzzword, remember that this is a good use of keyword searching. Since I (or you) control who's got access to a project, and who's tagging bugs, you don't get the collective cognitive dissonance that site-wide flickr searches produce, because you don't have people who are trying to whore their bug reports to as many people as possible.

Now, on privacy. Your tails projects can be set to either public or private. So, in private mode, really you've got full control over who can see your private information (however much you'd like to put up into tails), and of course in public mode, anyone on the site can see your stuff. That said, there is no public index of projects at this stage, and i'm not sure one is to come. So, Tails still serves as a personal bugtracker, and nobody else will find it (or stumble across other people's random projects) unless you want them to, even if you keep your projects set to public. In either mode, you can invite guests to your project to come, tool around, report bugs, request features, again, all the normal bug tracking things. Guests also don't count as users, in terms of the level of account you have. And accounts come in 4 flavors; Free, Basic, Pro, Unlimited. (seen below)

What screen shots don't illustrate is the usability of the site. Why is that? Because it's got a lot of dynamic interaction. Most text and options related to your project is easily editable via a JS/ajax interface. Click, an overlay will popup (see below) and you're ready to go (and what's better, all editable items give you indications that they are editable). This is the thing that's really great about the site. It's hosted, but it's also lovely to simply use.

So, what's the final verdict? For me? Definitely. It serves all the purposes that I have for it, as a small/lone developer, and hands me some functionality that I wouldn't otherwise have. Finally I don't have to worry about maintaining it, and because it is a commercial project (thankfully that also has free accounts), I'm not terribly concerned about suddenly being left holding the bag, having to support my own bug tracker.