Just to prove that we’re serious about BugHerd; just 10 days after our last major update, we’re releasing another! w00t!

The two…no, make that THREE, big additions to BugHerd this week are Email Notifications, Real-time sidebar updates and the Beta release of our API. That’s a whole lot of work in the past couple of weeks. I seriously need some sleep!

Email Notifications

One of the biggest problems with BugHerd in the past was that it was impossible to know if someone had assigned you a bug, or whether someone had fixed a bug you’d reported. We’re happy to say that we’ve finally gotten around to fixing this! Now whenever a bug you’re involved in (whether you created it, or whether it is assigned to you) is modified you’ll get an update email.

We’ve tried to be a little bit smart about doing email updates. You wont receive an individual email for every update, where possible we’ll try and group things together and email you just the once. So if you have someone going through the site creating 100 bugs in 5 minutes, you’ll just get one email.

Real-Time Updates

It’s probably unusual for a company like ours to advertise third party services we use. On this occasion we are making an exception. Pusher is awesome. We started off building our own solution for pushing updates to the browser, but it turns out that Pusher have already done all the work for us. 

Using Pusher, we’re able to not only keep your sidebar up to date with new bugs and changes as they happen, but we can also update bug flags and comments. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t expect real-time commenting to work as well as it does. As a result we have a bit of work to do to improve the performance, but in the near future we expect commenting to be as good as instant messaging.

The final thing that Pusher allows us to do is to notify you of new bugs and changes on your sidebar that affect you. If you’re assigned a new bug, or if a bug that you’re involved in is updated, you’ll see a little blue dot indicating something of interest. The relevant bug will the be easily noticed as it will have a little blue triangle in the corner. In short, when changes affect you we’ll let you know about it.

All of this means that you don’t need to refresh the page to see what’s new, and you never need to go hunting for that new bug that someone assigned to you.

API

We’ve been getting hassled for ages to release our API, and it’s finally here. It’s in beta at the moment, so please use at your own risk, and if you have any questions or issues please contact us at support@bugherd.com. You can find the docs on our API here

At the moment the API will let you do some fairly common tasks like get your list of users, projects and tasks. It will also allow you to create and update projects and tasks. You can even create comments!

The API will grow as more people start using it. If you have any special requests please either shoot us an email to support@bugherd.com or drop a suggestion at http://bugherd.uservoice.com/