Limelight v0.3

David — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:27:41 +0000

Here’s a new version of the Limelight app! The name is now changed, and it has a new icon.

In terms of functionality, I’ve updated the API requests to grab all the tickets for a project, instead of just the first ‘page’:

Limelight version 0.3

Lighthouse Keeper is now called Limelight!

David — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:29:29 +0000

As stated in the update on my previous blog post, there is already a Lighthouse-related app called Lighthouse Keeper. Bummer.

Still, not to worry. To avoid confusion and general awkwardness, I’m going to change the name of the app to Limelight. I’m pretty sure that there are no existing apps in the same domain with that name. Pretty sure. Not 100%. So if there are any app developers out there developing a Lighthouse app called Limelight… I’m sorry in advance. Hopefully I’ll be ok this time though.

I’m going to release a new version of the app with the changed name in the next couple of days.

Introducing: Lighthouse Keeper

David — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:58:13 +0000

Update: Oops! It looks like there is already a Lighthouse-related app called Lighthouse Keeper (it can be found here). Future versions of my app will have a different name to avoid confusion.

Lighthouse is a lightweight hosted bug-tracker produced by entp. It’s advertised as “Beautifully Simple Issue Tracking”.

Lighthouse Keeper is a small AIR app produced by me. It allows you to export Lighthouse ticket info to a csv file.

Background

I learned about the existence of Lighthouse earlier this week at a job interview. I’ve used a couple of bug-trackers before, but Lighthouse had never appeared on my radar. The two guys interviewing me got into a spirited conversation with each other about the various pros and cons of different bug tracking solutions, but Lighthouse in particular. One of their comments was

I wish there was a way to export my tickets as a csv file.

Maybe someone will come up with something using the API.

That’s a challenge if I’ve ever heard one.

Implementation

I’m a big fan of Flash/Flex, so I set to work that evening on a small app that would grab Lighthouse projects for a given domain then allow you to perform searches on the tickets in an individual project and export the results. Fortunately, flex is designed around tasks just like this.

Lighthouse has a fairly comprehensive REST API available for developers. Using either your regular login info or a generated API key, you have access to (as far as I can tell) all of the functionality you get from the regular web interface.

Thanks to this, retrieving data from the API was achieved in less than an hour, and then the rest of the time (about 6 more hours) was spent wrangling it and tweaking the interface.

The current incarnation is still very much an experimental product, but I want to release it to let people (and prospective employers) test it out and see what they think.

Download

So, without further ado, here it is:

Lighthouse Keeper version 0.1