announcements

Request Tracker 4 released!

Here are some major technology news – Request Tracker 4 is released! For those of you not in the know, Request Tracker is an open source ticketing system developed by the company called Best Practical Solutions LLC. Request Tracker, or RT for short, is one of the most flexible pieces of software I’ve seen in my life. It’s also an excellent example of software design and architecture for those who are into that. I’ve used Request Tracker 3, the previous version, for anything from personal task and document management through to a large installation with a 100+ concurrent users and a 1,000,000+ tickets database.

New features in version 4, according the website, include the following:

Lifecycles
Mobile device interface
Branding and theme editor
Quote-folding in replies and comments
Articles integration based on RTFM
Easy full text search
Autocomplete of owners and requestors
Better HTML mail display
Easier and more efficient navigation menus
Refreshed ticket create and update pages
IP and Date/DateTime custom fields
Dropdown and radio list custom field display types
Finer-grain ticket-level control of notifications
Much improved rights management UI
Loads of performance improvements and bug fixes

Continue reading for the full text of the email sent to rt-announce mailing list.

Continue reading Request Tracker 4 released!

Switch to Gmail

Gmail blog announces Switch To Gmail – a new website that should assist all those who haven’t switched yet. On to of that they added email migration support for another 14 domains – mostly Asian Hotmail, Live, and Yahoo sites.

This announcement is surprisingly close to the recent accusation of Chinese government interference:

“This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” a Google spokesperson said.

Discussions in Google Docs

Google introduced discussions in Google Docs. A very useful feature, no doubt.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zmOYziFKZw]

After seeing a social network implemented within Dropbox, I wonder how much time it will take to turn this feature into the next Twitter. Or Facebook.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Here comes yet another product from Automattic and WordPress.com team – Jetpack.

This is a WordPress plugin that brings WordPress.com goodies to your self-hosted WordPress site. The project is starting off with just a few, most requested, bits of functionality, but according to this blog post more is coming.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, LaTeX. We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

Foursquare releases version 3

Foursquare – an awesome location services that I use way more than I should – announces the release of Version 3. They have a lengthy blog post explaining their reasons, goals, and changes. And I have to say that it’s exciting. I was slightly worried that they might give up given the Google Latitude check-ins competition, but apparently they are not. Good for them! Anyways, my phone still runs Android 2.1, so the newer Latitude is not available to me. But the new Foursquare is. And there is plenty of new fun, including leaderboards and Explore.