This update has been in the works for a lot longer than I would have liked, buried under a bunch of higher priority projects. However, I finally found enough spare time to clear the backlog of feature requests and publish a really significant update to my popular FNN plug-in for FogBugz, a project management tool for software development. Thanks to everyone who submitted bug or feature reports.
Where can I get it?
If you are hosting your own install of FogBugz, you can download the new version immediately from the FNN page on the FogBugz PlugIn Gallery.
For those of you using FogBugz On Demand, it will be a bit longer before you can get your hands on it. It has to go through an extended Fog Creek plug-in approval process and be scheduled for inclusion the next available maintenance cycle. If all goes well, it should make it up to the FBOD site in the next month or so. I’ll update the status in this blog post as things progress.
What’s New?
Despite the minor tick on the version number (1.1.6 -> 1.2.1), there is really quite a bit in the new version, so I encourage you to check it out if you are a FogBugz user.
New Feature: Activity Report
One of the most requested features for the next update of FNN was to enable the specification of a custom date range on the Recent Events Report in addition to the current functionality of showing the last X events that met the other filter critera. I considered adding a toggle, but it just looked too cluttered in all my prototypes, so I decided to split this off as a separate report, the Activity Report, which is now also available from the Extras menu in FogBugz.
New Feature: Subscriptions Report (and Management Tool)
This screen is also new to FNN, and is used to get an overview of who is subscribing to various items (Cases, Wiki Articles, Discussion Topics). Like the other reporting screens it can also be filtered by person and/or project. You can also remove a subscription from this screen for items where you are the subscriber or you are a site admin.
New Feature: Auto-Updating Recent Events Report
The popular Recent Events Report has a new feature that was requested by someone on the Fog Creek team at the StackOverflow Dev Days event in Austin last year. By checking the new “Auto-Update” checkbox on the report, it will give you a live feed of the what is going on in your FogBugz database. New updates will be inserted at the top of the report roughly every 5 seconds so you are always looking at the most recent X items, without having to continually refresh. Perfect for the micro-manager in all of us, right?
I also made some other minor tweaks to this screen, including:
Feature-ette: You can now display up to the last 1,000 most recent items instead of the paltry 100 allowed by the old version.
Tweak: The description column was empty more often than I liked, so I made it fall back on another location to fill this column if the primary source was blank.
Fix: There were a few scenarios when cases would not be displayed on this screen, when indeed they should have.
What does it cost?
Nada. It’s still freeware. I haven’t attached any licensing terms to it yet, but am okay with you doing whatever you want with it so long as you don’t steal my work and claim it as your own. I developed this and the other plugins mentioned on this site principally for my own use as a FogBugz user, but didn’t want to Bogart these useful utilities all to myself.
Also, since some have asked. It’s not open source at this time. I’m considering it, but want to sheppard it along a little longer on my own before I let other cooks in the kitchen.
Feedback is Appreciated
If you have any complaints, comments, ideas, etc., please either drop me a line using the e-mail link next to the plug-in on the FogBugz PlugIns Admin Page, or just throw a comment up on this post. I also follow the FogBugz StackExchange site semi-regularly, so you can also post ideas/comments there if you want to give other users a chance to vote on them or add to them. Now that the backlog is almost empty on this project, I should be able to get to new requests pretty quickly.
Improving Software 
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