2007 / April 3^rd/ Lighthouse: The bug tracker you’ve been looking for

Two of my most respected developers out there, Rick Olson and Justin Palmer have decided to take their little project Lighthouse and bring it into the wild. To me, this is one of those apps I couldn’t wait to play around with. From the day i heard Rick talking about this on IRC — to the day I saw ActiveReload form, I knew it was going to be something awesome.

A little about ActiveReload

ActiveReload (AR) is a play on word for those of you without much Rails experience — based on the ActiveR components of Rails: ActiveRecord, ActiveResource, etc off ActiveReload from Gears of War. It’s a compilation of two rockstars in the Rails world. First up, we’ve got Rick — Rails core team member, creator of Rails Weenie, co-creator of Beast and more projects than you can shake a stick at. Second up on plate, we’ve got Justin — Prototype (javascript library) core team member, author of Encytemedia and Shopify fame. Together they built and released Mephisto, which is quick becoming the premier Ruby on Rails publishing system.

Needless to say, these guys rock pretty hardcore. They’re serial inventors at heart with a passion for great design and fantastic code. They’re constantly playing around with new projects, helping out the OSS community, and tinkering with code. Who else do you know would try to script Photoshop with Ruby or release over 30 plugins for an open source framework that he has commit access to?

On to the Lighthouse

What is Lighthouse? It’s a light, hosted bug tracking system. But it’s not similar to it’s feature-creepalicious cousins like JIRA (which I happen to use every day). It’s simple. It’s lightweight. It’s timeline based, and cuts down on features to cut down on confusion. It’s got features that don’t clutter up the interface, but provide time-saving functionality. It’s got email integration and RSS feeds.

Overview of features

• Projects: You can have many projects underneath your account. The number of projects you can have depends on the plan you sign up for.
• Tickets: Create, Assign, Resolve, etc.
• Messages: Messages are lightweight little notifications for your project. They show up in the timeline and are great for getting everyone on the project on track. For instance, you can send out a message: “Remember, we’re still targeting the 23rd for launch!”
• Milestones: You can associate each ticket with a milestone. The next milestone is usually shown in the upper right hand corner with a nice progress bar to keep you on track with how many outstanding tickets there are left. See screenshot below for more information.
• Pages: Pages are static pages that appear on the sidebar that you can add information to. These are great ways to add information about the project — such as development & staging server urls.

Here’s a few screens of the wonderful interface:

Dashboard

Create a ticket

Milestones

To get a handle on the interface for yourself, check out the Lighthouse bug tracker.

Using Lighthouse without using Lighthouse

One of my favorite features of Lighthouse is the ability to use it without going through the interface. Bug tracking systems are always so burdensome to clients. Working with JIRA is a pain every day because of this — clients get the emails they get from JIRA constantly confused with the actual tickets. To make things worse, the emails sent from JIRA aren’t even from real email addresses.

Not so with Lighthouse. If you want to update a ticket from the email it sends you to notify you of an update, you just reply to the email. Here’s a sample email for an example:

// Add your reply here ==================================================
Justin updated this ticket at March 09, 2007 22:50
Status: open
Milestone: Post Launch
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about hotifying them soon. I’m probably gonna associate color badges with the status similar to OS X.
——————————————————————————–

View this ticket online: http://activereload.lighthouseapp.com/projects/44/tickets/92-select-hotness-for-all-ticket-options.
Stop being notified of this ticket’s changes: http://activereload.lighthouseapp.com/projects/44/tickets/92-select-hotness-for-all-ticket-options;watch
Update your Profile: http://activereload.lighthouseapp.com/profile

Notice the “Add your reply here” bit? Just type in some text, hit reply and it’ll show up as a message for the ticket. Extremely useful for the blackberry users of the world who want to update a ticket on-the-go. To me, this is massive. It lowers the barrier to entry to a point almost everyone can understand — email.

Conclusion

All in all, Lighthouse is just an app that does one thing really well: bug tracking. I know the developers behind this are going to make it even more awesome than I can imagine — so go ahead and sign up for one of the most useful applications for any developer. Bug lists help keep your project on task, and act as a project manager for you so you don’t have to keep three dozen stickies around you at all times. I do think the low-end pricing (for those with light bug needs) is a bit much right now, but I’m sure they’ll be tweaking it as time goes on.

Get started with Lighthouse All accounts come with a free 30-day trial, so there’s nothing to lose.

Like this article? digg it for some good karma

1. 

   labrat

   April 3^rd | #

   That design is absolutely gorgeous but with this team you know the source code is just as well written too!

2. 

   Ben

   April 4^th | #

   Erm, apart from the fact that their pricing is directly in opposition with Basecamp, and therefore offers nothing more in a competitive market, the internal design is broken in Safari and the login form has at least two usability gaffs which turned me right off:

   1. How many timezones do we need? There are only 20 odd in the world, yet hundreds of options in the drop down.
   2. The TandC’s leads to a seperate page, losing form data.
3. 

   Ian Halliday

   April 4^th | #

   Being able to reply to Lighthouse’s emails is just plain awesome! That’s the one thing that is a real pain about Basecamp. I often find that clients either try replying to the Basecamp messages or instead send disjointed emails to me rather than log into Basecamp to post messages, which I can’t really blame them for. I keep it open in my browser all the time, where in most cases a client needs to open their browser an log in.

   I’m going to have to sit down pretty soon and re-evaluate my situation and look at all the products out there for project management and bug tracking.

4. 

   Craig

   April 4^th | #

   snooze

   Let us know when it’s more than just a facelift of trac (not to mention hosted and with fewer features).

5. 

   barny

   April 4^th | #

   There’s already one Lighthouse bug tracker out there: http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org/

6. 

   Justin Palmer

   April 4^th | #

   Thanks for the write up Kyle! A couple corrections–ActiveReload isn’t a spin off the Rails stuff, it’s a spin off Gears of War’s active reload feature. Also, I didn’t really co-found Shopify. I helped them get their company started and was on Shopify from the beginning, but I really have no stake in the company.

   Ben: LH works fine in Safari. On your problems with the sign up form, both are valid and both of them will be fixed by our army of ninjas asap.

   As far as it offers nothing more, different strokes for different folks, but we’re not in the business of competing on more features. We’ll add in the features that are needed to meet the needs of our goals with Lighthouse and that help us get the job done. Basecamp does what it does just fine, we’re not looking to do what it does.

   Thanks for the comments.

7. 

   Kyle

   April 4^th | #

   Thanks Justin, I updated my entry up top.

   And for the record, I find a lot of value in Lighthouse. I think systems like Trac have their place, but they most certainly can’t be compared to Lighthouse. Plus, the trial is free for 30-days… what’s the hold up? Worst case is you lose $0.

8. 

   links for 2007-04-04 at Baron VC

   April 4^th | #

   [...] Lighthouse: The bug tracker you’ve been looking for This one really rocks. (tags: design programming bugs) [...]

9. 

   Craig

   April 4^th | #

   I think systems like Trac have their place, but they most certainly can’t be compared to Lighthouse.

   Why not? It matches your description of Lighthouse exactly.

   Plus, the trial is free for 30-days… what’s the hold up? Worst case is you lose $0.

   The worst case scenario is I lose my data. This is often the leverage hosting companies use when I want to leave.

10. 

    Kyle

    April 4^th | #

    Trac is used primarily as a GUI for source control, with a basic wiki and bug tracking system attached. It’s not the same thing at all.

    Also keep in mind that while Trac is “free” it is banned on almost all shared hosting environments due to the extremely high load caused by the software. You’re going to need a hell of a lot more than $10/month in server costs to run Trac from my experience.

11. 

    Craig

    April 5^th | #

    Trac is used primarily as a GUI for source control, with a basic wiki and bug tracking system attached. It’s not the same thing at all.

    If you look and read, you’ll find that the primary function of Trac is issue tracking and project management.

    You’re going to need a hell of a lot more than $10/month in server costs to run Trac from my experience.

    Hosting is free as well, and not just for OSS (see – http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/CommercialServices). DevjaVu.com even has ninjas! ;)

    There are also commercial options that I didn’t bother to investigate.

    Craig

12. 

    Jed Wesley-Smith

    April 13^th | #

    cool, nice and clean interface.

    dude though, if you can’t respond to JIRA’s emails you haven’t got it set up properly. JIRA has had email comment, issue and attachment creation capability from way back (I found the POPService in the first JIRA cvs check-in back in 2002) and it has supported IMAP as well for a few years: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1862

13. 

    Kalinikos

    January 2^nd | #

    Cool…

14. 

    Lighthouse: The bug tracker you#39;ve been looking for – Warpspire « Site Super Tracker

    January 31^st | #

    [...] Today found this great post, here is a quick excerpt : snooze. Let us know when it’s more than just a facelift of trac (not to mention hosted and with fewer features). Gravatar. barny. April 4th | #. There’s already one Lighthouse bug tracker out there: http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org/ … Read the rest of this great post Here [...]

Name

Email (will not be published)

Website (optional)