About Periscope

You know how sometimes you just can’t find that one thing on the internet that solves the problem you have? Well, that’s the basic genesis of Periscope. I really needed (and wanted) a simple way to punch-in to a project I was busy on; work; then punch-out and write a quick description of what I did. It’s really important to me to charge my clients by the minute: who wants to be charged 1hr of my time for a small copy change that really only took me 4 minutes to do?

Enter Periscope. I’d been using Project Recon for a while, and it’s a great little system tray app (if you have Windows: I run it under Fusion on my Mac Pro) but I really wanted something different. Why do I have to have Windows to be able to punch in and out just for tracking time with Basecamp? With Periscope, I don’t. I just need a browser and iGoogle, and I’m set! It’s also faster than logging in to the Basecamp site just to see what the latest activity is site wide, but also per project. I mean, you can certainly do RSS for each project, but that gets a little hard to manage.

I created Periscope for myself, for tracking my own time. But now, since it is useful to me, I think it might just be useful to the community as well. I plan on growing this little gadget into something worthwhile for all of us, and I plan on having fun doing it. Big plans and big features are ahead, but I also want to hear from the users and incorporate as much feedback as possible into the gadget.