In the current version of Sifter, the status bar does a great job of communicating and reminding you of the status, but it overwhelms the other significant attributes.

Now that we've been using Sifter in the wild for well over a year in addition to receiving tons of feedback during that time, we've really been able to develop a clearer vision for what Sifter should look like and how it should work. As a result, we've been able to be much more thoughtful about how it all fits together.

The devil is in the details. It's a bit overused and certainly clichéd, but it summarizes a valuable truth when designing. Now that we've sorted through some of our information architecture challenges, I wanted to really look at our new designs and question the value of every pixel to edit the interface down to it's simplest necessary elements.

We've got a lot of things going on, and while there haven't been any major updates since the visual refresh and OpenID, the next few months should be big.

One of the most common questions and points of confusion about Sifter is comparing it to a help desk. While there is some overlap between help desks and bug tracking, they have some very important differences.

We recently released an update to Sifter that included search, and despite the deceptively simple name of "search", it's actually a fairly complex feature. I wanted to run through everything involved in getting search up and running. This was written...

For those of you who use Fluid to create site specific browsers for your web apps, we've finally created a high quality icon for you to use with Sifter. When we set out to create the original icon, we intentionally...

It's a side table, but when opened, the top still serves as a shelf so that you don't lose the horizontal table space. Most tables would just have a top that opens. This table on the other hand, not only...

It's been a while since sharing about how I planned on creating links between issues, and things have progressed quite nicely. Recently, though, I got the idea to add a strikethrough when the target issue has already been closed. I...

After coming up with a new name and spending some quality time trading ideas with the wonderful Jared Christensen, we've made another big step towards launching the issue tracker. Everybody. Meet Sifter.

Last year, I did a presentation about the issue tracker at Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas, TX. This morning, I went though, made some updates, and added audio to the presentation for anyone who's interested. It's basically a quick peak...

It's always fun building a company piece by piece, and this time around it was even more enjoyable to work on creating a visual identity with Jared Christensen. With about 30 comments on a thread in Basecamp, we were able...

A wise man once told me, "Everything takes longer than it does." He was right. One month after striking out to build the issue tracker as a full-time business we've made significant progress, but we have very little to show for it. Yet.

In the interest of consolidation, we've aggregated links to all of the posts about the design of the issue tracker. Going forward, they'll all be posted here, but this is a good summary of the progress thus far.