Frustrated by wasted screen real estate when you're editing Wiki articles in FogBugz?

Try Chas's Greasemonkey script.

Full Screen Wiki Editing in FogBugz

Carson McComas reviews FogBugz: "Its genius is in its maturity. It is mature, seasoned, and polished software that makes tracking multiple issues with difficult sticky elements not just easy, but enjoyable. You know software is great if you still love it, and use it heavily after several months. Now I can't live without it."

Carson's site is at WorkHappy.net.

If you're a Macintosh user, check out Fluid, which lets you create custom icons in the dock for websites you visit a lot.

Indiekid created a high-res fluid icon for FogBugz:

Doug Clinton blogs: "Why would you buy a bug tracking system when you could just use Bugzilla? Well, it’s like Apple equipment. For the most part it just works. There are lots of little details in the user interface which show the care and thought which have gone into it. It’s clear that the Fog Creek guys use it every day as part of their environment which means they have covered most of the things you would want from a bug system and some things I certainly never considered. But also there’s the fact that these guys are so nice to deal with that you almost want to give them your money anyway." Thanks!

Here's a handy plugin for Trac so that you can link from Trac to FogBugz cases. It was developed by a team that uses Trac for its Wiki and for its Subversion backend, but they still wanted to use FogBugz for bug tracking. 

See also: FogBugz has a new Trac importer.

The designers of FogBugz decided that the main bug description area should always be a fixed width, rather than widening automatically to fill the browser width.

This is not always the most popular decision; many customers feel like it wastes screen real estate. We did it that way because there's a lot of research about the readability of text. Columns that are too wide are hard to read, because it takes a long time for the eye to move from the end of each line to the beginning of the next line, and it's easy to accidentally skip a line or read a line twice when the line gets really long. Graphic designers have known this for a long time and even have guidelines for how wide columns of text should be.

If this still drives you crazy, Richard Thombs developed a little GreaseMonkey script to force FogBugz 6.0 to use more of the screen to display bug details. (Thanks, Richard!) 

Wil Shipley: "I have a real crush on [FogBugz] right now. Last two weeks (since I switched to it) have been incredibly productive."

Wil makes Delicious Library, a really cool, award-winning library catalog system for Macintosh.

Thanks, Wil! 

We've set up a new blog, Fog Creek Network Status, for announcements about planned and unplanned outages on Fog Creek's servers, including, of course, FogBugz On Demand. Since this blog is hosted by TypePad it does not rely on any of our infrastructure and will not be affected if we have problems.

If all our servers do go down, you probably won't remember the URL for this site, so you may want to bookmark that link, or, even better, subscribe to it using an RSS reader. The RSS feed is at http://fogcreekstatus.typepad.com/fog_creek_network_status/rss.xml .

When FogBugz On Demand has an unplanned outage, we promise to conduct a complete post-mortem, analyze the root cause, tell you why it happened, and tell you what we're going to do in the future to keep that problem from happening again. More about the Fog Creek Network Status Blog.

If you haven't yet found Launchy, oh boy, today is going to be a very happy day for you. As a keyboard fanatic, it's my favorite Windows utility.

Launchy is a command line for Windows. I have it set to pop up when I hit Windows+Space. Then you start typing the name of any program on your computer and it finds it for you and launches it. There are a million fancy things you can do with it.

Neil Barnwell figured out that you can use Launchy to go straight to any FogBugz case. Cool! Let me take it one step further and show you how you can use Launchy (2.0 or later) to do a quick FogBugz search.

1. Bring up Launchy and click on the gear in the top right corner to configure it
2. Go to the Plugins tab
3. Click "Weby" from the list of available plugins
4. Click the fat + button to add a new website
5. Set the name to FogBugz, the URL to your FogBugz URL (e.g. http://example.fogbugz.com)
6. Now set the Query to ?pre=preMultiSearch&pg=pgList&pgBack=pgSearch&search=2&searchFor=%s

Now you can do a FogBugz search or go to any numbered FogBugz case by running Launchy and typing FogBugz, pressing tab, and entering the search term.

Fog Creek Software has a bunch of great job openings right now. All are based out of our offices in New York City.

• Software developer
• Sales manager
• Support engineer
• System administrator
• Intern in software development
• Software Management Training Program

The team over at Tableau Software, which makes powerful, yet easy-to-use data analytics software, uses their own product to analyze and report on FogBugz data.

Chris Stolte wrote all about it: Eating Our Own Dog Food: How We Use Fast Analytics for Bug Tracking

"MT Fogger is a Movable Type interface to FogBugz. The plugin exposes a set of template tags that make it possible to query and display information stored in FogBugz within your Movable Type templates."

Congratulations to our partner Perforce Software, which today officially released the SDK for the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway! (Press release PDF)

Perforce is an industrial-strength source control system, used by teams all over the world. It has a reputation for extreme scalability and great performance with the largest code bases. This new Defect Tracking Gateway allows Perforce to communicate with FogBugz. For example, when you check in changes, you can connect it to a FogBugz case:

There are instructions for getting started with the Perforce DTG in the FogBugz 6.0 documentation.