A few Ballpark updates

Over the past week or two I’ve made a few upgrades to Ballpark. They’re nothing major, but I figured I would document them here.

Shorter public URLs

The idea behind the public URL altogether is essentially for sending the link to a potential client (or whoever the estimate is for), letting them view the estimate without having an account. Under the covers each estimate has a unique 40 character token that’s auto-generated, and that’s how I’m able to show estimates without logging in. But that also means the URL looks like this:

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http://ballparkitapp.com/estimate/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

That’s kind of long, especially for someone reading email on their phone. So now when you create a new estimate, I’m integrating with the is.gd API to generate a significantly shorter URL, resulting in something like this:

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http://is.gd/xx

Much better. There’s an icon on the main listing that let’s you access your public URL. Either hover over it to see what it is, or cmd-click and “Copy URL Location”.

Keep in mind: I’ve already converted your existing estimates for you, but that doesn’t mean the old public URLs stopped working. It just means you can now use both.

Time zone support

Somehow I missed this in the beginning. But you can now set your time zone in the settings area.

Estimate cloning

Ballpark tries to assist with creating estimates as much as possible. Having default tasks is one way to go, but I’m finding that there are situations where tasks are common enough to reuse but not quite at the “default” level. That’s where estimate cloning comes in.

You can clone any of your estimates. This will create a new estimate based on the one being cloned. The estimate itself, and all of its associated tasks, will be duplicated and given a “Copy of …” title.

Estimate discounts

I’ve come across several situations where a potential client tries to “negotiate” with an estimate total. Having to adjust the price for a task means either tweaking the time or lowering the cost, both of which aren’t great solutions, because the problem is simply “the estimate is too high”.

Now you can apply a percentage discount to an estimate, which just lowers the overall cost of the project, avoiding the need to tweak individual tasks. When viewing the estimate, if there’s a discount, it will list the original price, the percentage off, the amount of savings, and the new total. And nothing will change if there isn’t a discount.

This is useful for the reasons explained above, but it also handles that case where your cousin’s friend asks you to build him a website, and doesn’t realize he’s getting a deal :-)

You can find the “Add Discount” link in the lower right-hand side of the estimate form, just above the total.

More to come…

I have several more ideas in the pipeline, including:

• Drag-n-drop reordering of project tasks
• PDF downloads (or exports)
• Ability to send estimates to clients from within Ballpark
• Mobile support for viewing estimates

I’m aware of a few UI inconsistencies that need to be adjusted, too, but they’re not worth mentioning, here.

I realize this tool is only useful to a handful of people, but it has already been extremely convenient for me. The real problem, now, is working too much :-)