I firmly believe that any project, no matter how small, needs a way of tracking bugs.  This should be a matter of religious conviction.  However,  I must admit that up until now I've been a family-values politician: Preach it all day long, and practice it in public, but ignore it completely when it comes to my personal life.

 

But I've seen the light and been reborn!  This morning I installed a freeware open-source bug tracker in a virtual directory on my ISP site.  I'll be using it to keep track of GraspIt.org bugs.  Originally, I wanted to use BugTracker.NET, which I'd used (in a modified version) with paying clients before.  However, it expects to have its own database, and I'm not willing to pay extra $$ per month for that.  So I looked around and ended up with IssueManager.

 

It seems to have the needed rudimentary functionality, so that's good.  It runs off an MDB file to start, which is fine; I can't imagine I'll be exercising it enough to require a real SQL backend.  Also, it's free & open source which means I can modify it if I have to (and so far I've had to make two modifications just to get it installed).

 

I don't know how it'll work (I'll keep you posted), but for now there is one thing that I have to say to the makers of this application: ARE YOU FREAKIN' BLIND!?!?  Check out the screenshot below.  Have you ever come across a more arbitrary and unappealing color scheme?  I mean, I'm no graphic designer, but come on!

 

Something else I was thinking: the Express products should really come with a simple internal bug database.  They're meant for hobbyists, right?  So you don't have to hook it up to anything fancy.  Just give us a chance to enter problems & mark their status.

 

Just a thought...