Communication is a key to a good team work so we focused on making communication and interaction with other users our priority with this release.

Connecting you post to other users

Mentioning other users has been made easier with autocomplete.  By starting with the (@) symbol Jitter suggests JIRA user based on the first letters you type.  Users can now receive an email notification when they are mentioned so you will never miss an important conversation.

Enrich your content with Wiki syntax

To better deliver your messages it is essential to be able to customize your text.  Jitter 2.0 supports wiki syntax that users are accustomed to from Atlassian products.

Quickly share your content 

Sharing should be easy and quick, that’s why we introduce a new feature called ShareBox.  Using the new ShareBox, users can quickly post to any project wall, or globally to the timeline, from the same place.

We would love to get feedback on the new features for example at our UserVoice page where we also welcome new feature requests.

Our vision is to remove email as the standard communication tool we use to collaborate on our projects. With Notify you no longer have to keep up with issue updates, sharing, or @mentions through you inbox but can instead enjoy them right where they belong: on your JIRA site.

If a team member decides to share an issue with you, then you will receive a notification while browsing JIRA. Same applies if someone mentions you using the @username notation. Even better, if you have a notification scheme for the project, then you will receive those notifications also as in-app notifications.

The in-app notification contains the original mail content that is sent to your inbox, so you can view each notification in detail. Even without leaving the JIRA page you are currently viewing.

After trying Notify, it will be difficult to go back to email notifications. If you are considering upgrading to JIRA 5.1, then I seriously recommend that you give Notify a try. It will minimize the context switch of going to your inbox for important notifications and increases productivity by having important notifications right there in the browser to take quick action.

Jitter is getting closer to becoming the social and collaboration network we have been needing in JIRA. You can now express your interest in an issue by liking it and discover popular issues. A feature that integrates very well with JIRA and enhances its social capabilities.

When working on a project with different stakeholders, for example a customer and a group of developers.  It is essential to create a barrier between them so developers can communicate freely without concern of the customer watching over them.  In Jitter 1.1 you can now control which JIRA users can access project posts using a project role.

For better integration and customization  you can now select what activity from Jitter shows up on your Activity Stream.

We are working on some great new features at the moment to improve Jitter and make it the ultimate social and collaboration network for your company.  If you have ideas for new features you would like us to add, please be in touch or add them to our UserVoice site and vote for existing ideas.

Of course, you usually have information as the author, the time, and the commit message when you are looking. But there is usually nothing to visually aid you to find it.

I rely mostly on the branch graph to quickly read a repository and find what I like. But that is not always possible. For example, Stash does not show the tree when browsing commits. My personal favorite is SourceTree which does an excellent job of viewing a repository as a graph.

But even with graphs, it can still be quite difficult to recognize a commit. I really wanted something graphical to help me out. The plugin architecture of Stash made it possible for me to add some magical sparkles it and the result: Unicorns!

The idea is quite simple. Take the hash of each commit and generate a unique and distinctive unicorns for each one. Why unicorns? Well, every developer loves unicorns. Right? The idea comes from Gravatar, a service to manage a global avatar for each user of the Internet. Gravatar uses a hash of the email address to generate a unique avatar (often called “identicons“) in case the user has not signed up for the service. I figured there is no reason to limit this to avatars and appled it to Git commits.

If you are a StackOverflow user, you probably remember their April Fools’ joke where they replaces avatars with unicorns. Now you can enjoy those fabulous unicorns in Stash!

Head over to the Atlassian Marketplace to get Unicorns for your Stash server and don’t forget to rate it as it is competing in the Codegeist 2012 competition.

Jitter 1.0 supports new powerful features such as the Timeline, Activity Streams integration, and the ability to reply to posts. The Timeline is accessible from the new Social Menu. Posts from any project are available on the Timeline in addition to global posts that are posted directly to the Timeline.

Active Objects, the database layer for the Atlassian plugin platform, is now out of preview. This means that Jitter works on any supported database that JIRA supports and is fully backed up and can be imported and exported with the JIRA tools. Upgrading to JIRA 5 is recommended to get a stable Active Objects support.

Jitter for JIRA 5 is available on the Atlassian Marketplace from $10 for 10 users. Try out Jitter free for 30 days.

No new features have been added but compatibility with different databases has been improved. Version 0.5 will include new exciting new features on top of a stable JIRA5 release.

This competition is really exciting but there is still one week left to submit new entries and we will probably see some big submissions in the next days. Meanwhile I will have to cross my fingers and hope that the community and the judges will like the plugin.

I have already received some great feedback from the community regarding my plugin and the plan is to implement some of the suggested features in before the competition ends. Let me know if you have an idea for the plugin that would really help you make JIRA more social and fun to use.

Jitter depends on JIRA 4.3 and the new Active Objects Plugin (AO). You need to install AO first in order to try out Jitter. See the AO installation instructions for details.

This is version 0.1 of Jitter. It contains the essential features to start microblogging in a JIRA project. More features will be added in 0.2 and I welcome ideas and have already received some great feedback from the community.

I have also submitted Jitter to the Codegeist competition and would appreciate your support by voting for it!

Let me know if you are interesting in trying out the beta in the comments or send me a line.