In my last post I introduced you to parts of Lighthouse Keeper that help make issue tracking much easier and more hassle free. In this post I'll be going into more detail about the most vital unit of currency in any issue tracker: tickets. To be a good issue tracker you need to allow users to quickly and easily add, view and update tickets. Lighthouse Keeper takes this to a new level.

You will likely spend most of your time in the tickets list in the top right of your screen. This gives you an overview of the tickets in the selected project, milestone or ticket bin (or just all your tickets if you haven't anything selected in the source list). There are columns available for almost every bit of information about your tickets, and you can show or hide them by right clicking on the menu.

Now when you look over to the left of the tickets list you may have one of two reactions:

- "Ooo, purty colours!"
- "My eyes, they burn!"

This will depend on your affinity to the Lighthouse defaults for state colours. If you're finding these colours a bit bright you can edit them in Lighthouse in your "Edit Project" page (these are project specific). Unfortunately you can't change this from within Lighthouse Keeper yet, but I will be adding it in a future version.

Below the ticket list is the ticket details pane. This give you more detail about the ticket, including body and its history. Each comment and change is displayed in the bubbles below the body. Nothing much special here... yet.

So we've covered viewing, what about adding and updating tickets? Well as I said when I introduced Lighthouse Keeper, the metaphor I finally settled on for a ticket is that of email. As such the Add/Update ticket windows are pretty similar to what you would find in Mail. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail, a picture says a thousand words:

I will give a useful tip for when adding or updating a ticket though. As you would expect you can tab all the way through the fields on the window, but when you've reached the bottom you'll find that you're reaching for the mouse to click the submit button in the toolbar. You can instead use the Cmd-S short cut to submit the details of the front-most ticket window, allowing you to submit a ticket without removing your hands from the keyboard.

One of the very first requirements I had for Lighthouse Keeper was to be able to start adding a ticket quickly and easily from anywhere. There were many times I got a support email about a bug but never filed a ticket because I would have had to open Safari, log into Lighthouse, select the project and choose "Add New Ticket" before filling out the details. As such Lighthouse Keeper lets you set a global hotkey to start adding a new ticket.

Another useful feature is the ability to copy a ticket. Copying is essentially adding a new ticket with all the fields auto filled with those of a previous ticket. How is this useful? Well it helps if you have a ticket similar to one you want to file, but it also makes the task of moving a ticket to another project much easier, which is great for those with a public project for customer issue tracking and a private project for internal issue tracking.

All issue trackers make it easy to manage tickets, but Lighthouse Keeper is helping take that to an all new level of speed and usability. But adding, viewing and editing tickets are only part of the equation. These features aren't very useful if you can't find the ticket you want quickly and easily. Come back in a few days to see the 3rd post in this series: Searching.

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