We’re now on our third bug tracker since the Xbase alpha was released. All three share much in common: they’re all written in PHP, they’re all custom built and most importantly, they all integrate seamlessly with Xbase.

First there was Fbug, a simple system that couldn’t do much more than submit bugs (it was actually initially impossible to edit or delete bugs). It was written in a day or two. It did get support for editing bugs a few months later but it was so difficult to use nobody ever bothered.

Next there was Anthill 1.0, the system used until recently. It’s a slight improvement over Fbug, although it does reuse some of Fbug’s buggy code (you couldn’t insert newlines until recently, plus bug reports with no title are impossible to view). On the upside, it looks good.

Today we’re introducing Anthill 2. It’s a complete rewrite of Anthill 1. It was built to handle the influx of bug reports/feature requests since Xbase 1.0. We considered lighthouse, which is an awesome service, but at $49 per month it’s just not value for money.

Anthill 2 has some great features, which are explained more in depth on the Anthill 2 site. Here’s an overview:

• Free! Anthill is completely free and open source (for personal and commercial use). It’s licenced under the BSD licence.
• Extremely Fast One thing that desktop apps still have over web apps is “snappiness”. When you click a button on a desktop app you get instant feedback. When you click a link on a web app, you normally have to wait a few seconds for it to load. Anthill uses 2 images and no javascript (yet). On our broadband connection it loads instantly.
• Easy to install Anthill is written in PHP, so provided you have PHP 5, MySQL and mod_rewrite or equivalent, you just FTP the files, run the installer script and you’re done. It should work fine on most shared hosts.
• Cocoa and .NET Integration Anthill has a great Cocoa interface. Better yet, it’s even easier to install than Anthill itself. Just drop the files into your Xcode project, set up the URL to your anthill installation in info.plist and you’ve got an instant bug report window. A .NET version is coming soon.
• Email Integration Anthill will email you if a new ticket is submitted on a project or milestone that you’re watching. You can also watch tickets and get notified when it gets changed or someone comments.
• Much more!

Want to try it out? Head over to http://www.fileability.net/anthilltest/. If you don’t want to create an account, use a username/password of test/test.

You can install Anthill 2.0 beta right now by heading over to the anthill page.

Xbase will switch over to Anthill 2.0 in 1.0.5.