Thoughts on Color

We generally like Stephen Few’s and try to stick to his guidelines when we can. The short form of his advice is “Use Color Meaningfully and with Restraint.” With that in mind we asked our selves how can we use color to convey additional meaning in our Gantt Charts. So far we have come up with the following scenarios:

Color is helpful when used to:
- Code which resources are assigned to tasks
- Bring some tasks to the attention of the chart viewers
- Group tasks together into logical groups such as phases or internal/external

This latest release now supports color coding of the assignments in the resource view. Next will be resource dependent color coding of tasks in the Gantt Chart view along with color coding of individual tasks and groups of tasks.

Performance Improvement

We hope you notice an improvement in how Gantto has been performing over the last few weeks. We have been rolling out the juiciest performance optimizations we can find and have improved responsiveness by 50% or more for many user gestures.

As always, we love all comments or suggestions. Please drop me a line: chris@gantto.com

Quick Overview of the Work Calendar Editor

To edit your work calendar
– Open your project
– navigate to View->Work Cal
– edit, add, remove the default working times to your custom working times
– that is it, navigate back to whatever you were doing

Work Calendar Editor Requirements

Up until now Gantto has assumed that the working times are 8am-12pm, 1pm-5pm Monday to Friday. While this works for a number of customers, we have gotten numerous requests to allow more flexible working times. Some people like to work on weekends, some define the work day from Sunday to Thursday, some people just like to work a lot more than 40 hours a week.

We set out to create a system for editing the work calendar which:
– Defaults to the existing behavior (8am-12pm, 1pm-5pm, M-F)
– Easy to create or edit, should take less than 60 seconds for most people
– Is flexible enough to handle the customer calendar requests thus far
– Is precise to 15 minute intervals

Work Calendar Editor How To

For a quick example, lets assume you want to schedule a death march, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.
First, Open your project and navigate to View->Work Cal
You should see the default work calendar:

From here simply resize the working times to span the ranges you are looking for, lets assume we want to work from 10am to 11pm with a 1 hour video game break:

That is it, the work calendar has now been updated, the project now assumes that you are working 7 days a week. So now a task dependent on one which finishes on Friday will start Saturday instead of Monday. Also tasks modeled as taking 70 hours of effort will now finish in 1 week instead of almost two.

We would love to hear your comments, suggestions and requests about this work calendar editor or any other aspect of how Gantto is working for you. Please drop me a line at chris@gantto.com.

TL;DR

Gantto can now do this:

Use Case

We are looking to serve a few related use cases with this new capability:

1. How can you quickly display what each individual of your team is working on at any one time?
2. How can you quickly see which resources are scheduled over or under capacity?
1. Once you have them identified, how can you easily make adjustments to the plan (hint: drag and drop)

Resource Manager Allocation Example

Lets start off with a simple schedule like the one below. Here Chris and Fed are working on two features, the Resource Manager and the Work Calendar:

This schedule looks simple enough, but what is not clear is that is actually has both Chris and Fed over allocated by 100%. To see this, we click View-> Resources and get this view:

This view shows the tasks organized by the resources who are responsible for them. Here it is clear that both Chris and Fed have a number of tasks which overlap each other (i.e., they are doing two things at once.) Now that we have this insight, it is easy to return to the View->Data view and slide the summary for the Work Calendar over one week like this:

And the resulting resource chart looks like this:

And now Chris and Fed are no longer over-allocated.

If life were only that simple As a consequence of solving the overallocation problem, the release of the Work Calendar is pushed out one week. The Gantt Chart and the Resource Chart help to motivate why that is. It is up to you to communicate that effectively to the stakeholders.

Resource Manager Add New Resource Example

It is also possible to add new resources in the resource view. Just click “Add New Resource”

You have the option to list the full name as well as nicknames for each resource. (This makes rendering the resources on the views more compact and less cluttering.)
And now that we have this new wonderful QA resource, we can simple drag the testing tasks from Chris’ list to theirs:

And then we can drop the assignment into QA’s list:

Add Resources in Spreadsheet Mode

On a related note, if you work with a lot of resource allocation you should definitely check out our full spreadsheet view for your Gantt Charts. It makes it really easy to go down the list and add resources to each task:

As ever we would love to hear what you think! Please do not hesitate to email me: chris@gantto.com with any comments, suggestions or bugs!

Qu’est-ce que cela signifie pour une application d’avoir une version Français?

1. Notre application détecte automatiquement la préférence de langue du système d’exploitation
2. Le menu devrait apparaît en Français
3. Entrée de texte sont compatibles avec les caractères de l’orthographe Française

Malheureusement, personne chez Gantto ne parlent le français couramment. Si vous
remarquez des problèmes ou avez des suggestions pour de meilleures traductions,
merci de nous contacter a l’adresse suivante: support@gantto.com.

Lorsque nous sortons de nouvelles fonctionnalités, nous le faisons en
Anglais dans un premier temps, les versions traduites viendront dès que nous aurons assez de
feedback de nos clients pour nous assurer d’une version stable. Si vous le voulez
en français plus tôt, envoyez-moi un email et nous nous en occuperons au plus vite:
chris@gantto.com

Auto-dependencies

First I select the tasks I want to cascade:

Creating a cascade of dependent tasks is a single click of the connect button:

Want a cascade with no dependencies? Just connect them and then unconnect them again with another click:

Grouping tasks is now also a single click:

Tool Tips

We officially have enough features that it takes a few minutes to look through them all and several of them are unique to Gantto. This week we have implemented tool tips to provide a helpful bit of info right where you need it. Just hover over a Gantto control for a few seconds and one will popup:

Read Only

Another common request is to make shared Gantto schedules appear more read only. Up to now, it was possible to locally change a read only schedule, but it was not possible to save it to the server. (We agree this was quick to implement, but confusing) Starting this week, read only schedules will let you change the way you view the data, but will not let you modify any of the data. Just as before, changes to the view are not saved to the server.

Small Task Shape

Some of you have commented on our new “Small Task Shape.” Aka, weird Batman thingy. One of the things that always bothered us about other Gantt Charts was that once the tasks were below a certain size, they would not longer render any of the controls. So our goal was to create a small task shape which would stay interactive. Unfortunately at the limit our task looks more like a Batman symbol than a task, so this week we remodeled it again.
From Bat:

To Task:

As ever we love to hear feedback, good and bad. Please e-mail me at chris@gantto.com

Historically we have relied on our constraint engine to move dependent tasks when updating our online gantt chart. This is a powerful tool once you have your model setup, but in the brainstorming phase it requires a bit too much investment.

This week one is now able to move groups of tasks and selected tasks all together, even without dependencies. For instance, lets say we start with this schedule below.

Now, we realize that we want to move all of group one over by three months. To do this we simply select the group:

and drag it to the right by three months. Gantto automatically updates the start and end dates of all of the tasks by the amount the summary has moved.

Similarly if we have just created three new tasks but want to move them over by a month, just select them:

And drag them until they line up with the date you intend.

No predecessors or constraints required!

We also now support dragging and dropping vertically directly on the gantt sheet. (You have always been able to do this on the spreadsheet, but it is now for the gantt sheet. We are that much closer to drawing a schedule as easily as on a whiteboard.)

Just select the tasks you want to move and move them up or down where you want them to go.

Done:

Comments or suggestions? I would love to hear them, e-mail me: chris@gantto.com

Export Gantt Chart to PDF

Creating a PDF is easy, just get the project looking the way you want it on the screen:

And then click the Cloud->Export to PDF button

We ask you your paper size preferences and ask if you would like to add a title:

It turns out that Adobe Flex applications are really particular about saving things to your local machine without a “direct user action,” so after we are done creating the .pdf, we ask you to save it to open your filesystem dialog menu:

There are now four different ways to share your gantt chart with Gantto:
1. Share your project by mailing a permalink
2. Present your project on the big screen
3. Take a screen shot using the snapshot tool
4. Print the current view to a PDF file

Percent Complete Indicator

By user request the percent complete value is now displayed in real time while you are updating the task with the mouse. These user interface polishing features are fun to do, we appreciate the request.

Other Updates

1. Added a toggle button for the current day indicator in the view menu
2. Moved the critical path button into the view menu as well
3. Fixed a few bugs that were hopefully invisible to most of you
4. We made quite a bit more progress on our Pivotal Tracker Integration. It currently works ok, but is buried as an easter egg in the right click menues. If this is something you might be interested in, shoot me an e-mail: chris@gantto.com and I am happy to give you a demo and hear your thoughts.

All of the features we built this week were a direct result of customers who took the time to share their thoughts with us. We really appreciate hearing your opinions and requests! Please feel free to contact me with any comments, questions or requests: chris@gantto.com

This week, Gantto now sports a user preferences menu:. To get there click the user profile button next to your username:

Then select the preferences tab:

International Date Formats

We have quite a few international customers, and they all lead me to believe that we Americans write our date in this funny format:

mm/dd/yyyy

and their format:

dd/mm/yyyy

make actually makes a great deal more sense. Fortunately now Gantto supports both date formats. Just set your preferred format once and Gantto will remember forever.

Easier to Use for New Project Managers

A comment we hear frequently from people who are new to managing schedules is that it is confusing to think of tasks in terms of a duration and a start or end date. To better serve those customers, Gantto now lets you pick your data entry style.

1) Duration and start date determine end date
2) Start date and end date determine duration

Most experienced project managers tend to prefer 1 while most new project managers seem to prefer 2. Use whichever works for you!

Critical Path Calculation

One of the great things about having computer science interns is that you get great algorithm and data structures work out of them. This week we are releasing critical path calculation for our online gantt chart. The critical path for your schedule is recalculated every time a task is updated and the critical path tasks are outlined in red:

Continuous Improvement

As one of our non-verbal feature request initiatives we now do a much better job of saving the application view states than we used to. Now your spreadsheet columns will remember their widths every time you open a project and now the summaries will remember who was opened and who was closed. The end result is that loaded files should now look exactly like they did when you saved them.

I talk to between 5 and 10 customers every week to learn more about how they are using Gantto and to listen to frustrations and feature requests. If you would like to chat, just drop me a note: chris@gantto.com

-Chris.

Non Vocal Gantt Chart Interaction Features

New selection + highlight logic
– The whole row is now highlighted
– Highlight displays over already selected rows
– Rows may now be selected on the Gantt Chart Directly
– Ctrl + Click now selects

Vocal Gantt Chart Interaction Features

– Autosave every 60 seconds
– Right click, insert task on row number behaves correctly
– Improved Pivotal Tracker to Gantt Chart Integration, you can now select a date range to import
– Narrower predecessor column for spreadsheet mode

Marching Along

We are making steady progress with our pivotal tracker integration. And we have a few other big features in the works as well. Our top big feature requests today are:
– Real Time Collaboration similar to google docs
– Resource Management
– Custom task color coding
– Task Cost Tracking
– Earned Value Tracking and Reporting

Which one would you like to see first? Shoot me an e-mail and let me know: chris@gantto.com

Basics

• Great post by Alex Harui on all things ItemRenderers – all the things that you should know before you start coding an IR
• Peter Ent’s series of 5 articles on ItemRenderers – great initial introduction to the main concepts associated with them.
• Good post on how to handle recycling while having a state – one of the trickier parts of coding ItemRenderers.
• Yet another good post on ItemRenderers and recycling
• Adobe’s documentation on how to use Spark ItemRenderers with MX Controls, and how to use ItemRenderers with AdvancedDataGrid components