GanttProject Development Blog

GanttProject 2.5: Release Candidate build

2012-02-10T03:13:00.000+04:00

We have published the first Release Candidate build of GanttProject Praha. Please fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing! If everything goes fine, we will release GP 2.5 in a few days. We want to be sure in its quality, so we're asking you to help us with the final test cycle. Download the RC, use it for planning your projects and report to us immediately if you hit a severe problem. Other bug reports are welcome too, but we're mostly interested if GP 2.5 works in general.

GanttProject 2.5 RC I download page with packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and platform-independent ZIP distribution.

We also appreciate translation contributions. Thanks to a few great guys, we have translations to major languages, but we still need Japanese, Brasilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese and other languages.

GanttProject license update: now with GPL3

2012-01-17T03:19:00.001+04:00

GanttProject will be covered by GPLv3 starting from version 2.5. We made this update from GPLv2 mostly for the sake of license compliance with the libraries which we use. For most GanttProject users this requires absolutely no action. GanttProject remains both gratis and libre, you can use it for any purposes, including commercial, given that they are legal per se. Only those who link code of their public proprietary web applications with GanttProject code should be worried, but I really doubt that we have such users.

GanttProject 2.5 beta V

2012-01-11T04:33:00.000+04:00

Thanks to the brave souls who are using GanttProject 2.5 and to the great guys who translate the interface, we now have a new beta with a number of important bugfixes and new translations to German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese.

GanttProject 2.5 beta V download page with packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and platform-independet ZIP distribution.

If you're running a previous beta of GP 2.5, go ahead and download it now, and tell us if it fixes any problems or creates new. If you're a newbie or die-hard, definitely consider at least trying beta V

We hope that the next public build will be a release candidate.

GanttProject 2.5 beta IV

2011-11-21T04:19:00.001+04:00

Beta IV fixes severe problems discovered in all export functions in beta III on Windows.

GanttProject 2.5 "Praha": the third beta

2011-11-11T02:01:00.001+04:00

So, the third beta is waiting for you on our download pages. It finishes the stage of implementation of major features and opens the stage of bugfixing.

What has changed since the second beta?

Export functions. iText PDF export engine now prints data columns, just like other exports and printing. It also was promoted to default way of PDF export, and FOP engine will probably be removed in the next major update.

PNG and PDF exports now allow for choosing a date range for the charts.

UI. We have a new set of toolbar icons painted in one style and color scheme, 1.5x bigger in size. Thanks to the authors of AnyColorYouLike Gnome icon theme! Also we added a search box to the toolbar. Oh, wait, there is also a long anticipated feature: separate option for the short date format! Find it in the basic application settings, just under appearance and interface language.

Recover and bug reporting. A sudden power outage can ruin all your work unless either you or software regularly save it. GanttProject does save your projects but this has not been exposed in the UI. Now we have Recover project action in Help menu which scans through autosaves and suggest you to recover (or skip) them. Also, to make bug reporting easier, we added an action to view log file contents.

The last, but not least, is that Custom columns tab in task properties dialog now shows and edits the values of custom columns for the selected task. Not the columns themselves and their default values as it was before. Less surprises, less need to write manuals.

GP Praha has got its version number, now it is officially GanttProject 2.5. Go ahead and give it a try!

Eager to discuss? Visit the forum!

GanttProject Praha: beta 2 is here!

2011-10-02T03:13:00.004+04:00

The second beta of GanttProject Praha is available for download. We have packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

It fixes a lot of issues found in the first beta and on old usability problems, such as losing entered data in task resource and predecessor tables. Thanks to all who reported them! We also updated the UI of custom columns management in task and resource tables. Now you can add, remove, change default value, hide or show custom columns from the single window.

It is available from the context menu on task/resource table header.

Beta 2 certainly has a lot of bugs. Please report them on the forum or in the issue tracker, and please save our time by checking first if it is already reported or maybe even already fixed!

We plan to release the third beta with a few remaining features to the wild as soon as possible and focus after that on translations and bugfixing. Stay tuned!

GP 2.0.10, Lion update

2011-07-25T19:22:00.002+04:00

GanttProject package for Mac OSX used to require Rosetta (software which runs Power PC binaries on Intel processors). Since there is no Rosetta in Mac OSX Lion, I rebuilt this package. It should run fine without Rosetta and it also should run fine on previous Mac OSX versions on Intel processors. A new version is available for downloading on Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/ganttproject/downloads/detail?name=ganttproject-2.0.10-lion.dmg

Old version is also there for those who still run Mac OSX on Power PC: http://code.google.com/p/ganttproject/downloads/detail?name=ganttproject-2.0.10.dmg

1000000 downloads

2011-07-25T18:48:00.003+04:00

Sunday evening, Google Code shows that GanttProject 2.0.10 for Windows has been downloaded one million times.

Want to comment? Visit our forum.

GanttProject Praha: beta1 is out!

2011-07-13T03:29:00.002+04:00

Hello everyone!

The first public beta of the new major update of GanttProject is available for downloading. All traditional packages plus a new DEB package for Linux (Ubuntu) users are waiting!

There are many updates, some of them have already been around for a while, so here I enumerate those which appeared after the last alpha build.

Notification area in the status bar which reports errors, if any, and keeps you tuned by reading updates feed from our site. It checks the updates just once per day and it incurs no startup delay.

Simple search service which can search in task/resource names and task notes. You can activate it by hitting Ctrl+F

Rubber dependencies are now rendered as dashed lines

If you're sharing with your colleague a project file on a network disk and your buddy overwrites it while you're working on your part, GanttProject will show you a warning

WebDAV over HTTPS is now supported, and overall is expected to work better.
Column resize mode is now "next column" instead of "proportional resize" which turned out to be annoying.

It is a public release, and we encourage you to try it, but keep in mind it is still beta. There are bugs, some of them are already known, so please check the existing issues before submitting new bug reports!

Wondering how to comment? Visit the forum!

Move the whole project

2011-04-02T19:35:00.000+04:00

If you planned to start your project on January 1 and created a big plan, but after that decided to go hiking to New Zealand until February, you would want to move the whole project somehow. You can use some tricks to do it in the old good GanttProject 2.0.10, but starting from build 428 of GP Praha you have an explicit option.

In the Calendar page of Project Properties dialog you see a date chooser. It shows the current project start date, that is, the start date of the earliest task in your project. Choosing another date will move some or all of the tasks, depending on what rescheduling option you select.

Move all tasks will just add the same number of days to all tasks in the project, and it is the default option. However, sometimes you want to move the project start but prefer to keep the remaining tasks intact whenever possible. You can use the second option for that.

GanttProject Praha build 428

2011-03-19T23:50:00.001+03:00

A new build of GanttProject Praha is available for downloading.

What's new and noteworthy (I will try to give more details later on the most important items) :

Major rewrite of the options dialog. I hope it now looks much more clean and professional.
Move the whole project feature. Checkout Calendar page in the project properties and set a new start date, with two rescheduling options.
"Project states" renamed to what they're supposed to be, that is, to baselines.There is a new baseline edit dialog, and the button which shows it sits above the gantt chart timeline next to "show/hide critical path" button
Some more intelligence with respect to the custom properties in MS Project MPP import
Many small UI fixes everywhere.

We're approaching the wide beta testing phase, with announcements on the home page and all. It hopefully will start with the next public build of GP Praha. Stay tuned and give the alpha build the first try!

Download link: http://ganttproject.googlecode.com/files/ganttproject-praha-r428.zip

GanttProject Praha build 306

2011-01-12T22:20:00.001+03:00

Hello GanttProject friends,
the next build of GanttProject Praha is available for downloading. The most noteworthy changes are:

1. Microsoft Project export and improved import
2. Months at the bottom of the timeline and thus ability to fit a few years into the Gantt chart viewport

You can download it from http://ganttproject.googlecode.com/files/ganttproject-praha-r306.zip

Read more about GanttProject Praha: http://ganttproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/announcing-ganttproject-praha.html

Announcing GanttProject Praha

2010-11-16T02:09:00.002+03:00

Hello GanttProject community!

We haven't been publishing any news for quite a while, but today we have pretty sweet ones!

We are announcing a new GanttProject update with codename Praha. It is a successor of the old good GanttProject 2.0 but with many important updates. Its first alpha version is available for download. It is by far not complete and we will be adding more features and more stability. At the same time we want to make this release cycle short and release the final version of GanttProject Praha as soon as possible.

So, what's new?

What can you try in the first Praha build?

New Microsoft Project import. It should be able to import the most recent MS Project files, and it also supports importing custom properties, project calendar and resource days off.
New timeline which is less cluttered and has navigation and zooming controls built-in.
New weekend option for those who love weekends but have to work 24/7 :). It allows for rendering weekends still counting them as working days. By the way, you can change now weekend setup in your existing projects.
Task end date is now the date when a task finishes, not the next day. So 1 day long task starting on Nov 12 will finish on Nov 12.
Task properties dialog UI was rewritten. Now it looks more professional, and task notes are located next to the main properties.
Additional priority levels

What about Loire?

Well, it turned out that changing that much as had been planned in Loire was impossible. Loire is still in very unstable state while GanttProject absolutely needs a major update. So I decided to build a new version based on 2.0 code. However, many things were backported from Loire and I hope that Praha will eventually evolve to Loire.

Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to Maarten Bezemer whose amazing job on bugs, features and on code cleanup kicked off this development.

GanttProject news

2010-04-08T18:52:00.001+04:00

This recent post on the forum reminded me to share some GanttProject news.

First, many of you have probably noticed that we've got our own forum. This almost finishes our migration from SourceForge. Most of the stuff, including bug and feature tracking, is now hosted on Google Code, and forum is hosted on ganttproject.biz. We're still using SourceForge version control, but we migrated to Mercurial.

Our new forum is similar to SourceForge feature-wise but it is faster and less cluttered than SF. However, another UI and performance was not the only reason to move. We're going to improve web experience of our users, but let me keep the details in secret for now and avoid giving any promises or public commitments.

Second, I am working on GanttProject 2.0.11 which will fix a few bugs and usability issues. You may track the changes in code on our GanttProject pages on Google Code. One of the latest changes allows for dragging tasks holding Ctrl with left button of your mouse and even allows to customize this behavior using a .properties file.

GanttProject Loire is also alive and evolving in its new Mercurial repository. It is experiencing a major refactoring of almost all important components, which really takes a lot of time and efforts but which is necessary to open up space for extensibility and for new features in task/resource management.

GanttProject on SlackBuilds.org

2009-11-28T01:44:00.000+03:00

Those who are using Slackware Linux may like GanttProject SlackBuild script by Chris Abela which automates installing of GanttProject on Slackware. Thanks, Chris!

GanttProject 2.0.10 is released.

2009-09-15T03:32:00.002+04:00

GanttProject 2.0.10 is finally here. It is a relatively big update which fixes a few important bugs (e.g. it makes "Critical Path" feature working), adds an option to create rubber dependencies by default and adds an experimental iText-based PDF export.

Installer for Windows, package for Mac OSX, platform-independent ZIP archive and source code are available on our downloads page on Google Code Hosting. Web Start edition and other updates will follow soon.

Enjoy the new GanttProject!

GanttProject 2.0.10: create rubber dependencies by default

2009-09-15T03:23:00.000+04:00

A small new feature in GanttProject 2.0.10 is an option to set rubber dependencies by default. It sits in "Link" group of Gantt chart settings.

Just in case if you didn't know what rubber dependencies are: when two tasks are linked with, say, Finish-Start dependency, then you have two options of how moving a predecessor task affects a successor task:

If your dependency is Strong then successor's start date will always be the same as predecessor's end date, provided that there are no other constraints. When you move the predecessor, no matter backward or forward, the successor will also move in the same direction. You may think that your tasks are linked with a metal pipe.
If you have a Rubber dependency then the successor will not move unless it really has to. In particular, it will not move backward in the time if predecessor moves backwards. You may think that this link is a rubber band.

Dependency hardness can be changed in dependency properties (tab "Dependencies" of a successor task properties). GanttProject created strong dependencies by default and many people who preferred rubber links didn't like changing properties of every new one. Now it can be configured just once.

GanttProject 2.0.10 Release Candidate

2009-09-05T16:17:00.000+04:00

The third build of GantProject 2.0.10 fixes a few bugs, including numerous critical path problems, and improves iText export output and the UI of the export wizard. Give it a try, report any regression problems. It is a release candidate build which I plan to release in a few days.

Critical path gets revamped

2009-07-28T01:49:00.000+04:00

Critical path, one of the most essential features in a project planning software, was announced a few years ago as a new feature of GanttProject. However, it has never worked properly. Here is how GanttProject 2.0.8 calculates the critical path in HouseBuildingSample project (critical tasks are in red):

The critical path is obviously wrong. Construction phase supertask is a chain of the critical path but its subtask are not included. Foundation building is a successor of Architectural design subtasks with no float, so they also should've been included in the critical path.

Working on new iText based PDF export I recently opened in my text editor the code of critical path algorithm implementation. Sighed and removed it completely. Spent a few evenings on the new implementation which would take into account supertasks, dependency lags, different kinds of dependencies, etc. Wrote a number of unit tests. As a result, here is how GanttProject 2.0.10 renders HouseBuildingSample critical path (critical tasks are red and textured):

The release candidate build of GP 2.0.10 is about to be published. Stay tuned!

Export to PDF with iText

2009-07-05T22:42:00.000+04:00

It is important to be able to export project data to some pritable format. PDF export feature appeared in GanttProject at the very early days, and it is one of the most popular features in our product. However, there is a number of problems with PDF export implementation in GP. The most important is probably this landscape export bug which is difficult to reproduce yet is really annoying when it appears. It is a bug in Apache FOP library which GP uses for PDF renderig and which had no updates for years.

A few weeks ago I started playing with iText library and the second build of GanttProject 2.0.10 which was published on Friday includes an experimental plugin which exports to PDF using iText. My opinion is that it is just better than our traditional PDFexport. It is faster, it produces more visually appealing documents, it allows for scalable graphics rendering, and it doesn't suffer from that "No meaningful layout" problem in landscape mode (which is now default). Besides, now you can choose document page format and substitute fonts if you don't have those specified in iText export theme.

I plan to work on iText based export a little bit more and ship its beta version with GanttProject 2.0.10 in addition to FOP based. After that, its development will continue in Loire code where it will replace FOP export completely.

Fix for Polish translation

2009-06-04T13:23:00.000+04:00

In the last releases of GanttProject (starting from GP 2.0.7) Polish translation was broken . Choosing "Polski" in the language settings didn't work and even manual editing of the options file didn't help. The reason was one missing character in the translation file.

The fix was submitted to our SVN repository on Google Code Hosting and will be included into GP 2.0.10. If you don't want to wait until 2.0.10, just open

$GP_HOME/plugins/net.sourceforge.ganttproject_2.0.0/data/resources/language/i18n_pl.properties

in any text editor ($GP_HOME is a directory where GanttProject is installed on your machine), find

refresh=Od\u015bwie\u017

and append 'c' at the end of that line, so that it becomes

refresh=Od\u015bwie\u017c

SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

2009-05-14T02:14:00.001+04:00

SourceForge started the 4th Community Choice Awards contest. You can nominate GanttProject clicking this image:

Kostenfreier E-Workshop "GanttProject"

2009-04-19T00:38:00.000+04:00

Knut Harms informed me about the electronic materials for learning GanttProject which are available in German here:

http://www.schulprozesse.de/content/view/87/1/

Materials are free for personal use. I don't speak German but Google Translate did a good job and translated this page.

PDF file is available on this link:

http://www.harms-oldenburg.de/schulprozesse/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,45/Itemid,33/

GanttProject.biz: now with Google App Engine!

2009-04-14T03:31:00.000+04:00

April 12 becomes a day of great launches for me.

48 years ago Soviet engineers launched Vostok-1 spacecraft which carried Yury Gagarin onboard and was powered by six liquid-fueled engines. Gagarin's flight was just 108 minutes long, but it made the Universe closer to the millions of people.

Since that time many Soviet and now Russian people celebrate Cosmonautics Day. I admit that it is one of my favorite holidays. This April I celebrate it with launching an updated GanttProject.biz, which now is also powered by an engine. Google App Engine.

Its uptime now is about 20 hours and it is feeling good. I hope that this launch will eventually make the universe of information closer to hundreds of GanttProject users. Stay tuned!

GanttProject FAQ

2009-03-21T03:36:00.009+03:00

Do you have a roadmap or a release schedule?

No, we don't have any roadmap. We continue releasing maintenance updates of GP 2.0, we develop the next major update named GanttProject Praha. We expect beta version of GP Praha to appear soon, and at the moment you can try playing with its fresh snapshot build.

There is another unstable branch called Loire but it has never graduated from kindergarten and is kinda orphaned now.

Is it possible to use hours as task duration?

No. We tried to implement it in Loire and you can even download an experimental unstable milestone build GanttProject Loire M3 and play with hours. However, it is far from being stable.

Why 1 day task ends on the next day?

Because day X + 1 day = day X+1. Never mind, it is just because programmers are kinda mathematicians. We understand that when you, business people, say in the morning "it takes 1 day" you mean that it takes 8 hours and should be ready today evening. We changed it in GanttProject Praha. Try it out!

Is it possible to change weekend days?

You can setup weekend days when you create a new project. If you have already created a big project and discovered that weekend days are not those you wished, you may create a new project and import data from the old one.

In GanttProject Praha weekends and holidays are configurable at any time in the Project Properties

My project is two years long and doesn't fit in GanttProject window. What can I do?

Try zooming out using toolbar buttons. If on the minimal zoom level your project still doesn't fit, bad luck. We're aware of the "long projects" problem and will be working on it.

In GanttProject Praha one can zoom out more and get a few years visible on big screens.

Landscape PDF export reports "No meaningful layout" error.

Yes, it happens. Not always, but often enough to be annoying. It is a problem of PDF rendering library which we use, but you probably don't care whose problem it is.

Try running experimental iText PDF export, it will probably be more suitable.

Can GanttProject do resource leveling?

No.