We’re not done with the dashboard yet (we’re firm believers that no product is ever “done”, though). We’ve been getting great feedback as to how you and your clients would like to use the dashboard, and we’re going to make some extra changes to it to include some of those suggestions. We’ll keep you updated right here on the blog.

Quite a lot of people believe that making a product better means adding new stuff. While that is sometimes the case, sometimes you can make something better by simplifying (Maeda’s laws of simplicity come to mind immediately - read that book if you haven’t yet). That’s what we’re doing with the dashboard redesign. The new dashboard will have less stuff than the current one does, and the thinking behind that move is quite simple. A screenshot first:

There are two main things you need from your dashboard on Goplan. You need to know what’s going on in your company - which is what the activity feed is -, and you need to know what you need to do - which is what the todolist bit is. The old project and people lists are gone. How often do you need to use those? Companies don’t add new projects or people every day, so they’re basically just UI pollution. Off they go.

A penny for your thoughts?

We’re still not done with the dashboard redesign. We’re constantly thinking about it, and before we launch the update, there will likely be more changes to both its design and functionality. But we do want your opinion. What do *you* need off of your Goplan dashboard? If you have any comments, feel free to send them in, either by commenting on this post, or sending us an email at our support address. Thanks!

(PS: we’re aiming to launch the dashboard update by early next week)

Calendar: The calendar now includes a weekly view in addition to the existing Monthly view, which makes it much easier to plan things out on a week-by-week basis. The new view (available on the Calendar sidebar) also includes the javascript goodness you were used to in the monthly view, like clicking and dragging to create new events. Oh, and here’s something you might not know. On text fields that take dates, you can use real text like “tomorrow” or “next saturday” or “two weeks from now”. Give that a try, it’s awesome!

Person view: Something quite a lot of people have requested in the past (which makes total sense, by the way), is a way to quickly get a glimpse of the activity from a particular user. That’s the new person view. Anywhere you see someones name or alias, you’ll be able to click through to a page, which lists assigned items (tasks and tickets), latest status updates and latest activity for that particular user.

More RSS feeds: Many of you are using RSS readers to stay on top of project activity. But sometimes, keeping up with the full feed of project activity can be a daunting task, so we added separate feeds for tasks, tickets and discussions - you’ll find them in each sections page, ready for you to subscribe.

More speed: We changed a few things under the hood to improve our caching mechanism (for the techies, we started using a cluster of Memcached servers), which causes the app to be much snappier. We hope you enjoy the extra time you get to actually manage projects :-)

Cosmetic changes: There were quite a few other changes throughout the app, particularly in support of our users who are using Internet Explorer (please consider our recommendation of switching to a browser more ‘up-to-date’ with the latest standards, like Firefox 3 or Safari 4)

Final notes

Good thing about these updates, is that we already have a few new things up our sleeves for the next few weeks, so do keep an eye out for more news. We wouldn’t be updating the application so frequently if all of you weren’t being so prolific at sending in great feedback. We really appreciate all the love we’re getting. Thanks!

We’re also launching a contest for developers who want to build apps with the API. It runs until September 30 and gives you the chance of winning a full year of our Unlimited plan. There’s a bunch of details about the contest on the contest page, so check it out here if you’re interested. We can’t wait to see what you guys come up with.

Oh, and here’s something for your OSX Dashboard

As a simple example of the kind of stuff developers will be able to build with our API, we built (and are now releasing as open source) a timetracking dashboard widget for your mac. It lets you use our timetracking functionality remotely, so definitely give it a go if you’re interested. If you’re a developer, feel free to look under the hood for inspiration on how you can use the Goplan API. You can download and install this widget by clicking here. Have fun! And do submit bug reports if you find any.

Here’s how time-tracking works

At the bottom of every page, you’ll see something new - your status and time bar. This bar will not only take the place of the old “Update your status” button (which was on the top of every page on Goplan), it will also help you keep track of how much time you actually spend working on specific tasks. You start by clicking your status, and the UI guides you through either updating your status or tracking a task. You click it again to stop and start something else. It’s that easy.

Those are the very basics. We do some smart stuff under the hood too, though. If you’re viewing a specific task or ticket and click your status, Goplan will automatically suggest a task name and title and start tracking the time you are working on it. If you’re on the task list or the ticket list screens you can have the same behavior by clicking the new clock icons next to each task or ticket.

Reports, rates, time sheet cards

It wouldn’t make sense to just track time without having reporting tools, so we built those too. Goplan lets you setup hourly rates for each of your team members and generates time sheets based on this information. These time sheets give you and your team mates a good idea of where time and money are being spent in your projects. Time tracking reports are available from your project dashboard (check the new “Time tracking” item on the sidebar, next to Milestones).

At this point, we let you export time sheets in CSV so you can import them into your favorite app. We’re working on other clever ways to integrate Goplan with the existing tools for invoicing so keep an eye out for that (we’ll blog about that soon).

A few necessary remarks

You can’t expect to build the perfect solution for everyone, so we’re definitely looking for your feedback on how timetracking on Goplan 2 works and ways it can improve - we’re sure there’s lots. So go take the new functionality for a spin - we hope you like it!

We’ve been getting huge amounts of feedback since we first launched the new version of Goplan (for which we’re extremely grateful) and one of the most requested features has been Time Tracking. So we’re really excited about finally being able to say “it’s done, and it’s coming on monday”.

A few extra thoughts on features and updates

We’d like to make an extra comment about the way we’re managing Goplan’s development. We’re huge believers that you shouldn’t coast along once you get a number people using your application - something we often see other products do. As such, we have been keeping a backlog of feature requests and improvements that we’ve been tackling week after week (as we’ve mentioned before). We’re really proud of where Goplan is going, and we hope you are too. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts on the product or its features. If there’s a reason why we’re working on this product, that reason is you guys.

Do you use an application for time tracking, or plain old paper sheets? If you use an application, is it online or a desktop app? Do you do track it in real-time, or create a report every day/week/month? Does your organization have one person who keeps tabs on how long someone takes to do something, or does each person do it for themselves?

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts or requests on time-tracking, please leave a comment, or send us an email to support at goplanapp.com. Thanks!

Note: Love those wallpapers? We do too! They’re the work of Mike Stimpson, who totally rocks at taking photos of toys. Check his Flickr set for high-resolution versions of these photos.

Functionality updates

Milestones: The milestone functionality took quite a revamp. Milestones now have their own page where you can quickly have a glimpse of what needs to be accomplished in order for a project milestone to be hit. You can access milestones from the project dashboard (click the project name anywhere on the site or the Home button when inside a project, and Milestones will be right on the sidebar).

Task updates: Tasks are now colored when they have a due date. Green is for tasks who are still days away, yellow is for tasks under 3 days away, and red is for tasks where, well, you know. They’re in the “get me done right now” category. We’ve all been there, though, don’t worry. These changes are also reflected on your dashboard - if you have tasks assigned to you, they’ll be color-coded as well in order for you to know what’s really important.

Discussions: We completely revamped the discussion list and each discussion’s individual page. Although Goplan has a fluid layout (meaning that it is as wide as your browser), discussions typically involve large chunks of text, which means readability goes down if the text is too wide. So we fixed that by giving discussions (the text block) a fixed width, which should help you read through those paragraphs properly.

Company logo: We’re allowing companies to remove their existing logo (have you added yours, by the way? Login pages look 1000 times cooler with a company logo) if they added one by mistake. We missed this one when we launched Goplan 2 and it was about time we fixed that issue.

Comments by email: We heard you. We’ve been getting huge amounts of feedback about being able to reply to updates by email (which is great if you’re on the road), so whenever you get an email about an update, you’ll be able to reply back and your reply will be added to the comments list for the associated item (which can be a ticket, task, etc.)

Two other minor things: Added comment counts next to files and events on the calendar list view. We also changed the way we display names (we now show your user alias as well as your name) so we can do some really smart stuff with tags in the future. Keep an eye out.

“One more thing.”

Ah, we all love that moment in a keynote. You’ve been asking for weeks, and we’ve been secretly working on it. You know what we’re talking about: time tracking. We’re not spilling all the beans already, but here’s a quick hint of how awesome it’s going to be (because a picture is worth a thousand words):

Yes, thats a Lego Darth Vader - in a motorbike. So awesome (don’t miss the important piece of the picture, though). So yes - time tracking! It’s coming really soon. We’re just adding final touches and will have a lengthy post about time tracking on Goplan in the next few days. Keep an eye out! We’re so excited about this.

Goplan had a facelift a few weeks ago with the launch of v2 and we thought it might be interesting to tell you guys about the creative process behind the new logo.

The first thing we had to do was come up with the new logo idea, so I sent an email to everyone at WBS asking them to write down at least five objects/images they associate with Goplan. The results were pretty interesting.

We had a good number of answers but some stood out. The most chosen were checklist, post-it notes, blueprint, blackboard and briefcase. This ended up working great - we got a bunch of great ideas of where to go with the new identity.

When that was done I needed to get all the ideas on paper to start thinking what might work best. After sketching a few of the ideas, a really good one came to my mind. The concept was: two different images, one for each part of the name: Go+Plan. This way people could read the logo and see the name without the text. It was simple, efficient and I really believed it might work.

The next step was picking the best concepts for each of the words. For “Go” it was easy, a cool checkmark would do just fine. For “Plan” i looked at the pool of ideas from the survey and decided that the blueprint would probably work best.

I grabbed my stuff and rushed to the office to share the concept with everyone. They liked as much as I did which was great! The hard part was over and now I had something concrete to work on.

I started drawing a few blueprints but got to a point where a bit of inspiration would do wonders, so I searched for “blueprint” on Compfight ^[1] and got a few nice results. When I thought I had a good starting point i opened up Illustrator and began to work on the final logo.

The first thing i started working on was the blueprint. I did a simple 2d blueprint with some diagrams, then i used the 3d>rotate tool to give it some depth.

After some tweaks on that i started working on the check-mark and I thought the best was giving it a smooth 3d effect. Just like the blueprint, i made a 2d version first, but now i used the 3d>extrude&bevel tool to create the 3d look.

I combined the two elements and voilá:

Then it was time to pick a good font to match the blueprint and check-mark icon. I ended choosing ITC Officina Sans from ITC. I felt the 3D look from the check-mark was fine so i did the same thing to the font.

Combining all the elements this was the final result:

So now after finishing the logo, i moved on to create the icons and some extras. To create the icons i saved the blueprint+checkmark in a few different sizes and opened them in Photoshop to tweak the smaller ones.

Notice that the smaller icons are different because in smaller sizes the logo was too complex so i change it to a simpler version and I think it worked nice.

Then i made some different versions of the logo as you can see below.

And that was that, hope you find this post useful and don’t forget to give us your feedback, we really value it.

^[1]: Compfight is a great tool to look for stuff on Flickr. I highly recommend it if you’re a creative and need a little extra inspiration (and who doesn’t?).

Coming June 29: The first of these functionality updates is coming on Monday, the 29th of June, where among other things (for which we don’t want to ruin the surprise already) we’ll be updating our milestone functionality quite a bit, making it easier for project managers to assign tasks to given milestones and manage them effectively. The second of these updates will be coming 2 weeks later, and so on.

We’ll be using this blog more often to tell you about both small and large updates to Goplan 2, as well as share some of the tips and tricks that users much like you have been sending in. Do send us email if you have any feedback, we are extremely happy about everything we’ve been hearing. We hope you’re happy about the product as much as we are. Coming next week: hints on future functionality.