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.

You were missing the drag-and-drop functionality for prioritization, and the consistence of the tools (those that show up when you drag your mouse over tasks on the task list) being on the right-hand side of the screen. Yesterday we fixed both those things, and the changes are already live on the production servers as I write this post. There’s still quite a bit of changes coming to the task functionality (we’re simplifying the way you can add due dates, in particular) which will be deployed soon.

We wouldn’t be able to work this fast and iterate so quickly if it wasn’t for your feedback - you guys have been awesome. We realize not everything is perfect about the product right now, but we are trying to improve every day. Keep sending in your suggestions. Thanks!

As you may know, being a european startup makes it so we can’t use a payment gateway like Authorize.net - like we’ve done in the past for other products whose legal representation is in the US. Truth is payment gateways in europe are subpar, and we’re looking for a solution to this problem. Until we finally find a solution, we have to apologize for having you use Paypal - which means you need an account on their system to have your company on ours. We know that sucks and we hope the product compensates for that bit of a hassle. We’re on this, and hope to have a solution soon.

If you are a new user

If you don’t have a previous Goplan 1 account, you have nothing to worry about. All you need to do is head over to the new website (New design, too! With video!) and click “Plans & Signup” to get started. We’re giving everyone a 30 day free trial to any plan, so feel free to give it a shot without being afraid to commit (we don’t even ask for payment data until your trial is over).

If you have a Goplan 1 account

Companies and users who have an account on Goplan 1 will be migrated gradually throughout the next few days. In order to guarantee that everything is migrated successfully between the two versions of the product, we’ll be working with each company to be sure you’re well taken care of.

If you are interested in being migrated faster, please email our support team and we’ll send you an email as soon as the process is completed. We’re taking in a lot of people, so it may take up to 24 hours for the move to affect you.

Now that that is out of the way

We’ve been working really hard on this release, and we know it’s been a long time coming. Some of you have been waiting for months, and we hope the waiting was worth it. We want you to have a great experience, so if there’s ever anything that doesn’t look or feel right, get in touch. We want to make this your one stop for project management and online collaboration.

In the coming two weeks we’ll be working on a series of videos showcasing the new functionality and some of the hidden features we haven’t mentioned on the blog yet. We’ll also start talking about some of the other exciting things we have lined up for post-release - particularly integrating with other applications and (you may have guessed it) an iPhone application. We’re excited, and we hope you are too! Look for more posts very soon!

A little background

There are a whole lot of solutions out there for people who are looking for hassle-free online project management. In fact, since we first started on Goplan (the first version) this market has clearly become saturated with products that do what we are doing too. That is a fact, and there’s no denying it. However, we also believe we do some things better than the rest. One of the reasons why we decided to launch Goplan 2 as a full rewrite was to make that difference stand out.

That being said, differences must not come only in functionality (although as I’m sure you’ve seen on our GP2 previews, that counts too) but in pricing. We’ve been wondering about the escalating prices for online apps for a while. We won’t name names because it wouldn’t be useful, but there are a few products out there (not necessarily project management apps) that are way too expensive for what they provide and their real cost of operation.

Anyway, enough critic and on to the real stuff. We’re bringing prices down quite a bit. In fact, we’re simplifying by cutting one of our existing plans and adjusting the features/limits for all the others. Here’s how our plans look right now.

Old plans versus the new plans

Here’s the current Goplan:

• Personal ($10/mn): 12 projects, 8 users, 300mb of file storage
• Startup ($20/mn): 30 projects, unlimited users, 1.5gb of file storage
• Professional ($50/mn): 100 projects, unlimited users, 6gb of file storage
• Unimited ($100/mn): unlimited projects, unlimited users, 25gb of file storage

We actually like these prices, but they have one striking problem - user numbers. This is possibly the one thing that most dramatically differentiates large companies from smaller ones. So it makes sense to bring prices down and scale the plans based on company size. That’s what we did. Here are the new plans (the Personal plan is gone, because we brought the startup price down and features up):

• Startup ($10/mn): 15 projects, 5 users, 15 external collaborators, 10gb of storage
• Professional ($35/mn): 40 projects, unlimited users/collaborators, 25gb of storage
• Unlimited ($80/mn): Everything is unlimited

This makes us even happier. We always wanted to bring all prices down dramatically, and that’s what we’re doing. We hope you’re happy about this too.

Upgrading to Goplan 2

One other thing people have been asking is how we’ll do the upgrade between people and companies who have a Goplan 1 account, into a Goplan 2 account. If you had a Personal or Startup account on GP1, you will be upgraded to the new Goplan 2 Startup plan, which at worst gives you more bang for less buck. If you had a Professional or Unlimited account, you’ll be upgraded to the new Professional and Unlimited accounts, which bring prices down and also pack more features.

The move between Goplan 1 and Goplan 2 will be gradual - this is a complicated move, and we won’t risk your data by doing it automatically for everyone. Come launch, we’ll have Goplan 1 and 2 running side by side, upgrading accounts on a case by case basis. You’ll be able to request the move for your account, and the process shouldn’t take long (our estimate is that with the exception of very large accounts, the migration takes only a few minutes, and you’re ready to go).

We’ll do a post on launch explaining the move, and as always we’ll be available both over email and phone if you have questions or need help. We’re also looking forward to your comments on these plans and updates. Thanks!

The new image gallery (accessible from the File navigation) shows thumbnails for all the files uploaded to a specific project on Goplan, allowing you to quickly get a glimpse of artwork, schematics, diagrams or photos. With the new tagging and filtering mechanism, it also becomes really easy to filter out through the photos and focus on the ones you’re really interested on.

All this (and a lot more) coming really soon with Goplan 2. In the next couple of posts we’ll talk about the new plans and of the minor updates coming. Keep an eye out!