Jim Anning

Second release

Here’s the second release of the application. I had some excellent feedback on the first release and have tried to incorporate as much of it as possible (see below).

Its great that people are willing to spend a bit of time having a go with the app and helping its development along and I’d like to find a way of saying thankyou… So (and tell me if this is a crap idea),  I’ve decided that for each feedback post I receive I’ll donate £10 to a charity – if you want to nominate one when you post your feedback then if there’s an obvious favourite then that will be the one to benefit.

Notes about this release….

It still doesn’t do anything particularly useful – this week I’ll start work on the Milestones bit of the app so hopefully in the next release it will really start coming together. Some of the differences in this release include….

• I’ve put some sample info in there to make testing easier
• You can now view the timeline down to a resolution of 1 week (thanks Dave)
• Days of the week are displayed when the timeline is zoomed in enough (on my screen I get the days displayed at anything less than 12 weeks or so, depending on your screen size it may be different for you – thanks Clive)
• I think I’ve enabled Mousewheel control of the up/down scroll bar (but can’t test because I don’t have one!! Thanks Dan – tell me if it works or not)
• Swimlanes have changed quite a bit – firstly you can add new ones. If you click on the title hotspot you can change the details, if you drag the title you’ll be able to swap the order of the swimlanes around (this took ages to get right – but i’m fairly pleased with the way it works)
• There were a number of good suggestions which I haven’t tackled yet… including clicking on the zoom slider, having a date picker to control the timeline view and being able to zoom vertically to see more or fewer swimlanes.
• Both Dan and Clive said that there was an issue with the dates at the top of the timeline when you zoomed – they didnt display correctly – I couldn’t replicate this, but since then I have changed the way the app is deployed so would be really grateful to know if this has gone away or if its still and issue I need to fix.
• I tried to make weekends look different (in a different colour) but it just didn’t look right – would be interested in how strongly people agree that it would be easier to use if weekends / non-working days were highlighted?)

As before if you want to leave some feedback then post a comment to the blog.

Thanks – Jim

Years ago I came across Milestone Slip Charts – which are graphical ways to show the history of a plan. I think they are pretty powerful because they make it v. clear whats gone on and you can’t really hide behind them. The top axis shows the planned milestone dates the left axis is real time – i.e. the chart shows how the milestones have changed over time. 

Milestone History Chart

 However…. they are a complete pain in the arse to draw, keep up to date etc… When I was building the basic prototype for the Milestone Planner I realised that the data I was capturing anyway would make it v. easy to build a milestone slip chart (or perhaps we should call it a Milestone History Chart – apparently some projects don’t slip !!). 

One concern is that this may just be too complicated to decipher and that a simpler (but not as rich) way of showing history would make more sense. 

So useful… or too complicated?

Spent the last hour in Costa Coffee doing some more pictures to illustrate design ideas. 

This one is for showing / editing the Milestone details – i.e. it Title, Owner and Status colour (will also allow people to change the due date here – although I’d imagine that most people would just drag & drop miletones on the timeline to do this). The box would pop up when you clicked on a milestone. At some point (once the basic version is up & running, I’d hope to add a whole bunch of stuff into this screen showing the history of the milestone – i.e. who made what changes to it when) and a wikipedia-like way of reversing changes.

 

Main Screen Design v0.1

Today I’ve been working on the main screen design for the Milestone Planner app (which probably needs a better name!!). I’m trying to keep it relatively simple, but to show ‘at a glance’ where stuff is on the timeline. Theres probably still a lot of tweaking of colours etc… but I chose a blue-ish theme as it kind of says “respectable” (Correct me if I’m wrong on this). I think the design must have something to it as I kept forgetting I was using OmniGraffle and trying to click the controls etc. It seems like a good idea to try and get 80% of the way there with the layout etc before I commit to code (I’m planning to code the colour scheme to make it tweakable later anyway), so the plan at the moment is to try and get some feedback on this design, and flesh out a few of the other screens and show what needs to happen when stuff gets rolled-over / clicked etc