Jim Anning

Whilst I continue to develop the next release it feels like Milestone Planner is picking up and starting to get some traction. Its been picked up on a few startup blogs which is helping to up the number of visitors. We’re about to hit the 500 registered users mark and its really gratifying to see more people coming back week after week to keep their plans up to date. Have been getting some good feedback from people and am feeling pretty positive about the whole thing.

So Milestone Planner seems to be working out OK. In the first couple of weeks there have been around 700 visitors, about 45% of them give the app a go – and at the last count 100 people liked it enough to sign up. I’ve had some great comments on the app (nicest ones below) and some good suggestions for improvements…

“What an awesome job!! This is absolutely fantastic. You would not believe how easier this has made life.”

“Very good format & very user friendly.”

“I love this app – it’s exactly what I need to create a visual for a complicated project I’m working on.”

Still have work to do on tweaking things to improve the 45% take up, but on the whole I’m pretty pleased with how its going. There’s another release planned in 2/3 weeks time which will extend the planning horizon from 30 to 52 weeks and I’m starting to work through how the collaborative aspects of the product should work.

So far so good!

It’s been a month and a half since we got back from Spain. It’s been hard work, but I’m really pleased that I’ve released the first version of milestone planner!!! Will publicly launch in a couple of weeks.

its at www.milestoneplanner.com

Our house for the last couple of months

So today is our last day in Niguelas before we head back to the UK (just in time for new years eve). Things I will miss….

• playing with Joel & Zak down by the river, making dams and generally bending nature to our wills
• Fresh mountain air, bright blue skies & fantastic views
• The whole notion of Tapas – a tasty snack every time you order a drink

On the other hand… I will not miss…

• Having to wear three layers of clothes to bed when its icy and arctic outside
• the cross-your-fingers, sometimes there, sometimes not internet connection
• cleaning out the log fire everyday

All in all its been a great trip – I’m so glad we could do it before Joel started school. The kids have had a brilliant time and have spent all the time playing with the few toys we brought with us (thankyou Lego!) and each other – without a second thought for CBeebies etc.

I didn’t make as much progress on MilestonePlanner.com as I hoped – I’d wanted to get the first publicly available version online by now, but what we’ve developed so far is good, the feedback from everyone has been really useful and I think we’re well placed to get in up & running early in the new year.

So… from Niguelas… Adios & see you all back in the UK soon.

Any thoughts of it being balmy and warm when you’re 1000 miles south of home have long been forgotten… ITS COLD! This morning saw icicles on the window frames and lots of crisp white snow – how Christmassy is that.

Joel heads for the slopes

Note : the Niguelas Christmas lights (and they are every bit as spectacular as you may imagine!) have not yet been turned on – there is some kind of Andalucia-wide energy saving initiative going on – every town and village are delaying the grand turning-on of their lights in a bid to prove themselves the most energy conscious municipality.

Am wondering if I should point out that the year-round, nightly illumination of every church tower with arc-lights so bright that they can be seen from Mars kind of makes the whole thing about delaying switching on a few measly coloured baubles a bit of a joke.

This time with Milestones

OK – So this time it does something useful!! – although because I’ve yet to work on any back-end stuff it still doesn’t store anything. The main difference this time round is that you can now add & edit milestones (which after all is what its all about). Click on a blank bit of swimlane to add one, drag to move it around & click to change its colour / edit details etc.

I’ve also been pondering whether to start calling the swimlanes workstreams instead – thoughts? Also if anyone has access to a projector I’d be v. interested to know how well it translates onto a big screen (I’d see a major use of the software being to capture output of workshop planning sessions)

Notes for this release..

• As mentioned Milestone functionality is now there – particularly interested in feedback around how easy or not the software makes it to add / update etc. Most of the work over the last couple of weeks has been on getting this up & running – solving problems such as what to do when 2 of the little blighters overlap etc.
• I’ve fixed the issue that John discovered around dragging swimlanes – I’ve had to get rid of the fancy smooth movement to do it but at the end figured that its far better to have something which reliably works than something which looks pretty – can always pretty it up later
• Have gone over the thing around weekends and put it in the TFD box for now. My first thought was to have an option not to display Sat & Sun.. but as John pointed out big chunks of the world have their w/ends on Fri/Sat + you then get into the whole bank hols etc issue + We’ve all worked on projects where Sat/Sun started off being days off but at crunch points there are often milestones planned in for the w/ends. Once its up & running for real I’ll be able to log how many people are actually putting milestones on w/ends and then make a call what to do.
• Have changed the font – what do you think?
• Text can still overspill in lots of places – am aware I’ll need to go round and either limit the number of characters you can have in each field, or crop text so that it doesn’t overspill.

Thanks for all the feedback to-date, both on and off the blog…. I’ll be giving £80 to ActionAid as a result.

Take Note St. Nick

F.A.O Father Christmas: This is the note which Joel has written to you to inform you of his festive requirements. We put it in the fire to ‘send it up the chimney’ to you. However, as he is not convinced that this is a guaranteed delivery mechanism we have reproduced it here for the record. Please take appropriate action and note that the chimney here is pretty narrow.

Am glad to report that children’s toothpaste in Spain can be bought ‘Sin Azucar’… i.e. ‘without sugar’.

The joys of living on the edge of the Sierra

Haven’t posted anything for ages – we’ve had a couple of sets of visitors… so we’ve been busy entertaining. Weather here has been crap the past couple of weeks – grey skies and rain (or about 500 feet above where the house is it has all fallen as snow). Lisa took this pic on the road to Niguelas last week. Spectacular, but a bit chilly!! Luckily my fire making skills continue to improve – Ugh !

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