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Entries from October 1, 2008 - November 1, 2008

Thursday
30Oct2008

New LiquidPlanner release: Halloween treats from our team to yours

DateThursday, October 30, 2008 at 2:39PM | AuthorLiz Pearce

The team at LiquidPlanner has been hard at work designing, developing, and testing features for last night's release for the past nine weeks or so. Just in time for Halloween, we're debuting them with the hope that they'll make managing your projects in LiquidPlanner faster, easier, and more connected to the other applications you use every day.

Everyone on the product development team is vital to LiquidPlanner's continual evolution; here's a list of who's responsible for what this time around:

Multi-select and right-click in LiquidPlannerJake has spent countless hours making our web-based UI seem even more like a desktop application. Now you can select multiple items at a time and move them around or perform various actions on them, making building and modifying your plan tons faster. Right-click now works in LiquidPlanner, too, so you can access many common actions without ever having to move your mouse. He's also made it easier to "watch" items, enhanced the virtual user feature, and worked on performance optimizations.

Adam is the one to thank for the ability to email tasks directly into LiquidPlanner from your email client. Have an email thread with lots of background information and attachments that need to be captured in LiquidPlanner? Modify the subject line to include the task name, owner, and estimate then send it to one of your custom LP "inboxes." All of the task information will be captured in your plan. Easy! He's also enhanced printing capabilities on the collaborate and analyze tab, worked to improve the import process, and made it easier to embed images.

Bryan is our scheduling engine master. He's been spending his time getting the scheduler house in order, focusing on everything from bug fixes to performance improvements.

Jason put new project templates in place and integrated outbound "update request" emails into LiquidPlanner. Need to ping a team member about an out-of-date task? You can now do so in just two clicks.

Susanna, our new test engineer, has worked her tail off making sure we get the cleanest code possible out to our users. All of us are extremely happy she's joined the team.

We look forward to your feedback on these new features. If you find them half as useful as we do, we'll have done our jobs.

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Wednesday
29Oct2008

Coworking for the Win!

DateWednesday, October 29, 2008 at 5:17PM | AuthorBruce Henry

Last night I had the pleasure of announcing a special LiquidPlanner offer for members of the StartPad.org coworking space. While your company (or anyone working for your company) is a paying member of StartPad, LiquidPlanner will give you 5 free seats!

Why are we doing this?
Well, there are a couple of reasons...

We like small startups and we understand how hard it can be to get a company off the ground (no really, we understand). So we thought that this would be a great way to help. And who knows, if your company "goes big" maybe you'll keep using LiquidPlanner to plan and execute your projects successfully. That's good for you and good for us. Win!

Working from home can be great, but if you do it a lot it can get a little lonely. Working from a cafe is okay, but after your 3rd coffee the caffeine paranoia sets in and it gets hard to control your mouse. Enter coworking businesses like Startpad.org which give you a full facility in which to work. You get to work from a different space but still have some people around to bounce ideas off of.  Win!

Coworking rather than driving all the way into work can reduce your commute. Less commuting means less time driving, fewer cars on the road, better environment. Win!

I'll be on the lookout for more opportunities to partner with businesses to help each other out. If you have an idea for how we could work together I would love to hear it. Please feel free to contact me.

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Wednesday
29Oct2008

10/29/08 Release: Multi-select, email integration, more

DateWednesday, October 29, 2008 at 5:13PM | AuthorLiz Pearce

This was a huge release, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback about the new features.

Multi-select – It’s finally here! You can now select multiple items at once to edit, move, delete… any ‘like’ action can now be batched and executed across multiple items at a time. Not only does this speed day-to-day operations, but multi-select improves performance on typical planning scenarios by an order of magnitude.

Email integration – It’s easier than ever to add new tasks with our new email integration feature. Copy the container’s email address. Then open a new mail. Enter the task name, owner, and ranged estimate in the Subject line. Notes in the email body will be added under detailed notes; images will be uploaded as attachments.

Right-click – Right click over any work item and a new menu will appear, sort of a cross between the “add” and the “actions” menus. This gives you quick access to the most common operations in LiquidPlanner, like adding or deleting an item, focusing your view, and printing your schedule.

Watch column – Add the “watch” column to give yourself an easy way to watch or un-watch any item with a simple click of your mouse. Just go to the plan tab, select actions >>> advanced actions >>> customize columns. Select watch and click save.

Additionally, we rolled out a big batch of small improvements to the scheduling engine and the printing feature. New and improved sample projects provide insight into optimal workspace architecture, whether you’re getting started or just adding new projects.

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Saturday
18Oct2008

Positive Spin

DateSaturday, October 18, 2008 at 9:29PM | AuthorCharles Seybold

SpinArt for the iPhoneI admit it, I love my iPhone. It really has transformed my life, at least in the sense that there is always something to fill any unallocated moment.

I pet my iPhone in the Starbucks line and it purrs back with a flyby of my inbox. I unlock and re-lock at stop signs just to hear it click. And then there are the apps; I have a little 99 cent habit. I can’t help it because I love well designed toys as much as well designed tools.

I’ve found an application that is worthy of a little praise for its incredible simplicity and yet amazing ability to deliver fun; it’s called SpinArt.

If you have kids, like random art, or want to make market predictions, then this is a must have. Just flick the tile to start it spinning and poke it to start the paint flowing. My favorite trick is to saturate it with color and then start using white for a little crisp style.


Here’s my "best of" gallery show; should I quit my day job?
Modern Gallery of SpinArt

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Saturday
18Oct2008

Blurb - hardcopy done right

DateSaturday, October 18, 2008 at 2:32AM | AuthorCharles Seybold

It’s Friday night so no work stuff in this post. I want to share the word on one of my favorite tools, Blurb.com. This online service lets you make your own bookstore quality books. It has a downloadable layout tool that uploads your design and content and bada bing, 7-10 days later real books shows up at your door.

I’ve just finished publishing my 5th Blurb book (30 pages for $13). For me it’s all about photos. I really enjoy digital photography and when I sit down to actually do a project, it’s quite fun. Blurb has polished its feature set quite well over the last year. They have kept the interface clean and simple. I’d go as far as to say its fool proof. It is a template driven design, which annoys my bit-twiddler nature, but there is a wide variety of page layouts to choose from so I’m OK with it. I always choose the darkroom template with the slick black background because it looks classy and gets oooohs and ahhhs from friends.

My books are just for friends and family, but Blurb supports a marketplace. For example, my friend Ricco just published a coffee table book of his paintings (Of Dreams and Shadows), you can preview his book online, heck you can even buy if you want.

Speaking of friends and family, the gift giving season is coming. Instead of spending money on crap they don’t really want, why not stay up late one night and make a book of your best iPhone pics and your best twitters over the last year. You save money, they will laugh, and you don’t have to leave the house.

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Wednesday
15Oct2008

Producing Camtasia Videos for the Web

DateWednesday, October 15, 2008 at 1:40PM | AuthorBruce Henry

I've gotten a couple of questions about how I produce the videos for the LiquidPlanner tutorials so I thought I'd take a minute to blog the notes that I passed on to Kevin Merritt (founder of Blist).

I use Camtasia Studio 5 from TechSmith. The folks at TechSmith produce great tools. Just like SnagIt, I've really got nothing but good things to say about Camtasia. It is fast to get started producing videos and it has all the features that you'd want. My wish list for Camtasia is extremely short which speaks volumes for its quality.


  • better integration with CMS (we're using Joomla)

  • fix the strange tendency to have the edit cursor drift on long takes relative to the audio track

Now to the details...

For audio I’m using a Samson C03U USB condenser mic set for flat response at 0db. I keep the mic about 4-6” from my mouth and talk across the mic rather than directly at it to prevent pops on my plosives (letters like "b" and "p"). A high quality mic is the best investment you can make for producing decent videos.

When getting ready to record try this speaking exercise:
Breathe in and hold your breath. Feel that "catch" as you start the "hold"? You want to avoid that when recording, it comes through as strained and makes your first word more forceful/loud that is natural. Instead try going straight from breathing in to talking with no pause, smoothly. Alternatively you can say a couple of "throw away" words before the "real words" you want to record. For example, "I really like pie. LiquidPlanner can be used to coordinate…"

Top pointer… screw with your resolution and compression BEFORE you start recording and try to record at a nice multiple of the screen size you want in the output. I set up a capture window that has a 1200x900 view port and then capture just the part that I care about (like I skip the Firefox menus). That’s 1.5x the final resolution.

Here are the production settings I use for Camtasia:

Adobe Flash (SWF) movie file:
Colors: True Color+ (32-bit)
Frame Rate: 10
Size: 800x600
JPEG Encoding: Enabled
JPEG Quality: 75
Playback controls: Advanced
Pause at start: Disabled
Allow resizing: Enabled
End action: Jump to URL (/blahblah-video-done.html)
Audio Format: MP3
Audio Attributes: 22.050kHz, Mono, 32kBits/sec
Watermark: Disabled
HTML: Enabled
Table of Contents: Disabled
SCORM: Disabled


See that "Jump to URL" thingie above? I use that to get viewership metrics. I can tell how many people hit the video and how many watch it to the end because each video sends them to a unique URL after viewing.

When beginning production clear all the zoom and pan stuff and then insert it manually after all of your edits are done.

Top 5 Tips for Video Tutorials


1. Setup resolutions and sizes first.
2. One topic to a video and keep ‘em short.
3. Make your "takes" as long as possible. It is better to just stop when you make a mistake and start over from where you were while still recording. You can always edit it down later.
4. Use the pause button (F9) as it will move the cursor back to where you pressed pause when you un-pause.
5. Don’t get too caught up on the script. Get post-its and build a bullet point list of what you want to hit and then do it a couple of times to get it right. Kinda like prepping a short canned demo for a conference.

That’s the bulk of the tips and tricks I know. I should someday post an outtake reel. I sit in the office with headphones on while recording and swear like a sailor between (and sometimes during) takes.

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Friday
10Oct2008

Time Cards should start at the Top

DateFriday, October 10, 2008 at 7:41PM | AuthorBruce Henry

Today we were going over our time card design. It is really coming along nicely. We've been strongly influenced by a few assumptions that we made early on and I'd like to get them out there and see what our blog readers have to say about 'em.

One of the primary assumptions that we made was that there are really two kinds of people in this world


  1. People who want to time card and already have time card software

  2. People who don't have time card software and don't want to time card

This makes integration with existing systems like FreshBooks, Harvest, and others a fairly high priority for us. Nobody wants to have to enter time in two systems when those systems could just talk to each other.  Right?

Also, we are assuming that either the majority of an organization needs to be filling out time cards or pretty much nobody in the organization does. This means that at some kind of high level you need to be able to force the time card interface for everyone in your workspace. If it is not mandatory it should still be optional on a person by person basis.

On a related but tangential aside, when we rolled out time cards at Expedia we did it initially using a small product called ClickTime. We were quite happy with it at the time as it did pretty much everything we needed.  Expedia now uses CA's Clarity and at least several of their folks have referred to it as "the most f**ked up system ever." But that's not my point at all.

What is my point is that the time we rolled time cards out I think we made a big mistake. We said that people at the Director level and above did not have to track their time. I now think that this sends completely the wrong message.

Look, if the whole idea of time cards is to get a better handle on where your valuable resources are being spent, and your highly friggin' compensated execs are highly compensated because... well... they're so friggin' valuable, then it follows that they of all people should be tracking their time via time cards. Time cards should start from the top down.

Okay... breathe Bruce, breathe..

Anyway, what do y'all think of our time card assumptions? Comment early, comment often.

(P.S. - Nick Molnar wins the Best Comment prize for his comment on Playing Games with Collaboration. Congrats Nick! I'll be in touch to get you your fabulous prize!)

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Thursday
09Oct2008

Malcolm Gladwell and the Desire for Certainty

DateThursday, October 9, 2008 at 3:37PM | AuthorBruce Henry

I watched Malcolm Gladwell's talk at the 2008 New Yorker Conference. It is a good talk and you should watch it. He's talking about something he calls "the mismatch problem".  While quite interesting, I really have nothing to say about it. Rather, I'd like to riff for a few minutes on a couple of things that he said in the talk taken completely out of context. I get to do this because... well... I'm the author.

"[It] has to do with our desire for certainty... we have a desire to impose certainty on something that is inherently uncertain."

"We have this sense that progress, broadly speaking, has the effect of reducing uncertainty. But the opposite is true."

- Malcolm Gladwell


What struck me about these quotes was that he's expressing something that I see all the time in project management. That the desire for a plan that shows with certainty that things will go according to a specific schedule overrides the desire for really truthful information about the project. This desire for certainty, even a false certainty, often causes project teams to delude themselves about the realities of their projects.

In many ways, you have to admit to yourself that things are uncertain. You must embrace the uncertainty, before you can begin to control a project. The harder you try to resist and force a false certainty upon the project and the project plan, the more out of control the project becomes.

The very act of trying to tightly control a project can in the end lead to its failure.

So open your arms. Embrace the uncertainty!

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