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:

Jake 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.

When Brett got a break from site maintenance and deployments, he worked on marketing projects and built a handy new pricing calculator, so you can calculate the LiquidPlanner cost for different team sizes and payment options (and see instantly how the 3-for-free discount saves you money).

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 Need to ping a team member about an out-of-date task?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.

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.

I’m going to be on the Project Management 2.0 panel at the Office 2.0 Conference next week in San Francisco. I’m totally looking forward to discussing what the next generation of project management practices looks like. The panel will be moderated by Bay Area blogger Zoli Erdos.  It looks like it will be an interesting panel with some great panelists with whom I’m honored to be sharing the mic.

I think that the new tools that are coming on the scene are radically changing the way that project teams interact. Project management started out as a top down, planning and oversight activity designed to coordinate teams on large projects and monitor the status of said projects. The old paradigm of a project manager using stand alone software to do these functions is falling by the wayside.

More recently people have begun to realize that this centralized function was not just a bottleneck for reporting, it was severely limiting the success of the teams and their projects. Distributing many of the project management functions and allowing the entire project team to collaborate and communicate effeciently is what the next generation of project management tools is all about. This improves project execution and make teams more accountable for hitting their targets and deadlines. Zoli does a great job of summing the key question of “What is the Promise of Project Management 2.0?” in his blog post about the project management 2.0 panel.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to meeting Zoli and my fellow panelists. Hopefully we’ll get some time ahead of the panel to interact and give the audience something to think about.