Blog - Online project management software: collaborate, schedule, track

Entries from October 1, 2008 - November 1, 2008

Thursday

Oct302008

New LiquidPlanner release: Halloween treats from our team to yours

Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 2:39PM |

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.

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 Need to ping a team member about an out-of-date task?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

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web based software

Wednesday

Oct292008

Coworking for the Win!

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 5:17PM |

Bruce 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.

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

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 5:13PM |

Liz 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.

Positive Spin

Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 9:29PM |

Charles Seybold

I 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?

Blurb - hardcopy done right

Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 2:32AM |

Charles 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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LiquidPlanner,

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