It's been a very busy year for LiquidPlanner and we've enjoyed getting to know and serving so many new customers.

We really appreciate all the positive feedback, tweets, and dialog with the user community since it helps us learn how to build even better project management software.

In the spirit of appreciation, we offer our December software update (a.k.a. "Sprint 22"). It's a virtual holiday gift basket full of new features straight from the customer wish list.  

For team members: a new calendar view

And that's just for starters, there's more...

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Task Timers were released a couple of weeks ago (the reward for getting rid of the old Auto-Track feature) and I want to share some of the thinking behind the design.

This was an interesting challenge mainly because of the “1-click” expectations we all have around timers. 

The time trackers of this world want just 1-click to start, stop, re-start, switch, use, or find the target task; I don't blame them because time is money. One customer told us that timer use improved their client billing efforts by 15%. Specifically, they were able to bill their clients for 15% more time; these were hours that they had been previously eating.  

In short, everyone wants timers to be fast, easy, and always right.

Edit Task Details:

The first thing we had to do was create a recognizable, consistent, and small timer control UI that we could use in all the places where LP users interact...

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Tonight we released a service update of things you asked for and things we figured you’d like.

• Overdrive scheduling – a new option on resource profiles that tells the schedule engine to ignore availability. This is useful for modeling external resources.

• Power Filters – Under the four filter button menus on the toolbar you will find new sub-menus that let you build shared custom component filters for the whole team to use.

• Zoom – the filter quick links have moved to the task name column. Try selecting multiple containers and clicking zoom to quickly filter to just those containers.

• shortcuts – got your view set up just the way you like it? Now you can save that as a shortcut so it’s easy to return later. Look for that feature near the help link.

• Navigation improvements – we moved to a formal second level of navigation. A good example is the analysis tab (reports renamed).

• The History view was moved under the collaborate tab.

• You can now set dependencies on folders.

• You can now add tasks from the dashboard.

• Activities are now a saved property of a task.

• You can now change the activity for previously logged entries on your timesheet.

• Duplicate now gives you options to duplicate files, links, and notes.

• Add multiple now supports outline structure and an explicit cast to a container using ”#”.

• The scheduling engine and bar rendering is now more precise at the day scale.

• Scheduling engine performance improvements have been made for larger spaces.

The theme for this release was performance, performance, performance (yes, we take it that seriously). We’ve made most operations faster including saving edits and moving items around. There are also optimizations that will benefit people with large tree structures in their plans. Even though we were focused on speed, we managed to get some new features done too...

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