GanttProject Praha build 306

Hello GanttProject friends,
the next build of GanttProject Praha is available for downloading. The most noteworthy changes are:

1. Microsoft Project export and improved import
2. Months at the bottom of the timeline and thus ability to fit a few years into the Gantt chart viewport

You can download it from http://ganttproject.googlecode.com/files/ganttproject-praha-r306.zip

Read more about GanttProject Praha: http://ganttproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/announcing-ganttproject-praha.html

Announcing GanttProject Praha

Hello GanttProject community!

We haven't been publishing any news for quite a while, but today we have pretty sweet ones!

We are announcing a new GanttProject update with codename Praha. It is a successor of the old good GanttProject 2.0 but with many important updates. Its first alpha version is available for download. It is by far not complete and we will be adding more features and more stability. At the same time we want to make this release cycle short and release the final version of GanttProject Praha as soon as possible.

So, what's new?


What can you try in the first Praha build?

• New Microsoft Project import. It should be able to import the most recent MS Project files, and it also supports importing custom properties, project calendar and resource days off.
• New timeline which is less cluttered and has navigation and zooming controls built-in.
• New weekend option for those who love weekends but have to work 24/7 :). It allows for rendering weekends still counting them as working days. By the way, you can change now weekend setup in your existing projects.
• Task end date is now the date when a task finishes, not the next day. So 1 day long task starting on Nov 12 will finish on Nov 12.
• Task properties dialog UI was rewritten. Now it looks more professional, and task notes are located next to the main properties.
• Additional priority levels

What about Loire?

Well, it turned out that changing that much as had been planned in Loire was impossible. Loire is still in very unstable state while GanttProject absolutely needs a major update. So I decided to build a new version based on 2.0 code. However, many things were backported from Loire and I hope that Praha will eventually evolve to Loire.

Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to Maarten Bezemer whose amazing job on bugs, features and on code cleanup kicked off this development. 

GanttProject news

This recent post on the forum reminded me to share some GanttProject news.

First, many of you have probably noticed that we've got our own forum. This almost finishes our migration from SourceForge. Most of the stuff, including bug and feature tracking, is now hosted on Google Code, and forum is hosted on ganttproject.biz. We're still using SourceForge version control, but we migrated to Mercurial.

Our new forum is similar to SourceForge feature-wise but it is faster and less cluttered than SF. However, another UI and performance was not the only reason to move. We're going to improve web experience of our users, but let me keep the details in secret for now and avoid giving any promises or public commitments.

Second, I am working on GanttProject 2.0.11 which will fix a few bugs and usability issues. You may track the changes in code on our GanttProject pages on Google Code. One of the latest changes allows for dragging tasks holding Ctrl with left button of your mouse and even allows to customize this behavior using a .properties file. 

GanttProject Loire is also alive and evolving in its new Mercurial repository. It is experiencing a major refactoring of almost all important components, which really takes a lot of time and efforts but which is necessary to open up space for extensibility and for new features in task/resource management. 

GanttProject on SlackBuilds.org

Those who are using Slackware Linux may like GanttProject SlackBuild script by Chris Abela which automates installing of GanttProject on Slackware. Thanks, Chris!

GanttProject 2.0.10 is released.

GanttProject 2.0.10 is finally here. It is a relatively big update which fixes a few important bugs (e.g. it makes "Critical Path" feature working), adds an option to create rubber dependencies by default and adds an experimental iText-based PDF export.

Installer for Windows, package for Mac OSX, platform-independent ZIP archive and source code are available on our downloads page on Google Code Hosting. Web Start edition and other updates will follow soon.

Enjoy the new GanttProject!

GanttProject 2.0.10: create rubber dependencies by default

A small new feature in GanttProject 2.0.10 is an option to set rubber dependencies by default. It sits in "Link" group of Gantt chart settings.

Just in case if you didn't know what rubber dependencies are: when two tasks are linked with, say, Finish-Start dependency, then you have two options of how moving a predecessor task affects a successor task:

• If your dependency is Strong then successor's start date will always be the same as predecessor's end date, provided that there are no other constraints. When you move the predecessor, no matter backward or forward, the successor will also move in the same direction. You may think that your tasks are linked with a metal pipe.
  
• If you have a Rubber dependency then the successor will not move unless it really has to. In particular, it will not move backward in the time if predecessor moves backwards. You may think that this link is a rubber band.

Dependency hardness can be changed in dependency properties (tab "Dependencies" of a successor task properties). GanttProject created strong dependencies by default and many people who preferred rubber links didn't like changing properties of every new one. Now it can be configured just once.

GanttProject 2.0.10 Release Candidate

The third build of GantProject 2.0.10 fixes a few bugs, including numerous critical path  problems, and improves iText export output and the UI of the export wizard. Give it a try, report any regression problems. It is a release candidate  build which I plan to release in a few days.