Using GanttProject in the business of translating

Demid Tishin wrote a blog post about the successful adopting of GanttProject in their translation agency
His post is in Russian (so far) but Google Translate may help to English-speaking audience with a (somewhat) funny translation. You might as well ask Demid to translate it :), using English version of his web site

Gantta Claus is here with GanttProject 2.0.6!

GanttProject 2.0.6 was released a few days ago, on December 17. You are welcome to download and use it!

http://ganttproject.biz/download.php

GanttProject 2.0.6 is a maintenance release that integrates better with Windows and MacOSX and fixes a couple of severe bugs and a few UI quirks.

New features

• Windows installer can associate Microsoft Project files with GanttProject. It makes easier the life of those who don't have MS Project on their machines but want to view .mpp and .mpx files using GanttProject. The option in installer is turned off by default. If turned on during installation, it will associate .mpp and .mpx files with GanttProject so that GP starts when you double click such file and imports it
• MacOSX application now handles "About" and "Quit" system menu commands correctly and also creates file associations with .gan files

Bugfixes

The following bugs were fixed in GanttProject 2.0.6:

• [1064213] Incorrect removal of dependencies
• [1449913] Unindent of multiple subtasks causes task order to reverse
• [1496629] Failures if all days are weekends
• [1699369] Duration of 0 days breaks a task
• [1755404] Chart discarded after canceling "Save" dialog box
• [1826432] Resources - selection and popup menus
• [1827774] Deleting a "New Task" deletes a different task
• [1833302] Error on adding a new custom column
• Chart is not updated on task duration change
• Significant problems with values of resource custom fields and positions of columns in resource table

Localization

• Fixed problems with Slovenian translation (wrong names of months and days of week)

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to Joanna Muras who contributed most of the UI fixes
• Thanks to Eric Pastelleur and his organization who supported seamless importing of MS Project files
• Thanks to Demid Tishin and his translation agency "OK Translations" who tested GanttProject in the real life
• Thanks to David Andrews who contributed MacOSX integration improvements
• Thanks to Peter Zupevc who tracked the improvements in Slovenian localization
  

ganttproject.org has been squatted

Unfortunately we have lost ganttproject.org domain name. Because of our sluggishness it was squatted by unknown friends and now is available for sale and is serving ads. In fact, it is just search spam now. I am not going to take any actions to get it back. ganttproject.biz is our main site from now on, and .org suffix will be removed whenever it occurs next to GanttProject

Overview of the major open source project management tools

Jan Stedehouder wrote a brief overview of four open source project management tools: GanttProject and Planner, KPlato and TaskJuggler

GanttProject video tutorial

Andrew Churches from New Zealand has composed a nice video showing a simple scenario of using GanttProject. It covers the very basic things and might be helpful for those who don't know how to start. Thank you, Andrew!


Watch the video

GanttProject 2.0.5 was released on October, 4

GanttProject 2.0.5 is a maintenance release focused on adding custom fields of tasks and resources to the available export formats.

GanttProject 2.0.5 Release Notes

GanttProject 2.0.5: Release Candidate

The Release Candidate build of GanttProject 2.0.5 is available for downloading
The complete release notes are here. More detailed descriptions of bugfixes and new features are in this blog under the label GP 2.0.5

Bugfixes, exporting functions and interface translations

GanttProject 2.0.5 news:

• Custom fields are supported in Samara HTML export theme.
  
• Resource table now saves the state of shown columns in a project file
• Annoying problem of incorrect rendering of task completion bar is fixed
• New Slovenian translation and updated Japanese translation

We are very close to the release of GanttProject 2.0.5. Hopefully the release candidate build will be ready in a few days.

OpenProj

OpenProj is a project scheduling/management tool similar to GanttProject. It is also open-source and is written in Java. There is a gantt chart, there is a network chart, there are a few resource-related charts. It is developed by Projity, which is probably better known by their online service Project-on-Demand.

My personal feeling after playing with OpenProj a little is that the application is quite raw and unstable so far. There are obvious annoying bugs and quite a lot of usability problems. Goog luck for them, though! If they manage to overcome the problems, the community will be given one more nice project management application.

A few more improvements in exporting and printing

GanttProject 2.0.5 news:

CSV export now understands custom fields and keeps correct order of tasks. Memory consumption of Print Preview has been decreased approximately twice. It is still possible that big projects will not fit into available memory if printed with big zoom level, but in this case an error message will be shown.

Exporting custom columns to PDF

A few more evenings of coding resulted in ability to export custom columns to PDF. There is a new theme Samara which is aware of custom columns. User interface is very simple: columns that you see in the task table are columns that get exported to PDF, plus resources and task notes. Samara theme tries to keep proportions of column widths, places notes under task names, using smaller font and indent and uses task colors in a narrow column on the left, rather than in the whole task row.

A screenshot below shows our HouseBuildingSample project exported to PDF with Samara theme.


Samara is a big and old Russian city on Volga river. I have never been there (except for one sporadic transit through its railway station 13 years ago) but GanttProject feels comfortable there (as well as in many other cities worldwide :)

Update: These changes will be available in GanttProject 2.0.5

Importing custom fields from .gan files

Having spent a few evenings on refactoring of kilobytes of code, I finally added custom fields to the importing of .gan files. So, if you import one project into another, custom fields of your tasks will not be lost.

Two lessons which I personally have been familiar with for quite a long time, but other developers may not know:

1. Singleton pattern is very dangerous and one should avoid using it unless he is absolutely sure that two instances of that class is a non-sense. And even in this case avoid accessing singleton and prefer passing that singleton object as a parameters to the methods where it is required.
   
   In our case the instance of CustomColumnsStorage class was accessed as singleton from just everywhere. So when I decided to create another instance which would load custom fields from a file during import process, I had to patch all those places.
   
   
   
2. Classes which represent user interface must not be used as a model for code that reads data from files (it is just a rephrased Model-View-Controller).
   
   In our case code that handles tags storing custom fields in .gan files directly used instances of GanttTreeTable (a class that represents the table view). So if I want to keep in memory two .gan files (one is a project we work with and another is a project we import), I either have to create two UI tables or to refactor the smelling code and give that tag handler the interface it needs. I chose the second way.
   

These changes will appear in GanttProject 2.0.5

Bugfix: dependency type updates the gantt chart

One more bugfix. Now when you change a type of some dependency (say, from Finish-Start to Start-Start), the Gantt chart updates immediatly

GanttHive with captchas

Effective today, creating accounts on GanttHive is protected from robots by capthas (images with verification code that person who creates an account needs to type).

17/7/7 to be 17/07/2007

A funny UI problem is fixed. Now even if you type "17/7/7" in the begin or end date column (that is, one-digit year) it will be recognized as "17/07/2007".



But what if your project really dates from the beginning of Anno Domini? No problems, just create only one task from that period typing its date without missing zeros: "17/07/0007"


and GanttProject will stop adding 2000 to your one-digit year. If your project start date is not around year 2000 then one-digit year is interpreted literally, as 0007.

Bugfix

A stupid bug that blocked functionality of importing one GanttProject file into another has been fixed.

Profiling session

A number of people complained about performance problems in GanttProject 2.0.4 so I have spent last two evenings on profiling.

In one case the problem was in the project file: I found there one task that started in year 0007 (yep, 2000 years ago) and was half a million days long. It must've been an effect of this UI problem related to entering years using short notation ("7" instead of "2007").

In the second case the problem was in a code doing a lot of unnecessary stuff when loading a project file. Changes were quite easy and small and in the end I successfully loaded a project consisting of 1500 tasks and was able to work with that project with no significant pain.

User base is growing!

The latest updates from GanttHive user survey:

• More than 700 active users who work with GanttProject on daily or occasional basis
• Most users are from US, Germany, France, UK and Japan (totally more than 500 out of all active users)
  
• Users like our usability and easy learning even slightly more than excellent price. That's great!
  

Entry#1

Let's start blogging!

A few days ago I realized that current implementation of gantt chart renderer had become overcomplicated. So I decided to do some refactoring. Fortunately, refactoring is not going to turn into an absolute disaster. And not only the code becomes more clear and understandable, but also a long awaited feature of showing quarters and years in a timeline gets closer to reality.