GanttProject 2.6.1

GanttProject 2.6.1, which fixes a number of nasty bugs, was published a few days ago. Also Swedish, Norwegian and Czech translations were updated.

GanttProject 2.6: release build

I am excited to announce availability of the release build of GanttProject 2.6 "Brno". It adds numerous new features: zero duration milestones, outline numbers, timeline labels, to name a few (see the highlights below). We hope they will make your work with GanttProject more productive and pleasant.

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Download GanttProject 2.6 from Google Code

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Thanks a lot to those who spent their time on downloading beta and RC builds, using them in the daily work, fighting big and small bugs and reporting those bugs to us! Unfortunately it is not so easy to find and fix all bugs before the release, and it means that testing continues and we're waiting for the new bug reports. One severe issue has already been found, and there are a few more problems which we'd like to fix, so expect a bugfix release quite soon.

Thanks also to translators who did their best to update the most important translations: German, French, Spanish, Italian and a few others. We're still missing Japanese and Chinese translation updates, so please if you can and willing to do them, don't miss the chance :)

Special kudos to Aki Sivula from Finland who did an amazing job on updating Finnish translation and testing GanttProject!

GanttProject 2.6 highlights:

• milestones have zero duration. That was a very old debt and we're glad that we have closed it;
• new robust task scheduler;
• tasks can be shown as labels in the timeline which are visible even if task is collapsed in the tree. By default, milestones are shown in the timeline, but any task can be put there;
• tasks with notes are labeled now with a note icon on the chart and notes text appears in a tooltip when mouse is over icon;
• new Outline number column which shows automatically calculated hierarchical outline number;
• CSV import makes data exchange with spreadsheets working in both ways;
• vertical dragging of Gantt and Resource charts;
• WebDAV integration UI was completely rewritten. It becomes more important as the number of cloud storage services increases;
• when changing task dates and duration in properties dialog you can now choose what is fixed and what changes;
• logo shown in the UI and in the reports can now be easily changed;

More details in our blog posts by label Brno

Another call for translations: Spanish, Chinese and Japanese updates are urgently needed!

¡Hola! 今日は, 你好

We'd love to release GP 2.6 fully translated to the most popular languages, and at the moment, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese translations are those which need updates. If you're a native speaker of these languages and willing to contribute about 50 translations of the new strings in GanttProject interface, please do us and the whole community a favor! Translation guidelines are available on our Wiki pages: http://code.google.com/p/ganttproject/wiki/TranslationGuidelines

RC IV: Command button replaces Ctrl on Mac OS

Sorry dear Mac users, who have already got used to holding Ctrl key when working with GanttProject keyboard shortcuts. Starting from GP 2.6 RC IV, keyboard shortcuts on Mac OSX use Command key.

GanttProject 2.6: RC IV and new scheduling engine

A new release candidate build of GanttProject 2.6 is available for downloading, and there are some important changes which you should be aware of.

TL;DR: there is new scheduling engine which may reschedule tasks in your existing projects. If it does, you'll see a warning when you open a project.

During GanttProject 2.0/2.5 lifetime we have received quite a few bug reports about our task scheduling engine. Sometimes parent tasks do not adjust their dates when their nested tasks change. Sometimes even more funny and weird things happen. I tried to fix such issues with small scope changes, but it  finally turned out that "small" fixes were wrong way: they complicated scheduling code which was already quite difficult to understand and maintain. So I took a tough decision to replace scheduling engine with a new one, and this new engine was published in RC III.

With two or three bugs found by RC III users and fixed, it now works fine and looks more robust than old one. However, there is a side-effect: if your project is complex enough, there may be scheduling problems which old engine would ignore for a while. For instance, parent task dates could be wrong, and because of that a successor task with Finish-Start dependency could be scheduled earlier than it ought to be, and so on. New scheduler will detect and fix such problems, and as a result, some tasks may change their dates. The schedule overall will become more "healthy" but it may become an unwanted surprise for you. So, to let you know about such changes, GanttProject will show you a warning after opening a project file if it reschedules any tasks. You'll be able to find the details in the log.

Please notice that old scheduler could do the same changes, but at pretty random moments, so I hope this change is positive: it is better to know about all the problems at once and get a list of them, rather than discover them occasionally one by one.

GanttProject 2.6: Release Candidate II and call for translations

A few funny and severe bugs have been fixed, a few translations have been updated, a couple of small features have been added (most noticable is a "hidden" option controlling application font size). GanttProject 2.6 RC II is ready for download.

And we need translations! Comparing to GanttProject 2.5, there are about 40 new string messages which need translation. Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese-Brasil and Russian are already done, but there are other languages. We mostly need Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, so if you're a native speaker of one of them and want to contribute to GanttProject, translation update is probably the easiest way. See translation guidelines on our wiki pages.

Release Candidate build of GanttProject Brno

We're on the home stretch. Beta III has been in quite wide testing for a while, and now the Release Candidate build is available and has already been downloaded a few hundred times. What's new since the third beta:

• Fixed severe problems in the task properties dialog
• An option to store WebDAV password
• An icon on the right edge of the Gantt chart indicating that a task has notes
• An option for changing logo file
• Expand and collapse subtree keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+End expands the whole subtree, Ctrl+Home collapses it.

We will be working on translations next days and will be fixing severe issues, if any. I mean, if you find and report them :)

GanttProject with custom logo

It is GanttProject Enterprise Edition, priced at $1000, branded with your company logo. Wait, wait, I am just kidding. We decided to miss this chance to earn lots of money and provide this feature for free in GanttProject Brno. In fact, it has always been there, but now this option is exposed in the settings dialog. Just create an image file of appropriate size (40-50 px height) and choose it in a field on Application UI option page.

Free Software Foundation is not affiliated with GanttProject and we have no information if they are using GanttProject or not. We just picked their logo for this screenshot.

Wanted: user review for a magazine

Dear GanttProject users, if any of you is a project management professional who is willing to write a short user review on GanttProject for a magazine, please let us know!

GanttProject Brno beta III

The third beta of GanttProject 2.6 Brno is available for downloading, and there is a "what's new" summary on our web site. We hope that the next public build will be Release Candidate and we want to be sure in its quality, so we need your help in testing.

GP Brno beta III is quite stable, settings and files are mostly compatible with GP 2.5.5 (there are subtle issues when Praha opens a Brno file with zero-duration milestones), so you can use it in your everyday work activities. And our forum and issue tracker are waiting for your feedback! 

GanttProject Praha 2.5.5

Well, it is kinda forced update, as it turned out that the only thing one can do with GanttProject.app on the latest Mac OSX Mountain Lion is to move it to the trash. As people normally don't find it quite useful, I spent a few days trying to sign GanttProject.app properly. Now it is done, and GP 2.5.5 runs on Mountain Lion fine.

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• The full list of fixed bugs in GP 2.5.5 
• GP 2.5.5 download page

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GanttProject Brno beta II

The second beta of Brno, the next major GanttProject update, is available for downloading. It fixes a severe problem with task properties dialog which essentially made the fisrt beta useless, so please give it a try again! Also, we enhanced WebDAV user interface. Now it looks like this:

You can navigate through folders, delete, lock/unlock files (if server supports locking). You can choose a server from a drop-down list and add new servers.

GanttProject 2.5.4

One more maintenance update, which fixes 11 issues is available for downloading. The most notable fixed issue is PERT chart scrolling. Now it sits in a scroll pane!

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• The full list of fixed issues
• Download GanttProject 2.5.4

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Linux Insider: GanttProject Packs Prodigious Planning Power

Nice article in Linux insider: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/75597.html

"GanttProject is an impressive project management tool that can be a useful alternative to similar applications locked onto other OS platforms. For enterprise and small-business users, GanttProject's cross-platform access and easy data portability make it a winning choice for Linux users."

I hope our Ubuntu users don't suffer even from this problem:

"But I don't understand why Linux app programmers insist on shooting themselves in the foot with this no-menu massacre"

because our deb package for Ubuntu installs menu item just fine!

GanttProject Brno: the first beta

I am happy to announce that we're starting beta-testing of GanttProject Brno, which is a major update with  new cool features.

The headline is zero-duration milestones, our old debt. It is exactly as it reads: milestones are tasks with no duration. If you have an old project where you already rely on milestones which take 1 day, you will be able to keep them, though.

Next, it is possible to show task names in the timeline, so that the most important deadlines were always visible, no matter how deep they are in the task tree. Milestones are shown there by default, but you can also add individual tasks to the timeline.

And a few more features:

• charts are now draggable in all directions;
• a new Outline number column shows you hierarchical outline number which updates automatically depending on where a task sits in the tree;
• CSV import allows for importing comma-separated files. At the moment it partially imports CSV files produced by GanttProject's CSV export, but it is still under development, so expect it to be more flexible in the next betas
• WebDAV open/save dialog is much more friendlier. Instead of scarce UI with just three fields we now have navigation through folders, options to lock or do not lock a file, editable list of your favorite servers. 

Beta I build is available for downloading as ZIP archive. It should be fairly stable, as it includes all bugfixes from GP Praha branch. Please download it, try it and provide us your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker. 

Converting milestones duration

As I wrote previously, milestones in the next major GanttProject update (GP 2.6) will have zero duration. However, you may have reasons to keep them with 1 day duration in your existing projects. Don't fret. When you open a project, GanttProject will ask you if you want to convert your milestones or rather keep them mostly as-is.

Default option is to convert, but you may choose to keep non-zero duration. Milestones in this case will appear as regular tasks in GP 2.6, but if you save a project and open it in GP 2.5, they will appear as milestones.

Once you make decision, it is saved in a project file so next time you open this project you will not be asked. You can also tick "remember this choice" to save it to the options file for all projects.

GanttProject 2.5.3

GanttProject 2.5.3, a maintenance update is available for downloading. It fixes a few weird issues here and there.

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• The full list of fixed bugs 
•  Download GanttProject 2.5.3

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Zero-duration milestones and labels in the timeline

New and hot features, just submitted to the repository. Milestone tasks have no duration anymore, so now when you reach "launch the product" milestone, you don't have a free day after that for celebrating :P

Besides, milestone task names appear in the timeline as clickable labels, so you will always see and access your deadlines, no matter how deep they are in the task tree.

GanttProject 2.5.2

GanttProject 2.5.2 is here. It fixes a severe problem in MS Project export and a few smaller UI and usability issues, and updates a number of holiday calendars.

People from USA, France, Germany, UK, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Australia, Canada, Poland, Switzerland, Netherlands, we know you sometimes don't want to schedule tasks on Thanksgiving or Autumnal Equinox day. Now you have public holiday calendars for year 2012 in GanttProject. We did our best to compile these calendars properly, but please let us know if anything is wrong with them.

There are also Croatian and Dutch translation updates.

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• Download GanttProject 2.5.2 
• See the full list of fixed issues

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GanttProject 2.5.1

GanttProject 2.5 has been downloaded more than 50k times in 4 weeks after the release, and we've received just a few bug reports, which means that either nobody uses it or that the quality of this release was really high. We prefer to think that the latter is the case :) Anyway, we have fixed 5 bugs, and published a maintenance update, so meet GanttProject 2.5.1.

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• Download GanttProject 2.5.1 
• See the full list of fixed bugs

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Happy April scheduling!

GanttProject hacks: keyboard shortcuts

This post opens a short series of posts on configuring GanttProject.

Many people use mouse or touchpad when they work with GanttProject, but many are accustomed to keyboard and can do a lot of operations way faster if application supports keyboard shortcuts. Well, GanttProject is probably not the most keyboard-friendly tool, but there are keyboard shortcuts and you can redefine some of them if you don't like the default ones. We do our best to give you good default value, though!

You probably know that Delete deletes what is selected, Insert inserts a new task or resource, Alt+Enter opens properties dialog, Tab indents a selected task, Shift+Tab outdents it.  There are also a few shortcuts for the menu actions, they are written in the menu itself. For instance, standard Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V work with clipboard: copy, cut, paste.

But we have more.

Alt pressed with arrows Up/Down moves tasks and resources up and down. Alt and arrows Right/Left indent and outdent tasks.

Ctrl pressed with Space expands or collapses selected tree node, Ctrl+E does the same.

Ctrl pressed with PageUp or PageDown cycles through the tabs, and it works both in the main window and in the properties window.

In the next post I'll write how to redefine the keyboard shortcuts and mouse button bindings.

GanttProject 2.5 Release build

Hello GanttProject community,
we have published the release build of GanttProject 2.5 Praha. Thank you all for the great job you did!

• Brave souls who used beta and release candidate builds and submitted hundreds of issues to the tracker, you well deserve kudos for the high quality of this release
• Translators all over the world, thanks to your awesome efforts GanttProject speaks 15+ languages 
• Maarten, my personal thanks for initiating this release cycle and for your work on code. It was great that I was not just a single and lonely developer.

Of course it is not the end. We will be publishing maintenance updates and we will be working on new features, making GanttProject more easy, friendly and powerful tool.

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GanttProject 2.5 download page with packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and platform-independent ZIP distribution.

Brief summary of what's new in GanttProject 2.5

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Forum login system update

Google Friend Connect which we've been using for authentication on our forum is retired and stopped working since March. From now on, we use authentication service called "Loginza" which is developed by Yandex

You can authenticate using your Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID account. Neither GanttProject web site nor Loginza store your passwords.

GanttProject 2.5: Release Candidate build

We have published the first Release Candidate build of GanttProject Praha. Please fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing! If everything goes fine, we will release GP 2.5 in a few days. We want to be sure in its quality, so we're asking you to help us with the final test cycle. Download the RC, use it for planning your projects and report to us immediately if you hit a severe problem. Other bug reports are welcome too, but we're mostly interested if GP 2.5 works in general.

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GanttProject 2.5 RC I download page with packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and platform-independent ZIP distribution.

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We also appreciate translation contributions. Thanks to a few great guys, we have translations to major languages, but we still need Japanese, Brasilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese and other languages.

GanttProject license update: now with GPL3

GanttProject will be covered by GPLv3 starting from version 2.5. We made this update from GPLv2 mostly for the sake of license compliance with the libraries which we use. For most GanttProject users this requires absolutely no action. GanttProject remains both gratis and libre, you can use it for any purposes, including commercial, given that they are legal per se. Only those who link code of their public proprietary web applications with GanttProject code should be worried, but I really doubt that we have such users.

GanttProject 2.5 beta V

Thanks to the brave souls who are using GanttProject 2.5 and to the great guys who translate the interface, we now have a new beta with a number of important bugfixes and new translations to German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese.

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GanttProject 2.5 beta V download page with packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and platform-independet ZIP distribution.

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If you're running a previous beta of GP 2.5, go ahead and download it now, and tell us if it fixes any problems or creates new. If you're a newbie or die-hard, definitely consider at least trying beta V

We hope that the next public build will be a release candidate.