Offline mirror mode when working with GanttProject Cloud

Many modern project management apps, as well as other software, are built as cloud services. They are great and they work fine, provided that you are online and a lot of servers between your computer and service provider are working normally. They usually do, however, when they don't, it may render very frustrating.

Ooops!

What may go wrong? You Internet service provider may have network issues. Our servers may get down (we do our best to keep them running though!). Even your government may have issues with someone whom you don't even know and may block access to a wide Internet segment because of that.

GanttProject has always been a desktop application and it does not need an Internet connection. But now, when GanttProject Cloud offers a collaborative cloud storage, will it suffer from the same problem of Internet availability? Most likely, no.

GanttProject Desktop app can work with the documents from GanttProject Cloud in two modes: online and mirrored offline. Let's talk a bit about the latter.

The primary storage of a mirrored document is still GanttProject Cloud. When you click Save, you send an HTTP request to our servers and the document is written to the cloud storage. However, it is also saved on your local computer in a slightly hidden place. We call it "mirroring" and we save the file contents and some metadata about the latest sync with the Cloud. Normally this mirror is identical to what is stored in the cloud. It sits in a hidden folder and does not expose itself in any way besides this icon in the status bar:

Status bar indicates if document is available offline

If something wrong happens on the way from you to us, and your desktop GanttProject loses connection with GanttProject Cloud, the document will switch to offline mode and when you click Save, it will write to the local mirror. In the status bar you will see that the document is now Offline and countdown to the next reconnect try

GanttProject is working with the cloud document offline and is trying to reconnect.

Once the connection is restored, GanttProject will try to sync the offline mirror with the Cloud. If Cloud version of the document has not been changed while you were offline, it will just seamlessly switch to online mode, otherwise GanttProject will ask you to resolve the conflict. 

GanttProject shows that your offline mirror has diverged from the online copy

But what happens if you close GanttProject when you're offline and then start it again? How can you find your offline mirrors? Don't worry. If you're offline, "GanttProject Cloud" storage in the File Dialog will show your offline mirrored documents. 

If you're offline, GanttProject Cloud pane in File Dialog shows offline mirrored documents.

Documents which were accessed in online only mode are naturally unavailable when you work offline. Why one may need online mode then? Well, if you access GanttProject Cloud from a computer which you don't trust, you may want to use the online mode. 

You can switch between modes at any moment by clicking the icon in the status bar. It will open a dialog where you can change the online mode, lock or unlock the document or access the revision history.

Starting from update 2911, which is coming soon, GanttProject will open Cloud document in offline mirror mode by default. Have fun, collaborate with your colleagues and build your project plans even when you are offline!

GanttProject 3.0 packaging and update system

TL;DR: there are many somewhat technical details below. Long story short, GanttProject 3.0 comes with built-in update system. Leave it enabled to get bugfixes and other minor updates faster.

GanttProject 3.0 beta, build 2910

We started a public beta testing of GantProject 3.0 in August. The testing goes fine, we already see a few dozens of people who use GP 3.0 is their daily work. GanttProject 3.0 is compatible with our old good GP 2.X series and it reads and writes files in the same format. It is also very stable, so we encourage to join the beta testing.

Due to many factors, we had to include Java Runtime into the distributions, and the size of GanttProject 3.0 distro is now about 100 megabytes. Because of this and because building a complete distro for all platforms takes a lot of time, we decided to implement the update system which can install small updates as they are ready.

So, today we published update 2910 with many bugfixes and usability improvements. If you launch GP 3.0, the update system will suggest to install this update, as well as the previous ones.

Work with file storage was rewritten in GP 3.0 and now documents from the local computer, from WebDAV storages and from our own GanttProject Cloud are available in the single File Dialog. It is already very nice and became even better in build 2910:

• Offline cloud documents support is nearly completed. We fixed a lot of bugs, made the user interface more intuitive and checked that GP switches between offline and online modes smoothly (and fixed it when it didn't). Offline cloud documents are great, and we'll share more details on this later.
• Cloud documents were seamlessly integrated into the Recent Documents list. 
• Work with local documents became more error-proof. "Save" button becomes disabled if the target file can't be written, and we show a hint explaining the reasons. "Overwrite" checkbox prevents from accidental overwriting of the existing files. 

Local documents in the File Dialog

GanttProject Cloud document in the Recent Documents list

Download GanttProject 3.0, update to the latest build and join beta-testing! GanttProject 3.0 is integrated with GanttProject Cloud server for storing your project documents. if you work in a team, don't miss the opportunity to try GP Cloud. It is free during the beta-testing. 

GanttProject 2.8.11 hotfix update

A new build 2396 of GanttProject 2.8.11 is available from our website: https://www.ganttproject.biz/download

It fixes a few severe issues:
-- macOS: only English, Galician and Tajik languages are available in the settings UI;
-- Linux: ganttproject launcher won't open files when using relative paths;
-- all platforms: visible columns in the task and resource tables reset to default after undo operations or on file opening;


Version number remains the same, only build number has changed.

If you already downloaded GP 2.8.11-r2393, we strongly recommend to download the new build.

GanttProject 2.8.11

GanttProject 2.8.11 is a maintenance release with updated calendars, translations, a few fixed bugs and major update in macOS package.

• Updated holiday calendars of top 20+ countries and regions according to our Google Analytics data. Welcome, Karnataka region! 
• Major update of Simplified Chinese translation and minor updates in Korean, Italian and Turkish translations.
• Several fixed bugs.
• Package for macOS now comes with bundled Java Runtime and is properly signed and notarized to make the security system in the latest macOS versions happy.
• Also, we tested a number of Java Runtime configurations on Windows and wrote up the results in the release notes to help our users choose the runtime which provides the best experience.

Packages for Windows, macOS, Ubuntu/Mint/Debian Linux and platform-independent ZIP archive
are available from the download page on ganttproject.biz and from the release page on GitHub.

GanttProject is free software and you can download any package at no cost. You can help us to spread the world by leaving your like or review on Facebook or Capterra or by following us on Twitter or Facebook, or by purchasing paid download.

GanttProject is now available from Microsoft Store

GanttProject application with bundled Java Runtime is now available from Microsoft Store. We hope that this will make it easy to install on portable Windows devices, such as Microsoft Surface.

Please notice that this app is marked as unofficial. It was packaged by Hauke Hasselberg independently on his own initiative, and we can't provide support with respect to packaging issues, should they arise. However, it is the same GanttProject which you can download from our official locations and we do provide the same best-effort support for packaging- and device-independent functionality.