Gantt-chart based project management / News: Recent posts

After a very long time, beta 4 has been released with a raft of small but welcome bugfixes and rendering improvements.

The auto-re-schedule code is being ported from version 2, and an initial version is present in this release - but it isn't actually doing anything yet, so you'll have to wait for the next version to make use of it.

3.0 is expected in the near future, probably before the end of April. In particular, the printing should be finished porting from version 2, as should the auto scheduler.

This project is very much still in active usage, it's just that the current beta works almost perfectly, and those developers working on this project (few of whom have sourceforge accounts) have been too busy to add anything except for showstopper bugs.

We would welcome additional developers who have the time to get from 3.0 beta to the final 3.0 release, but otherwise you'll all have to wait until some of us get some more free time.... read more

Some major usability/UI improvements (see the change log), and a lot of minor improvements and fixes.

Most obvious changes are:

- Considerably faster startup time (by a factor of 10 on some PC's)
- "Remembers" the directory where you prefer to load / save your files, even between sessions
- Automatic shortcuts to the last 10 loaded/saved files
- Uses a convenient interactive calendar to select Dates throughout the program

This addresses most if not all of the new bugs and missing features that people have noticed since the major changes introduced in beta 1.

Generally, the GUI has improved considerably in many places.

The next beta release will bring another load of GUI enhancements, but it could take quite a while - we're havcing some problems with performance, and want to speed up responsiveness by a factor of about 2, which could take consierable effort to achieve.

The 3.x series seems extremely stable at the moment, the only reason it is still being called a "beta" is that we haven't finished porting a major features from 2.x ... printing.

This release is the first to allow multiple project schedules to be opened in the same window; we are planning to soon add the ability to "share" parts of projects with each other, so that each staff member can have their own schedule, and all the schedules automatically integrate and/or import each other when you want to see how your work is affecting other staff.... read more

Several new features, a new menu, and a new tab (view).

In particular, the support for dependencies is now much better - with their own menu and view, making it easy to view, manage and (finally!) delete them.

Also, various bugfixes to automatically delete unused dependencies when their start and end tasks get deleted (a problem that has been around since version 2.0!)

Various small usability improvements, extra icons on the taskbar, etc

The biggest new feature is HTML export; this produces standard HTML that retains the neat formatting of your GANTT charts, and is useful for distributing them to people who can't be bothered to download GANTTlet (e.g. attach the charts to an email).

A quick intro on how to use this is here:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=994986&forum_id=232337

Also, version 3.09 includes:
- resize tasks
- move tasks

- Screenshots of v3
- Some docs for v3

One thing in particular to note:

commonggui.jar has been updated; you should overwrite your existing copy with the current one.

This is being released now because:
- it gives you an idea of the changes coming in v3.xx
- you can actually use it effectively - depending upon what features in 2.xx you used, you may even find this version is MORE useful than 2.xx

Please note that this is NOT a replacement for 2.xx yet - it is being released for you to look at, play with, comment on, and in some cases use in production environments (despite missing features, this is stable enough to be used in production - I'm already doing so, as are a couple of others).... read more

This is just a heads-up that I've had some free time recently and been able to do most of Version 3.

The underlying data structures are unchanged, but I've rewritten much of the GUI to be easier to use, prettier, and take advantage of lots of Swing features I'd been ignoring.

In particular, you now have multiple views of the data - you can switch from a "timeline" view showing traditional GANTT chart to a "status" view showing percentage complete (with room for more detail) to a "resource allocation" view which makes it easy to assign many resources to each task, and to view what's been assigned, etc.... read more

Full printer support, to the maximum extente provided by Java.

It appears (from Sun's documentation) that Java cannot yet speak IPP, and so can only print to locally-installed printers, rather than network printers.

Most people actually print to a local printer/driver that then diverts to the network printer anyway, so I don't think this should be a problem.

If you have any probs or suggestions, just let us know.... read more

Printing is now working in the beta version of 2.7, sooner than expected, and will be included in the upcoming release (once testing is complete).

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to add bugfixes to 2.6 (lots of small things cropping up).

...with screenshot, rough feature-list, introduction, links to documentation and downloads.

Feedback on the recent 2.6 release has resulted in a load of fixes, changes, improvements in the following areas:

- graphics (use of standard symbols, all scaling fixed)
- internationalization - transparently shares files between different time/date/languages (thanks especially to Stefan Dallwig for helping test this)
- bug fixes for a few places where the date handling hadn't bene upgraded properly
- GUI cleanup: task names centred vertically in their space, names are auto-scaled to fit as you zoom in and out... read more

New version is out - 2.6

Highlight of major features:

- Zoom facility (use the slider to zoom in and out of the GANTT chart in real time)
- More screen space
- Buttons replaced with icons
- Almost all known bugs fixed, all major bugs fixed

Help needed:

- With the major GUI changes, we need a good tutorial on how to use Ganttlet - I'm willing to do most of the work, but could do with some help (suggestions, questions, problems you've had etc - all the way up to actually writing parts of the tutorial yourself).... read more

I've published a QuickStart guide in HTML, which should cover more than enough ground for you to start using this app productively.

It's in the SourceForge DocManager, URL for the lazy (if I've got this right) is:

https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14186&group_id=68357