AgileAgenda - New Version

Posted a new version of AgileAgenda over the weekend.  Fixed a few minor bugs, redesigned the opening screens, and put in our new logo.  The entire initial user experience should be better now.   Here's a quick glimpse of what it looks like now:

AIR Badge installer + swfobject + ExpressInstall

I've put together a page to install AgileAgenda using SWFObject with the ExpressInstall feature and the AIR Installation Badge.

This means people with a Flash Player less than 9.0.115 should be able to first upgrade their flash player, and then use the easy badge installation method for AIR + the application. I gave it a try on Firefox + Safari on OSX and IE + Firefox on WinXP, all of them with a 9.0.47 flash player and it all seemed to work well. The code also displays a message suggesting people install Flash player or install the AIR application manually if they don't have any version of Flash.

I've put together a small archive of the necessary files to make this work. It contains files from the swfobject guys released under the MIT license, and you can consider anything I wrote to make this work also under that license (which allows you to pretty much use it any way you like).

Thanks go to the swfobject guys, they really made this a no-brainer on how to implement!

Hope this helps some people.

AgileAgenda - New Version

For those of you new here, AgileAgenda is a project scheduling application built on Adobe AIR.

There's a new version of AgileAgenda now available on the website.

It's been updated for AIR Beta 3, and includes a lot of bug fixes and minor enhancements, with a couple large feature improvements thrown in for good measure. You can read the list on the project blog.

The biggest change for me is file open/save dialogs work on OSX Leopard! Yay.

AgileAgenda - new version

There's a new version of AgileAgenda available over at http://www.agileagenda.com/download/index.html. For those of you who are visiting the blog for the first time, it's a project planning and scheduling package written in AIR. I'm starting to get close to a 1.0 release as I'm down to a single feature I want to get in there, and only a handful of known bugs.

I've spent a bunch of time working on the PDF export and have really been pushing alivePDF to it's limits. Last week I sent a bunch of changes having to do with page size and a couple bug fixes to Thibault, everyone should check his project out, it rocks.

Here's a quick example of the type of stuff you can do with AlivePDF.

Developer interface to schedules

I've been working on a project scheduling application, and have a sneak peek at a new feature.

Wouldn't it be great if every developer on your team could go in to the schedule and update the tasks they're responsible for? They could mark them complete when they finish them, suggest new estimates, or make comments. Or even just to look at the latest set of tasks they have.

But doesn't it suck to have to worry about developers mucking around in your precisely laid out schedule?

Now, there's a developer interface that lets them subscribe to your schedule, and then update and comment on tasks with a simplified user interface.

Using the interface, they can subscribe to multiple schedules using a special key you can generate from the AgileAgenda main interface.



Then they can synchronize their view with the network version and take a local copy with them.




Right now, it's read-only, but I'll be adding all that 2-way stuff soon. And don't worry, any changes made through the dev interface will have to be approved by the project manager in the main AgileAgenda interface.

I'll have to slap on a slick interface at some point as well.

New tutorials

There's a new AgileAgenda tutorial showing off the basic functionality of the software. See it at this url:

http://www.agileagenda.com/help/createproject.html

You can view the previous tutorial on the light table at:

http://www.agileagenda.com/help/lighttable.html

AgileAgenda Light Table

The latest feature to AgileAgenda is the "Light Table", where you can drag your tasks around to modify their priority, who they're assigned to, and the estimated duration. I think this feature has the possibility to be a huge help to some people.

Take a look at a short video showing it.

AirDerbyEntries++

Last night I submitted agile agenda for the AIR derby. I wasn't going to originally since I didn't think I had a chance in hell, but then I got thinking. Even making some kind of entry-list might generate some good publicity. With beta starting within the next week or two, I could use a little press.

AgileAgenda facelift progress

I've been feverishly working on some of the UI elements of AgileAgends that have been sorely lacking in recent revisions. I've gotten a lot closer to something I'm proud to admit to doing. Here's a couple screenshots.







Go see a full listing of screenshots.


Also, we're still accepting beta apps...

AgileAgenda progress

With the release of AlivePDF, I've started on the printed reports of the project, arguably one of the most important features of software like this. Here is a sample report for the first few hours of working on this stuff. I'm quite pleased with how easily and quickly it was to develop that. It needs a lot of work visually, but I think it's actually a useful report. When printing these out you can choose which sections of the report will go in. Eventually I want to get the outline/bookmark PDF features working to make it easy to jump around in the document. I still have to tackle printing out the gantt style chart, but that's for another day. (Note on sample... that project is an amazingly simple project not really needing software like this. I've also been using this software for a project I've been working on at my "real job" and that is actually useful)

I've also been working with a young designer from France on some of the visual aspects of the software. He's been making icons for a while now and agreed to let me use some of them in my project. On top of that he did a mockup on a screen that took my thoughts on design to a completely new direction. He's working on a project of his own as well, I'll make sure to post about it when it's ready. Here's an example of what the software might look like come release time:



Even that look still has a couple rounds of revisions left, but it's getting closer.

We're still accepting beta applications for anyone interested in trying this stuff out in the first round of beta.

OSX Flex app is slow...

So I tried my scheduling software on my mac today. It took about 18 seconds to calculate my schedule on my duo-core 2ghz MacBook Pro.

My home WinXP 2.1ghz DuoCore2 based machine takes 2 seconds. A 9x improvement.

But the shocker... my work WinXP laptop with a 1.7ghz Pentium M, a MUCH slower machine, takes about 4 seconds.

Why is the Mac so much slower on compute intensive actionscript?

I've heard of it being slower on graphical animation type things, but not something like this.

Getting closer to beta ... AgileAgenda

I think I have all the functionality working that I care about for a closed beta. I'll take a few more days to poke at it to make sure it's all working and then release something.

For now, here's a WINK screencast of some of the functionality:
http://www.agileagenda.com/

-Marc

Agile Agenda - Web View

While AgileAgenda will be a desktop application, it will have tight integration with the AgileAgenda.com website. From within the application you'll be able to publish a version of your schedule to share with colleagues.



Once you do that, you can share your personal url with people who you wish to view the schedule.

http://www.agileagenda.com/view.php?schedule=1_6d9624696a3447404913dc0dd964e64a

Right now, the view is very bare-bones, but it'll turn into a full featured viewer in the near future.

This feature gave me a chance to try out AMFPHP, something I've long since wanted to give a spin. It turned out to be a lot easier to use than I could have imagined.

By making the web view it forced me to make a Flex/browser compatible version of the software. That gave me a chance to try out the new FB3 profiler, and using that I was able to get the compute time of my (rather large) sample schedule from 15 seconds down to 2 seconds.

AgileAgenda is born

Yesterday I asked for name suggestions for my scheduling software, and was disappointed to only get a single response.

Luckily, that single response rocked.

http://www.agileagenda.com/

Thanks Steve. (If you want your free copy when I get around to release time, leave a comment with some contact info in it.)