I haven’t blogged about AgileAgenda in a while on purpose since it seemed I was doing it far too often and was turning this blog into a big Ad instead of the resource for developers that I had meant it to be. But I’ve done good with only a single post in the past five months, and I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment with this one.
We just released a new version, and it has a feature that a lot of customers have been asking for. Far improved Basecamp integration! You can now connect to an SSL powered Basecamp install, and you can also now associate AgileAgenda resources with Basecamp contacts to automatically assign the Todo items. This is a huge jump in the integration between these two products and I’m really excited about it. We also streamlined some of the synchronization so it all happens a bit faster. You can read all about it here.
In the future, I’ll be exploring other services to integrate with. At my day-job we’re beginning a QualityCenter rollout, so that may be on the list. Along with that, I’ve always had plans to be able to export to Google Calendar. Working with third party API’s really excites me since it’s a way to add a huge chunk of functionality (and customer value) very easily. Any other ideas?
That really gets me thinking about interchangeable data on the web and how good it is for end users. With that in mind, I hope to be able to release the AgileAgenda integration API sometime this summer that would allow other applications to integrate with AgileAgenda. That’s going to take some serverside rework, but that’ll need to happen eventually for other reasons. Before that, we’ll start publishing RSS feeds of schedules so external programs can at least start consuming data from AgileAgenda.
This was kind of neat. I grabbed an Ubuntu VMWare image, installed the AIR Alpha, and then installed AgileAgenda on it. It mostly worked, except for one crippling problem. For some reason the hotkey for “Save” was set to “S” instead of “Ctrl-S”… so you couldn’t type any task name with an “S” in it. I’ll have to look into that to see if it’s just an AIR Alpha bug, or if it’s a problem I need to fix with something I’m doing. I can’t wait for the full Linux AIR to come out, it’ll be a great way for Linux users to get applications.
One of the best things about AIR is it’s application distribution model. It’s just so darned easy for people to install apps. One of the worst things about Linux is application distribution. There’s just too many package formats and different ways to install. I really hope AIR can bring a single, simple, installation method for AIR apps to all of the popular distributions. Something that my wife could sit down at a Linux computer and do.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
