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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
