Archive for the 'Schedule' Category

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development

Published
by
Marc
on July 14, 2008
in Actionscript, Flash, OpenSource, Schedule, XRay, actionscript 3, ant, development, flex and red5
. 5 Comments

The book I’ve been working on, The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development, is now out in stores.  It’s hard to believe that I started working on it about 11 months ago!  It’s really great to see all of that hard work finally in print.

So What is it about?

The book does a few things.  First, about a third of the book introduces you to some open source tools for doing flash development.  Things like FlashDevelop, MTASC, SwfMill, ANT, and ASDT.  It’ll show you how to create an AS2 and an AS3 based flash application using completely free and open software.  This goes all the way from installing the tools, creating a sample app, writing up some unit tests for it, and then to publishing it to the web.  Along the way it’ll give you a brief introduction to each tool, explain what it does, and then give a quick example of how to use it.  (That’s the 5 chapters I wrote)

The remaining 2/3 of the book dedicates a chapter to various open source projects going into a little more detail about them.  There’s a chapter on Papervision 3D, SWX, FUSE/Go, HAXE, AMFPHP, two for Red5 and a couple more.

This was a lot of fun to work on, and my only regret is not getting to know the other authors better.

If you’re looking for a place to buy it, check out Bookpool.   I worked for them for a year and they’re really stellar guys.  They offer good prices, but more importantly;  as long as the book is in stock, they do their damndest to get it on a truck the day you order it. (Of course, you’re at the mercy of the publisher if it’s out of stock)

AgileAgenda - New Version

Published
by
Marc
on January 7, 2008
in AIR, AgileAgenda, Schedule and flex
. 0 Comments

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:

AgileAgenda - New Version

Published
by
Marc
on December 14, 2007
in AIR, AgileAgenda and Schedule
. 0 Comments

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.

OSX Flex app is slow…

Published
by
Marc
on July 25, 2007
in AgileAgenda, Flash, Schedule and flex
. 8 Comments

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

Published
by
Marc
on July 24, 2007
in AgileAgenda and Schedule
. 1 Comment

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

Published
by
Marc
on July 21, 2007
in AgileAgenda and Schedule
. 0 Comments

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

Published
by
Marc
on July 19, 2007
in AgileAgenda and Schedule
. 1 Comment

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.)

Name my project (Scheduling Software)

Published
by
Marc
on July 18, 2007
in Schedule
. 1 Comment

I need a name for my current project. It is a project planning & scheduling tool (Much like MS Project) aimed at software developers.

I’m looking for a name that embodies one or more of the following:

- Project scheduling
- Treating the project plan as ever changing instead of something you create once at the beginning.
- Using the tool every day for short amounts of time to keep the schedule up to date. (Continuous planning)
- Planning software based projects.
- Intelligent scheduling algorithm

Bonus points go to:
- Names that I can get the .com domain name
- Names not used by other similar projects
- Catchy names
- Professional sounding names

If you care to read about it more, some thoughts are in the “Schedule” label of this blog.
http://www.rogue-development.com/blog/labels/Schedule.html

Just post in the comments. If I choose your name, I’ll give you lifetime free updates to the eventual product :)

Update on Scheduling Software

Published
by
Marc
on July 9, 2007
in Schedule
. 3 Comments

Past few days I’ve been blogging about my new project-scheduling software I’ve been working on. Yesterday I implemented the “welcome” screen when you open a project. Eventually, I’ll extend this screen so it captures all of the quick tasks one need to do on a day to day basis with a schedule. But for now it has:

  • Project Summary - # of tasks, completion date, etc.
  • The next 3 upcoming milestones, with expected completion dates.
  • Tasks currently being worked on, and by whom.
  • Tasks that are currently late.
  • “Latest News” box - pulls data from my website for info about new versions, etc.

Both the task-lists have a button to quickly mark them as completed.

The software is to the point where I’m going to start using it at work. Hopefully within a week I’ll have it to a point where others could use it.

I also implemented a feature that will let you easily share the schedule with anybody, but I’ll keep specifics of that secret until we’re closer to release. It’s cool.

Project Planning

Published
by
Marc
on July 8, 2007
in Schedule
. 3 Comments

In a previous post I mentioned my frustrations with MS Project and my desire to create a better alternative. That alternative is nearly to the point where I can start using it (it still needs work until I’d share it with others).

But to really make it better than MS Project, it needs to be able to answer common questions I get from producers/managers/clients. Here’s my short list:

  1. When will the project be completed?
  2. What is person X working on now, and working on next?
  3. What tasks are ahead of schedule?
  4. What tasks are behind schedule?
  5. What is the next milestone, what features will it have in it, and when is it going to be ready?

Another one that I haven’t figured out how to answer yet is…

If we add another person, what will that do to the schedule?

Help me out and post other common questions you might get about a project you’re managing (or working on) that scheduling software should be able to help you with.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest version: