Summerfest 2025 is live, with 25% of lots of your favourite Indie apps.

Apps on sales include:

Tinderbox (Mac)
Scrapple (Mac + Windows)
Scrivener (Mac + Windows)
BBEdit (Mac)

Plus my own applications:

Hyper Plan (Mac + Windows)
Easy Data Transform (Mac + Windows)

Unlike many other promos, the developers aren't paying a commission to a promoter.

For more details, see:

https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/

I use HyperPlan daily as a control panel and running budget for bills as they come due, and it's really cool for creating an instant multi-mode checklist for things like server maintenance. Nothing falls through the cracks.

EDT is still the best tool I've found for extracting intel from strange and unusual data sources. One format I've had to deal with was fixed length records in which one file had different record layout for different type lines. It was pretty easy to handle. I could have written Python scanners to deal with the files but it's nice to create a graphical workflow and let 'er rip.

Much appreciate your hard work, Andy.

Amontillado wrote:

I use HyperPlan daily as a control panel and running budget for bills as
they come due, and it's really cool for creating an instant multi-mode
checklist for things like server maintenance. Nothing falls through the
cracks.

You can't just say something like this about HyperPlan and not give details! I'm fascinated by how you have set up the bill budget dashboard! What are your pivots?

Amontillado wrote:

Much appreciate your hard work, Andy.

Thanks!

Just for complete clarity, I want to note that Hyper Plan development is paused while we concentrate our finite development resources on our 2 other products ( Easy Data Transform and PerfectTablePlan ).

However, Hyper Plan v2 is quite mature and stable.

We might do additional Hyper Plan releases at some point. No decision has been made.

Andy Brice wrote:

Just for complete clarity, I want to note that Hyper Plan development is
paused while we concentrate our finite development resources on our 2
other products ( Easy Data Transform and PerfectTablePlan ).

PerfectTablePlan?
Please, tell us more about it :-)

PerfectTablePlan?
Please, tell us more about it :-)

It isn't very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:

https://www.perfecttableplan.com/

Underneath the UI it does some fairly hardcore combinatorial optimization using a genetic algorithm.

I've been working on it for 20 years now.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/02/21/20-years-working-on-the-same-software-product/

But most event planners are still using Excel. :0)

Andy Brice wrote:

PerfectTablePlan?
>Please, tell us more about it :-)

It isn't very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:

https://www.perfecttableplan.com/

Puh, no need for crimping :-D

Thanks for the info.

Happy to share, but it's not rocket science.

The properties I use are Title, Status, Due, Cycle, Priority, and Budget. Setting the bin size to month for Due helps, and the colors for Due walk from dark green (hit the snooze button) to bright red (no, curses, no!) based on the current date.

The Cards view is where I pretty much live.

Columns are arranged by Due, rows by Cycle (week, month, quarter, yearly, semiannual, and other). In cell, arranged by due.

Show total is for the Budget property.

What's really cool is when I filter by "before next payday" or "the next 3 weeks," I get budget totals for just the cards that fit the filter.

When I pay a bill, I right click the card and use the shift date feature to kick it down the road to the next billing period. The budget totals all self adjust, keeping me advised of how much I need to survive the filtered period.

HyperPlan will also work great as an array of checklists. I have projects come up that require tasks performed on a large number of servers. A hundred or more.

Import the list into HyperPlan, setting a status property with predefined values, in order, for the steps required.

View as cards, columns by status. Filter to block cards with status set to Done.

As a step gets done on a system, drag it a column to the right. When you set the status to Done, the system disappears from the grid.

Many variations on that theme are possible. I like HyperPlan for this because it takes longer to describe the setup than it does to do it.

I could, of course, do all that in Excel. If I did so, though, I'd lose the easy drag and drop and the nice graphical display and I'd also lose being able to keep an automatically timestamped log for each system in individual Notes fields.

Nice, too, there's a global Notes field, also with optional timestamping.

Even better, all the pivoting is completely live. Last I looked, Excel's pivot tables are static snapshots that don't update with data edits.

Drewster wrote:

Amontillado wrote:
I use HyperPlan daily as a control panel and running budget for bills as
>they come due, and it's really cool for creating an instant multi-mode
>checklist for things like server maintenance. Nothing falls through the
>cracks.

You can't just say something like this about HyperPlan and not give
details! I'm fascinated by how you have set up the bill budget
dashboard! What are your pivots?

Andy Brice wrote:

PerfectTablePlan?
>Please, tell us more about it :-)

It isn't very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:

https://www.perfecttableplan.com/

Underneath the UI it does some fairly hardcore combinatorial
optimization using a genetic algorithm.

I've been working on it for 20 years now.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/02/21/20-years-working-on-the-same-software-product/

II just read the blog post.
That's incredible: A business based on such a specialized software.
Even more impressive: 60,000 copies sold.

Wow. Hats off!

Amontillado wrote:

Happy to share, but it's not rocket science.

The properties I use are Title, Status, Due, Cycle, Priority, and
Budget. Setting the bin size to month for Due helps, and the colors for
Due walk from dark green (hit the snooze button) to bright red (no,
curses, no!) based on the current date.

Thank you for this write-up. I've replicated the setup at my end and it's great. I already use Actual Budget to manage my finances, but while it has a scheduler, I like the dashboard view that your system offers.

HyperPlan is such fun software.

Last day of Summerfest2025 is 22 July.