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SheetPlanner 1.1 Beta
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Posted by Hugh
Mar 20, 2019 at 05:01 PM
What follows is in the nature of musing, prompted by SheetPlanner.
Having briefly tried the application, I do like the design of SheetPlanner’s UI, and its general approach to task management of a particular kind. I especially like what is I guess its USP - its combination of task management with a simplified Gantt chart. It does enable one to foresee and deal with “lumps” in one’s diary, and potential delays in one’s medium- and long-term projects.
There are very few rivals in this niche, as far as I know: Pagico is one, but I know of no others unless you move upscale to the complexity and cost of project managers such as, in the Mac world, OmniPlan or Merlin.
But I’d like to use such a Gantt-chart task manager as SheetPlanner just for projects that need it, like building a shed or writing a book. I don’t want to clutter it up with reminders to check out a new movie that’s just been released, or to remember my sister’s birthday. I’d like to keep all those, plus the top-level plans for my shed-building and book-writing, in a “trusted” (©David Allen!) “master” system such as OmniFocus (which also has several other advantages such as being available on my iPhone). And then I’d like to export individual projects for detailed monitoring in, say, SheetPlanner, as required.
What this means is that I wish these task managers were more inter-operable. Actually, SheetPlanner is I think pretty good, accepting imports IIRC in both csv and OPML formats. But I’m not sure how I’d easily, without a fuss, get individual projects out of, say, OmniFocus. It’s hard enough to get them out of OmniFocus into OmniPlan (as I’ve banged on about previously here!).
Of course, I think I know why this is so. I suspect that detailed inter-operability is not straightforward, and in any case the developers of task managers want to “keep their gardens walled”. But one can hope.
Posted by SheetPlanner
Mar 20, 2019 at 08:04 PM
Hi Hugh.
Its too early in the maturity of the product for us to have any plans on how we might integrate with task management systems but its something that we will consider down the line. I really wish there was a standard like publish and subscribe from the old Mac classic days that we could easily adopt.
One thing we are looking at is the ability to share a filtered list with the reminders app on the Mac. This would allow you to track projects in SheetPlanner and get access to Project tasks inside of Reminders. We dont formally have this in the roadmap yet, but its something we are looking at.
Finally, the longer term plan (perhaps not in the 1.x product) is for a user to have multiple outlines/projects in the same document, navigable via a folder structure in a sidebar. That way you could keep all your plans together along with a simple to do list.
For me, a lot of the motivation in building SheetPlanner was to get all sorts of information into the one place.
Plans, taks lists, passwords, hikes I want to take, places I want to visit, lists of books I want to read and so on.
Over time you will see the ‘Personal Information Management’ side of Sheetplanner evolve.
How nice would it be to view the columns in a form and what use cases would that provide for? ;)
Feel free to contact us at support@sheetplanner.com if you wish to correspond directly.
Thanks,
Peter
Hugh wrote:
What follows is in the nature of musing, prompted by SheetPlanner.
>
>Having briefly tried the application, I do like the design of
>SheetPlanner’s UI, and its general approach to task management of a
>particular kind. I especially like what is I guess its USP - its
>combination of task management with a simplified Gantt chart. It does
>enable one to foresee and deal with “lumps” in one’s diary, and
>potential delays in one’s medium- and long-term projects.
>
>There are very few rivals in this niche, as far as I know: Pagico is
>one, but I know of no others unless you move upscale to the complexity
>and cost of project managers such as, in the Mac world, OmniPlan or
>Merlin.
>
>But I’d like to use such a Gantt-chart task manager as SheetPlanner just
>for projects that need it, like building a shed or writing a book. I
>don’t want to clutter it up with reminders to check out a new movie
>that’s just been released, or to remember my sister’s birthday. I’d like
>to keep all those, plus the top-level plans for my shed-building and
>book-writing, in a “trusted” (©David Allen!) “master” system such
>as OmniFocus (which also has several other advantages such as being
>available on my iPhone). And then I’d like to export individual projects
>for detailed monitoring in, say, SheetPlanner, as required.
>
>What this means is that I wish these task managers were more
>inter-operable. Actually, SheetPlanner is I think pretty good, accepting
>imports IIRC in both csv and OPML formats. But I’m not sure how I’d
>easily, without a fuss, get individual projects out of, say, OmniFocus.
>It’s hard enough to get them out of OmniFocus into OmniPlan (as I’ve
>banged on about previously here!).
>
>Of course, I think I know why this is so. I suspect that detailed
>inter-operability is not straightforward, and in any case the developers
>of task managers want to “keep their gardens walled”. But one can hope.
>
>
Posted by Hugh
Mar 21, 2019 at 12:11 PM
Thanks for the response, Peter.
Posted by SheetPlanner
Mar 26, 2019 at 03:42 PM
All,
SheetPlanner 1.1 beta 2 will arrive go out on April 4th. There will be a lot of nice improvements in beta 2 as we have made some significant changes around dropdown menu interaction with rows that have been requested for a long time by a number of users.
A number of users on this board have contributed immensely to helping us make a better product via their feedback from the beta tests.
As before, if anyone would like to participate in the beta, please let us know at support@sheetplanner.com
Thank you.
Peter
SheetPlanner wrote:
Hi,
>We will be entering the beta cycle for SheetPlanner 1.1 in 2-3 weeks.
>Those of you wishing to participate in the beta cycle, please let me
>know.
>
>Upcoming Features in 1.1 are:
>A symbol column type containing multiple symbols such as checkboxes,
>stars, Eisenhower quadrants and so on. All of which can be filtered on
>A Progress column type where a user enters a percentage completion that
>is reflected in the column and in the timeline bar and can be filtered
>on
>Filter enhancements
>Keyboard enhancements
>Auto enter cell values
>Timeline enhancements
>Dependencies
>Print timeline view
>Performance optimizations
>
>These are the cliff notes. The beta will contain extensive release notes
>as there is a lot of depth to these features.
>
>Thanks,
>Peter
>
>
Posted by SheetPlanner
May 3, 2019 at 02:24 PM
All,
An update on SheetPlanner 1.1.
Beta 6 went out to a small group of testers last week.
Beta 7 will go out next week.
We expect b7 or b8 to be release candidate and so I expect we will be releasing 1.1 to the Mac App Store for approval in the next 2 weeks.
It’s a huge release. 1.2 which we will start work on after WWDC will be an incredible update also.
We are working on a new website and will have a full suite of tutorial videos posted after 1.2 ships.
Thanks for your support.
Peter