Who wants Kibble?

Gigantt is officially eating its own dog food. After 6 weeks of work I'm very proud to announce that I am now using Gigantt to plan and manage itself. Setting this canine-cuisine goal for myself so early in the project, I now realize, was the smartest decision I've ever made. Right away, I could tell what's crucial and what's not. What's really annoying - to the point of hurting usability - and what's just aesthetic nitpicking on my part. It also made me realize that I've still got a long way to go until I can release this product into the wild.


As you no doubt remember, I'm working on the private alpha version now, and by dog-fooding I'm finding out I still have quite a bit of work to do. More than I'd planned initially. There's a wide gap between cool and useful, and there are lots of tiny features to implement without which the system is just too annoying to use. 


Thanks, by the way, for signing up for the alpha. Lots of people signed up - more than I expected. While there's no link to a cool showcase in this post, I can at least tell you a bit about what to expect in the alpha.


Planned Alpha Features

• Saving plans. Obviously, this requires quite a bit of work in terms of creating a server-side, setting up user accounts, security, etc. 
• Sign-up is by invitation only at this point.
• Improved editing
• Cut & paste using a multiple-item clipboard.
• Undo (simple, right? I wish...)
• Reordering items by drag-n-drop.
• Deleting connections between items.
• Being able to mark items as "done".
• A feedback box, for quick one-click "listen, this product sux big time and you should quit" messages from early adopters.
• Lots and lots of tiny improvements that you'd hopefully not even notice because they're so natural and obvious.

Basically, the alpha will be a fancy mind-mapping system for graphs, instead of trees. As such, the alpha is useful for personal planning and management. Not quite useful for managing a team just yet. The rest of the functionality, like time estimates, resource allocation and collaboration, will have to wait for future versions.