Saturday, June 18, 2011

Collaboration in Gigantt

Today we're happy to release the first collaborative version of Gigantt.

What's changed?


Collaboration

Multiple users can now edit the same plan at the same time. It's also cool for the same user to edit the plan in multiple browser windows. However, Gigantt still doesn't support managing multiple resources (i.e. a team). That's our next major feature.
So what happens if two people make conflicting changes at the exact same time? Gigantt helps you avoid this problem by featuring a "freeze period". Basically, any task you modify and its immediate vicinity get frozen for 60 seconds. During this period only you can edit these tasks. Others have to wait for them to "thaw". Frozen items have a snowflake icon. If you hover over one you'll see who has been editing it and how long until it thaws out.


We think this approach to collaboration is better than simply letting people step on each other's toes and then asking them to resolve their conflicting changes.

Visual Clipboard

We got quite a lot of feedback about the way copy, cut & paste wasn't so intuitive. Now it's just like in Windows explorer, but you also get a visual clipboard window that shows you the contents of the clipboard.


The clipboard is also used for creating connections between remote items. To create a new link you select the source task and hit "L" (or the new link button). The task will be added to the clipboard in _linking_ mode. You then
select the target task and paste. That's it.

Performance

We won't bore you with all the details, but Gigantt is now wicked fast. Navigation is much quicker, even for very complex tasks, because sub-tasks are now rendered in the background (they sort of fade in). Auto-save is also much faster and so is every editing operation.

There are tons more improvements and fixes. But I'll leave it to you to find.

Keep sending us your feedback. It's really valuable to us and we do act on it.

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