I think a browser based project for Hyper Plan would take a huge chunk of time (ie Andy's money in reality). Further, the browsers would crash on the main strength and power of HP, large files with many cards. It would be just a commissioned toy at Andy's expense. Soon forgotten and abandoned by a few.

Secondly, a Dropbox remote connection might be more wise, simply saving the working file in cloud and being able to work in it with a cache on desktop. There are various database locking algorithms for multi users. But the age old simple: one user at a time assess would be easy to implement. Also if gdrive or onedrive have easier protocols/API set to suit HP, then they can be used instead of it as well as Dropbox to save him time.

Finally, the project like any similars needs a large client base to find it, which means needing PR. To get PR, users are needed and word of mouth. Catch 22. The main way to have a breakthrough is to have an easier interface introduction for newbies to it AND also people who are not tech savvy.

This is a problem infoqube, similarly comprehensive and innovative, suffers from too. In HP's case the cure is easy: free floating cards mode. The cards in free mode, can be auto-threaded together in ordered relationships to conform with current modes easily too. The user can then edit those threadings.

That free fliating mode would be the classic Visual/White/Cork Board of index cards a.k.a. Kanban everyone knows by sight and will dive in intuitively. HP would then be an enticing and easy self-training software and they learn more from there. And will then recommend it to others, mainly online which is what really matters. This is the key as simple logic shows.

J J Weimer wrote:

A bit late to the table ...

This is solely for macOS.

WRT multiple projects with numerous sub-tasks: I use a combination of
Curio and OmniFocus. I have three or more Kanban boards in one main GTD
project file in Curio (and others in other targeted project files). I
use the multiple boards to track the status of projects in different
areas of responsibility. The projects are hyper-linked to corresponding
entrees in OmniFocus, where the task management is handled. The link is
two-way, so that I can at any time jump to the OF task level or the
Curio overview level.

WRT identifying the status of projects: The advantage of Curio for this
is in its Status Panel. I can group projects by a range criteria,
including dates, ratings, priorities, or tags (grouped in tag sets). I
especially like that I can use the Status Panel to control-click and set
various states of the projects (e.g. update the percentage complete).
The mirror in OF is the ability to set defined perspectives for the
task-level management.

In summary, I also have not seen or have not been excited enough to
adopt a "dedicated" Kanban program to try to manage dozens of projects
with dozens of sub-tasks. Since I use Curio extensively for other things
and since I used OmniFocus to manage the tasks, it was a natural to try
to blend the two. For me, it has become a match made in Kanban+GTD
heaven.

It appears that these are Mac/iOS-based programs and I am working in a Win environment so I cannot dig deeper into your work flow. :(

--Ken

As usual, this has been a useful thread since it has been getting me to look at this issue in different lights. I had forgotten that some Kanban boards have swim lanes, andthat does add some functionality when dealing with multiple projects. But, a static board with swim lanes is a bit too rigid as I like to tag projects so they can be associated with multiple project states (e.g. "Urgent" and "Waiting on reply"). I guess I liked a lot of views of my data much of the time, so perhaps that is why I have shied away from static boards.

--Ken

Hi Ken,

I sent you a private message a few days ago. In case you didn't get it, did you know that InfoQube can easily be configured to be an effective Kanban board ?
And the extensive filtering / multi-view makes it suitable for multi-project management.

The Welcome to IQ sample IQBase has a Kanban dashboard ready to use.

I started documenting dashboards here:
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/4417

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

washere wrote:

I think a browser based project for Hyper Plan would take a huge chunk
of time (ie Andy's money in reality). Further, the browsers would crash
on the main strength and power of HP, large files with many cards. It
would be just a commissioned toy at Andy's expense. Soon forgotten and
abandoned by a few.

Browsers have come a long way. But it would certainly be very expensive in terms of my time, only to probably end up with a slower and less rich UI.

Secondly, a Dropbox remote connection might be more wise, simply saving
the working file in cloud and being able to work in it with a cache on
desktop.

I do this a lot between my various Mac and Windows machines and it works very well. Hyper Plan detects when another machine has updated the plan and refreshes.

There are various database locking algorithms for multi users.
But the age old simple: one user at a time assess would be easy to
implement. Also if gdrive or onedrive have easier protocols/API set to
suit HP, then they can be used instead of it as well as Dropbox to save
him time.

Storing your files in DropBox folders doesn't result in true concurrency. If 2 people write to the file at the same time, you end up with a conflict and a second copy of the file.

A server component would allow full concurrency and access control.

Do the DropBox APIs handle locking and true concurrency? I haven't looked into it.

Finally, the project like any similars needs a large client base to find
it, which means needing PR. To get PR, users are needed and word of
mouth. Catch 22. The main way to have a breakthrough is to have an
easier interface introduction for newbies to it AND also people who are
not tech savvy.

Realistically I don't think Hyper Plan is ever going to sell in the mass market. It is for a techie audience.

This is a problem infoqube, similarly comprehensive and innovative,
suffers from too. In HP's case the cure is easy: free floating cards
mode. The cards in free mode, can be auto-threaded together in ordered
relationships to conform with current modes easily too. The user can
then edit those threadings.

I think that would be a useful addition. But I don't think it is suddenly going to make my fortune. ;0)

That free fliating mode would be the classic Visual/White/Cork Board of
index cards a.k.a. Kanban everyone knows by sight and will dive in
intuitively. HP would then be an enticing and easy self-training
software and they learn more from there. And will then recommend it to
others, mainly online which is what really matters. This is the key as
simple logic shows.

It might be an easier way in for the less technical people. However this can be a 2-edged sword as less technical people tend to be more price sensitive and require a lot more technical support.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Also I should point out that Hyper Plan does use Windows file locking when the plan is stored in a Windows network share. So 2 people can't change it at the same time. It is more crude than full server based concurrency, but it does work.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Andy Brice wrote:

Hyper Plan

I have a honest and serious (but critical) question about HyperPlan: Why is it so ugly? This seems to be a major difference to other todo/planning tools -- especially those that are popular on OS X. It looks like the calculator program I had to write in Visual Basic 5 in high school. You are clearly capable of doing the back-end work -- most recently implementing graph data structures and algorithms for card relationships. But I think the front-end is really lagging behind. Maybe just switching the GUI framework (preferably native widgets) would help a lot? I'm sorry to say it but Hyper Plan looks like enterprise software. Some people might disagree and say it's all about function. But then we would all be using lisp-machines...

Andy Brice wrote:

It might be an easier way in for the less technical people. However this
can be a 2-edged sword as less technical people tend to be more price
sensitive and require a lot more technical support.

I disagree, it's reasonably priced even for the great unwashed. Also that so called problem of mass sales support, would self finance, it is a nice problem to have, i.e. Success.

BTW on HP's looks, unlike many other Qt or GTK+ implementations I use, it is sharp and crisp and not blurred, a well known problem half of them have even on the latest high-end laptops. Secondly HP has one of the most elegant designs and most aesthetically pleasing looks I've seen on any productivity tool.

From the UI elements design, to their layout, minimal versus complex layout, the cards, various modes views, etc. On this I'm hard to please, but it's outstandingly good looking, super model class.

Hadn't looked at HP's website for over a year, just usually glance at updates' changelogs launched by it. Jan has a point, going by the pics & video there. It is dated and doesn't do HP potential looks justice. HP is one of 3 card(ish) apps I use, actually use others more, horses for courses. Below is a couple of my stored views, of 4, in the same HP file of mine, smallest one of the lot. Data blacked out, but you get the idea:

https://pasteboard.co/HSMCGHC.png

https://pasteboard.co/HSMDxtN.png

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

Hi Ken,

I sent you a private message a few days ago. In case you didn't get it,
did you know that InfoQube can easily be configured to be an effective
Kanban board ?
And the extensive filtering / multi-view makes it suitable for
multi-project management.

The Welcome to IQ sample IQBase has a Kanban dashboard ready to use.

I started documenting dashboards here:
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/4417

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

Hi Pierre,

My apologies for not responding to your message. I was trying to wrap up a big project before year end, and had little time for many things I normally tend to, like responding to email messages. I obviously did receive your message and assumed that it was a reminder about the Kanban feature in IQ. I am hoping to have a little bit of free time over the holidays that will allow me to dig deeper into IQ. As always, I appreciate your checking in.

Thanks,

--Ken

Ken wrote:

(...) and assumed that it was a reminder about the Kanban feature in IQ

Hi Ken,

That's exactly what it was !

One doesn't immediately associate "outliner software" with Kanban... That is, if they both try to solve information management needs, the approach is very different

As you know, IQ is more than "just" an outliner (be it 1-pane, 2-pane or 3-pane)
Its Kanban features are quite new and emerged from (1) Dashboards and (2) improvements in drag-drop

Pierre

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

did you know that InfoQube can easily be configured to be an effective
Kanban board ?

I had no idea about this (though you may have mentioned it here in the past).

This made me think of a comment I had read many many years ago by Steve Z. on Zoot; it was something in the sense that "whatever I think could be done, Zoot has already a way of doing", and had made me look further into Zoot and eventually purchase it. I did a quick search and found a similar point, again from Steve Z.:

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/archives/viewt/3621
"every day it seems I learn some new feature that makes me marvel at how much thought Tom Davis put into his program."

Well, I think that the same can be said nowadays for Pierre and InfoQube!

Andy Brice wrote:

Hyper Plan allows you to:

-group tasks into swim lanes and columns
-colour-code cards (e.g. red=high priority)
-filter cards (e.g. hide all cards except those for project 1)
-switch 'views' so you can easily switch between different
layouts/filters etc

It sounds like a fairly good fit for what you are trying to do.

It is desktop-based (Windows or Mac), but you can share a plan between
multiple computers using DropBox or similar.

There is a free trial:
https://www.hyperplan.com/download.html

Andy, I bought a license for HyperPlan Home for my Mac and just started playing with some of the built-in sample files. I'm intrigued!

A couple of notes:

• In Cards view I can't figure out how to use my trackpad to scroll - in Cards the standard 2-finger scroll gesture is linked to Zoom in/out and I'm having to put my arrow on the scrollbar and manually scroll. This does not happen in any of the other views (eg Charts, Table, Notes). Is there a setting to fix that?

• macOS dev guidelines have always been (unlike for Windows) for an app to remain open even when the last window is closed; I was a bit shocked when the app quit when I closed the 'Wedding Plan' file. (And there's no standard Command-W to close any windows; I had to manually click the close-window button.)

* When I relaunched the app I got a little pop-up telling me I was using the latest version. Um, I didn't ask! ;-)

Speaking of which, can anyone suggest a good cork board software? I am on Windows (mainly) and Linux. A web service could do as well, but offline is preferable.

The topic has been touched upon here in the past, but examples centred mainly on organising verbal concepts on a virtual board. I would need to include at least images too--and ideally other multimedia.


washere wrote:

That free fliating mode would be the classic Visual/White/Cork Board of
index cards a.k.a. Kanban everyone knows by sight and will dive in
intuitively.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Speaking of which, can anyone suggest a good cork board software? I am
on Windows (mainly) and Linux. A web service could do as well, but
offline is preferable.

This seems to be a gap in current offerings. Two usual suspects by Literature and Latte are about all I've found.

Scrivener includes a corkboard feature with some nice sorting features.

Scapple, also by https://www.literatureandlatte.com is an interesting study in minimalism. It doesn't look like it does much, but it ends up doing a pretty good job.

Mind maps work best for me when they are used to inventory topics into categories. Scapple is much better for organizing the components of a story, at least in my use. For 15 bucks, it's a lot of bang for the money. My favorite feature is magnetic shapes. You can create little sub-maps that move as a unit, for example.

Other than those two, I haven't found a simple corkboard utility.

Now that I think of it, and of no use to you on Windows or Linux, Apple Numbers supports text boxes. You could have a bunch of text boxes on a canvas for your corkboard. Numbers will show a timeline view of events, so you could have a timeline chart on your corkboard, too. Libre Office Calc supports text boxes, but the Numbers concept of separate objects on a canvas may have an edge - but if you turned off the Calc grid and just used text boxes, you might be able to achieve the effect you're looking for.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Speaking of which, can anyone suggest a good cork board software? I am
on Windows (mainly) and Linux. A web service could do as well, but
offline is preferable.

Someone mentioned https://realtimeboard.com/ earlier and it looks kind of interesting, though I don't know if it would be too fiddly to use in actual practice.

Dr Andus wrote:

Someone mentioned https://realtimeboard.com/ earlier and it looks kind
of interesting, though I don't know if it would be too fiddly to use in
actual practice.

It looks like they do have Windows and Mac desktop apps as well, and some mobile OS apps:

https://realtimeboard.com/apps/

Thanks for the suggestions. I also found imapping https://www.imapping.info/what-is-imapping/ mentioned in a previous thread and am trying it out. It's reminiscent of Treeshets in its structure of items within items, and has the advantage of images and free placement of items on the board.

@Jan S. wrote:

I have a honest and serious (but critical) question about HyperPlan: Why
is it so ugly? This seems to be a major difference to other
todo/planning tools -- especially those that are popular on OS X. It
looks like the calculator program I had to write in Visual Basic 5 in
high school. You are clearly capable of doing the back-end work -- most
recently implementing graph data structures and algorithms for card
relationships. But I think the front-end is really lagging behind.

I'm a programmer, not an artist, and so far I have been concentrating on the functionality and usability. I realize there is room for improvement on the aesthetics and I might get someone more artistic involved for v3.

Also it is highly configurable. So you are free to choose ugly fonts and colors, if you want to.

Beauty is, of course, subjective. What is it you particularly find ugly? Can you be more specific? Are there any competitors you think are particularly attractive?

Maybe
just switching the GUI framework (preferably native widgets) would help
a lot? I'm sorry to say it but Hyper Plan looks like enterprise
software. Some people might disagree and say it's all about function.
But then we would all be using lisp-machines...

I do pay a certain price for writing it in a cross-platform framework (Qt) but I consider that worth paying to be able to deploy on Windows and Mac.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

washere wrote:

Hadn't looked at HP's website for over a year, just usually glance at
updates' changelogs launched by it. Jan has a point, going by the pics &
video there. It is dated and doesn't do HP potential looks justice.

The website is overdue a rewrite. For a start it isn't a responsive design.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

satis wrote:

Andy, I bought a license for HyperPlan Home for my Mac and just started
playing with some of the built-in sample files. I'm intrigued!

A couple of notes:

In Cards view I can't figure out how to use my trackpad to
scroll - in Cards the standard 2-finger scroll gesture is linked to Zoom
in/out and I'm having to put my arrow on the scrollbar and manually
scroll. This does not happen in any of the other views (eg Charts,
Table, Notes). Is there a setting to fix that?

There is. See the 'mouse wheel behaviour' field in the 'general' tab of the 'preferences' window.

macOS dev guidelines have always been (unlike for Windows) for
an app to remain open even when the last window is closed; I was a bit
shocked when the app quit when I closed the 'Wedding Plan' file.

Hyper Plan currently requires a plan to be open. So it has to exit if the plan is closed. I might look into changing that in future. Is it a big deal for you?

(And
there's no standard Command-W to close any windows; I had to manually
click the close-window button.)

That should be easy enough to fix. I will put it on the 'wishlist'.

NB/ You can use 'Escape' for modal windows.

* When I relaunched the app I got a little pop-up telling me I was using
the latest version. Um, I didn't ask! ;-)

By default it checks if there is a later version once per week. Check 'don't show this again' if you don't want to be told you have the latest version.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

@satis wrote:

Ps/ I only check this forum infrequently and don't read every post. Better to email support type questions to:

hyperplan _at_ oryxdigital.com

I check support emails 364 days a year and reply to every one (apart from the occasional bizarre one, to which no constructive reply is possible!).

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Hyper Plan - I haven't looked at that in a long time.

My New Year's Resolution to stop buying note/organizational software held firm until nearly the end of the old year.

I can call that victory.

I wonder how well Hyper Plan works as a cork board. I think I'll download the demo and experiment.

Amontillado wrote:

I wonder how well Hyper Plan works as a cork board. I think I'll
download the demo and experiment.

I would be interested to hear what you think.

Note that there is an option to display images in cards.

--

Andy Brice
https://www.hyperplan.com