OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — April 11, 2011

• Publish & Subscribe
  • In order to reduce the potential for data loss if multiple project publish to the same place, Publish & Subscribe actions are cleared out when using File -> Save As..., with warning.
  • Fixed a crasher resulting from changing WebDAV account's server path while the "Open From Server Repository" panel is open.
  • A recent performance optimization resulted in certain project modifications not being change tracked and published. This has been fixed.
  • Improved readabilty of some change descriptions.
  • OmniPlan will no longer allow publish & subscribe from read only documents.
  • Fixed clicking on the accounts tableview in account preferences.
• Printing
  • The page headers & footers for the “Master Page” are now immediately made editable.
  • Dragging tokens in headers & footers no longer crashes.
  • The “Project Title” token in headers & footers displays whatever is in the Title field of the Project: Information inspector now, not whatever is in the window title bar.
  • The headers & footers wrap correctly, ignore the printing scale, and stay in the margin where you ask them to.
  • The preview in the printing panel refreshes when switching to the “Print report” option.
  • Printing output should now paginate properly as print settings change.
  • Resource type icons are no longer rendered upside down on printouts and in image exports.
  • Fixed some memory leaks & a crashers due to bad print panel cleanup.
• Imported MS Project files no longer wind up in in generic dates mode.
• The start & end dates of hammock tasks are no longer lockable.
• More fixes have been made to flat-list filter handling.
• References to attachments in imported OmniPlan 1.x files are now preserved.
• Changing a split task to a task group and then undoing no longer reorders tasks.
• More care is now taken that custom column names are uniqued and don't step on internal keys.
• A resource is now presumed to work until the last on-hours moment of their schedule end date if any, rather than the first. That is, the start and end date range is inclusive.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — March 30, 2011

• Publish & Subscribe
  • We needed to change the way that changelogs were archived in a non-backwards compatible way and therefore, anyone using them via synching ought to delete the document from the server and republish it from scratch (by removing and then recreating a new sync pub/sub action). The current content of plans is unchanged, this is just to avoid losing changes during synching.
  • Cleaned up the UI for custom filters on pub/sub actions.
• Printing & image generation
  • Tokens can be added to page headers & footers again. There is a known issue that the “Master Page” headers & footer are not immediately made editable.
  • The print panel doesn't offer to print the selection, which was never supported.
  • Critical path now draws correctly on printouts. Was jagged.
  • The “HTML Template” popup on the print panel populates correctly for printing reports.
  • The Gantt and Timeline images now tile (or “slice & dice”) correctly in full HTML reports.
  • Generating Gantt and Timeline images is now much faster, particularly in the tiled image generation for full HTML reports.
  • The date and time are always emited by the “print time” and “last modification time” tokens in headers & footers.
  • We detect and offer the choices to correct impossible combination of paper size and margins.
  • Improved print scaling. Hopefully it's now more transparent what the “Dimensions” area of the print panel content pane does.
  • Most drawing for printouts and images is done using vector rendering and should scale well without getting jagged.
• Fixed a crash when you remove a flat-list filter.
• Leveling violations go away if you undo leveling
• Fixed crashes, errors, and performance problems with some imported OmniPlan 1.x and OmniOutliner files.
• Fixed layout errors in OmniGraffle exports.
• Added a warning when importing groups with reserve time from OmniPlan 1.x files. Reserve time is being dropped.
• We've made a lot of general performance improvements. More to come.
• We've redone a lot of inspector icons.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — February 23, 2011

• Change Tracking
  • Project level change tracking bubbles have a distinct rendering style to visually distinguish them from task changes.
  • Improvements to the positioning of change bubbles.
  • Bug fixes in tracking and updating project-level changes.
• Scheduling
  • Made resource start/end dates for projects work correctly. Incidentally, improved layout of the Resource Info inspector.
  • Added violations for tasks assigned to resources which have no more working hours. (Tasks scheduled past the end date of the resource's schedule, for instance.)
  • Fixed bug with positioning of ALAP tasks in primarily forward-scheduled projects. ALAP tasks could previously be scheduled too early.
• Publish & Subscribe
  • When updating project tasks from calendar events, only start constraint dates are brought back from the calendar side (from the calendar event start date).
  • Calendar event synching has been split into two separate action types to simplify the configuration UI. Now you can sync events with CalDAV servers (e.g. Google calendar, Apple Calendar Server, etc.) as one type, and sync events with local iCal calendars as another type. Any “Publish tasks to calendar events“ Pub/Sub actions previously configured will be silently dropped when the file is loaded and must be reconfigured.
• The "Make Link" context menu item in the notes field no longer causes a crash.
• Added the ability to delete baselines (from the Project menu).
• Added the ability to hide task numbering in the outline (in the View -> Outline submenu).
• It's no longer possible to set the assigned amount on milestone assignments. Milestones require zero effort, so this would just be deceptive.
• Found & fixed a case where the splitter between the resource outline view and timeline view or resource outline and calendar view would not be restored to the correct position when loading a file.
• Disclosure triangles on the Gantt view no longer refuse to expand rows after saving the document.
• Turning a split task into a task group works properly now. There is no reverse operation (besides Edit -> Undo).

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — February 16, 2011

• Turning exceptions into crashes turned up a number of logic errors we weren't catching otherwise. Thanks, beta testers!
  • HTML export now handles unrecognized tokens in the template by emitting the empty string.
  • After printing and saving we no longer do a lot of useless view layout looking at bogus info while tearing down printing or QuickLook infrastructure.
  • Fixed missing cleanup following a full HTML export that could lead to instability later.
  • Sorting tasks by baseline start or end, or by start or end variance works instead of erroring out.
• Account Preferences
  • The error message field now grows to accommodate long errors.
  • We're now more clever about finding the user's MobileMe account home directory.
  • We've added an OmniSyncServer account type, adding easy configuration for our free sync service.
  • The account list table is undergoing beautification.
  • Fixed a crash following changing the server path of a WebDAV, MobileMe, or OmniSyncServer account.
• Publish & Subscribe
  • OmniPlan now supports the following CalDAV server implementations: Apple Calendar Server, Kerio, DAViCal, IceWarp, Google Calendar, and eM Client.
  • Added interface for dealing with expired or untrusted SSL certificates in-application, when talking to WebDAV and CalDAV servers.
  • In the Publish/Subscribe configuration sheet, we're fiddling with the "no value" placeholders and choosing default settings.
  • Accept gzip encoded data from CalDAV servers to save network bandwidth.
  • Publish to calendar events is now a bidirectional sync, to and from calendar events.
  • We now constrain CalDAV queries when syncing tasks or querying busy times to a reasonable range of dates to improve performance.
  • When tasks assigned to multiple resources are updated with changes from a CalDAV server or OmniFocus, OmniPlan derives an appropriate completion percentage.
  • Fixed errors syncing tasks to CalDAV servers.
  • We are more robust in the face of CalDAV servers who keep their principals in different URLs than we expect.
  • We properly handle redirect responses from CalDAV servers.
• Change Tracking
  • Clicking on the text next to a radio button in a change tracking conflict bubble now acts as a button click.
  • Project level change tracking bubbles now live at the top of the change tracking view for tasks.
  • Added a conflict count to the change tracking bar. Click it to go to the first/next conflict.
  • Fixed layout problems with change tracking bubbles.
• The filter bar now has a refresh button to reapply the current filter.
• The timeline view now attempts to remember the dates it's displaying if it's not on-screen when the project is filtered.
• Tasks added while a filter is applied will now appear regardless of whether they pass the filter (rather than never appear).
• Tasks can now be sorted lexicographically by custom column data.
• Task: Assignments inspector will now accept changes to the Assigned Amount value on a hammock task.
• Leveling with resource group assignments no longer creates multiple assignments to the same Resource.
• We've changed to thin splitters in the document window, Violations window, and Task: Dependencies inspector.
• The splitter in the document window no longer gets ~100 pixels wide if the outline view is collapsed when you resize the window.
• Fixed some scheduling weirdness related separately to Daylight Savings time and scheduling granularity.
• Fixed bugs and a crash associating and disassociating resources from Address Book records.
• Fixed a crash importing .mpp files
• Fixed a crash figuring out resource constraints importing OmniPlan 1.x files.
• We no longer render dependency lines when loading documents that have them turned off.
• When the user turns off dependency lines, they now go away instead of leaking and becoming detached.
• Dependency lines animate properly when task groups are expanded and collapsed, causing rows to move around or come and go.
• If constraint drawing is disabled we no longer display constraint drag handles when the shift key is down.
• Shift clicking once again selects ranges in the Gantt view.
• Hammock tasks now end when their latest end prerequisite is met, not the earliest.
• The on/off state of per milestone critical paths is now saved.
• The color chit in the Project: Milestones inspector table view is now also a checkbox.
• If you turn on critical path display when no critical paths are enabled, we automatically enable the "Entire Project" path.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — January 27, 2011

• The "X" to clear locally defined style attributes back to their inherited defaults is back in the Style Attributes inspector.
• The style chits in the Style Attributes inspector are now draggable, and the "Multiple Selection" popups pop up.
• The end of the project is now regarded as an implicit milestone by the Project: Milestones inspector. The critical path to it can be separately disabled.
• In the change tracking view, conflicts are highlighted with a "caution tape" border instead of a white background.
• We've begun carving out a place for change logs that do not pertain to resources or tasks to live. This UI is evolving.
• The hovers on the resource timeline view now go away when they should.
• When the Gantt and Timeline views are displaying constraints, any left or right label is drawn inside the constraints if there is sufficient room. The selection rectangle will encompass the labels but not necessarily the constraints. This makes the chevrons much more useful for loosely constrained tasks.
• The Task: Dependencies inspector is now updated when the selected task changes in the resource timeline view.
• Filtering on custom data fields is back.
• Improved error display on the Pub/Sub configuration sheet.
• Fixed a crash filtering for tasks on the critical path.
• Fixed a crash creating a hammock task given a particular arrangement of prerequisites and parent/child hierarchy.
• A new project's currency should now default based on the user's locale, not to the U.S. dollar.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — January 21, 2011

• OmniPlan will now crash immediately if an unhandled error is encountered. We can't guarantee that the error didn't corrupt the project data, so it's better not to permit you to save your work and risk corrupting the file. Be sure you enable autosave! A Crash Catcher panel will come up inviting you to send in the error text, console logs, and backtrace. We need those reports so we can eliminate this class of error.
• If you delete a calendar subscription pub/sub action, any schedule exceptions from that calendar are now deleted along with it.
• The "Sync tasks with OmniFocus delegated tasks" pub/sub action has been disabled until OmniFocus is ready for integration testing.
• If a pub/sub action is using a saved filter which you then delete from the filter UI, the action will now hang on to a copy for its own use.
• Publishing tasks to CalDAV with a custom filter applied no longer erases previous published events that don't match the filter.
• If a Pub/Sub "Update" action fails because the document is missing from the server, the option is always given to publish it.
• When a split task is assigned, change tracking bubbles are now created only for the tasks itself. Previously we got one for each split chunk, too./li>
• Changing a valid Google account into a MobileMe account no longer throws the app into a bad state.
• If you "Focus" on task 1.1, tasks 1.10, 1.11 and so on no longer sneak through.
• Once you've used the "Go to Today" menu item, its title will change (if you haven't scrolled today out of view) to "Return to Previous Date"./li>
• Using the (X) button clear exceptions from a work schedule no longer raises errors.
• The tiny popup arrows on some toolbar items are now much easier to hit. Or, click and hold for a half second and don't bother trying.
• Various improvements have been made to critical path drawing on the Gantt and Timeline views.
• The critical path toolbar item now provides a popup menu to enable or disable display of the project critical path and paths to milestones.
• Dragging an address book card into the resource view will create a new resource to represent that person.
• Loading saved files and creating files from templates does a better job of positioning the windows and views therein.
• The default inspector positions now tile from the top right of the main screen.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — January 18, 2011

My apologies for not updating these release notes more frequently. Here are some changes that have been continuously trickling into the builds for the last couple weeks.

• Added compatibility with MobileMe to the "Sync tasks with Calendar Server to do" action.
• When updating from a subscription to a web calendar, old copies of previously seen events are no longer left around.
• The title "Subscribe to web calendar" menu item under the Update toolbar item now includes the calendar name rather than the URL.
• OmniPlan will no longer penalize you for trying to take New Year's Day, 2001 off by corrupting your project schedule.
• Added more paranoia to the WebDAV syncing code.
• If a pub/sub action runs using an account that is not correctly configured and validated, a helpful error now appears.
• If the dependencies defining a hammock task's duration somehow go away, we now add a violation to the hammock.
• When a milestone, group, or hammock with a disconnected end is changed to a regular task, its duration defaults to that of the prototype task, rather than always "1d".
• Leveling no longer creates hidden resource dependency objects, and the critical path calculation no longer relies on them. This makes critical paths more complete and makes leveling and critical path computation much faster.
• If a milestone whose critical path is displayed on the Gantt chart is converted to another task type, the critical path should now be erased.
• Slack lines are now only displayed on tasks and milestones.
• In the Gantt chart, task bars now top align with the top row of text in the outline view.
• The hovers on the Gantt chart (completion, duration, and dependency drag handles, lock icons, and constraint handles) appear and disappear at more sensible times.
• Gantt bars are now removed from the timeline view if you "Undo Add Task".
• The Timeline view should now scroll properly as you drag tasks and the scroller should adjust if tasks are rescheduled, changing the project duration.
• Reschedule, Set Baseline, and Catch Up can now be performed from the Timeline or Calendar views as well as Task.
• The Project: Milestones inspector now refreshes as task types are changed to and from "milestone".
• The popup color pickers in the Project: Styles inspector now reflect a selection with heteronenous colors. To disambiguate whether you're modifying resource or task styles, the inspector will no longer inspect tasks selected in the resource Timeline view.
• The last week of the year is now selectable in the "Extra & Off Hours" widget of the Calendar View.
• The "Custom Work Week" and "Schedule Exception" icons in the resource & calendar outline views now refresh when the value is changed by a Pub/Sub update or in another window.
• You should now be able to override any schedule exceptions you're getting a subscription from with local calendar changes.
• Printouts and exports that included an image of the Timeline view briefly presented an error panel and failed. Fixed that.
• Fixed a crash in the HTML exporters related to repetitive exports.
• The {@Notes@} token in HTML templates is fixed and works for tasks, resources, and assignments. An assignment's note is just the task note.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — December 28, 2010

• When configuring a MobileMe account, we ignore an @ sign and anything after it so the user can enter a MobileMe email address.
• MobileMe accounts now work for publish/subscribe actions requiring a CalDAV account.
• If you remove all events from a subscribed web calendar, the corresponding time-off blocks will be removed once the project plan is updated from the calendar.
• You should now get a violation when trying to level tasks that are locked and can't be leveled
• Undo/Redo Set Task Type now updates the type control in the Task: Info inspector.
• Undo Add Task will no longer leave a field editor (if any) up in the Gantt view for the removed task, waiting to cause a crash.
• On the Gantt view, milestones now have a completion checkbox to their left rather than the slider on the diamond.
• Day labels on blocks in the calendar view are no longer confused if the user's week doesn't begin on Sunday.
• Critical path calculations now ignore slack on the irrelevant side of a task.
• The Style Attributes inspector now only describes selected resources in the resource view (not tasks).

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — December 15, 2010

• Dependencies can no longer connect to the breaks in a split task. If you find yourself needing that, it's time to formally break down the task.
• The undo stack no longer gets corrupted when split task chunks are pushed together and automatically rejoin.
• Leveling no longer overloads resources when it is allowed to split tasks.
• Rejecting a "split task" change via the change tracking view no longer crashes.
• If use the split task dialog with either duration blank, we no longer raise an alert panel.
• In the change tracking view, "Accept All" should now... accept all changes.
• The Task and Resource Information inspectors now have larger prettier "type" buttons.
• The task completion slider in the Task Information inspector fills its completed portion with a lovely shade of blue.
• Fixed a crash in the OmniGraffle Work Breakdown Structure exporter.
• The View -> Go To Today menu item works again.
• The button in the top left corner of the timeline view that turns the resource allocation graphs on and off should now stay put and not be overdrawn, nor should the resource names draw over the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the view.
• The on/off state of the resource allocation graphs is now stored.
• The "Scale to fit" actions now only scale the currently visible view.
• Fixed a case where graphical remnants of a no longer current critical path would persist.
• Fixed horizontal scrolling in the Gantt View via the mouse wheel, trackpad, and Magic Mouse.
• Hammocks now display the same labels on the Gantt and Timeline views as regular tasks.
• The "Delete" context menu item on the Gantt and task outline views works again.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — December 2, 2010

• Simplified the workflow for conflicting changes due to syncing. If you update your plan and receive a change that conflicts with a local change, you will now be prevented from publishing until you resolve the conflict. The Change Tracking view will select which branch of the Truth you'd like to stick with. There is some peril here in that there is no Change Tracking view synced changes that are not resource or task propertiesm such as the project title. We'll add something ASAP so you'll be able to resolve such things.
• When publishing a document to a WebDAV server, recover gracefully if we find that the document exists on the server but its changelog is missing.
• The menu items to Send Email and Send Instant Message are now enabled and should work properly.
• Resource schedule exceptions are now taken into account immediately in files imported from OmniPlan-1.x.
• OmniGraffle exports no longer write a document version from the future, causing OmniGraffle 5.2 to warn about possible dataloss.
• Resource name labels are back on the Timeline view tracks. They could draw better... we'll get to that later.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — November 29, 2010

In spite of the long holiday weekend and 3 days of weather related office closures, we've made a few changes since the private beta began on 11/16. Skipping relatively minor items and issues we don't think any user ever saw, here are some highlights:

• Adding a second named style no longer raises an alert panel.
• Revising a work schedule can cause split tasks to correctly rejoin. Undoing that schedule change now correctly restores the split.
• The Publish and Update toolbar buttons are now always enabled. If there are no active actions of the appropriate type, they bring up the button's context menu.
• It's no longer possible to set a task's type to "hammock" via AppleScript if it doesn't already have both a start and finish prerequisite.
• The instant message gems should now reflect the users chat status and request chats without raising incorrect errors.
• The drag image for multiple tasks in the resource times has been improved.
• The Calendar view for modifying work schedules has seen some usability improvements and bug fixes. It no longer invites you via resize cursors to move blocks that aren't editable in the current scope. Drawing has been improved. Moving schedule blocks now causes minimal model changes.

OmniPlan 2.0 sneaky peek — November 12, 2010

Welcome to OmniPlan 2.0!

OmniPlan 2.0 requires Mac OS X Version 10.6 or later.

New features in OmniPlan 2.0

Publish and Subscribe

OmniPlan 2.0 adds support for automatic publishing and updating of your plan.

• Syncing
  • Collaborate with other OmniPlan 2 users via WebDAV.
  • Tasks can be published to and updated from Apple's Calendar Server, and OmniFocus on a per-resource basis.
• Publish
  • Publish tasks to a local or server calendar.
  • Automatically export in any supported format.
  • Execute custom AppleScripts.
  • Configurable to publish automatically on save.
• Update
  • Get free/busy times from resources' calendars on Apple's Calendar Server.
  • Import vacation and holiday schedules for the project or individuals from a web-hosted calendar.
  • Execute custom AppleScripts.
  • Configurable to check for updates periodically or when updates are announced via Bonjour.
• Visual change tracking
  • See who made synced changes on a team project, or keep track of your own edits on a personal project.
  • Accept and reject individual changes, or all at once.

Filtering

• Save multiple filters for quick reuse later.
• Filter bar displays current filter and how many tasks are visible of total.
• Configure Publishing actions to use filters.

Printing Options

• More configurable headers and footers.
• Expand all notes.
• Expand or collapse all task and resource groups.
• Page margins support mirroring on facing pages. Margin above and below header and footer is customizable.

New XML file format

• Smaller files, stricter data integrity checks.
• OmniPlan 1 documents are automatically upgraded.
• Export as OmniPlan for backwards compatibility.

Scheduling

• Fiscal years are now supported in addition to calendar years.
• Schedule projects backwards from a fixed end date.
• Schedule individual tasks as late as possible.
• Create, save, and compare vs. multiple baselines.
• Highlight the critical path to individual milestones, configurable in the new Project: Milestones inspector.

Tasks and Resources

• Split tasks to schedule around interruptions.
• Hammock tasks are a new type of task that determine their start and end dates based entirely on their prerequisites.
• Unlink Effort and Duration – Changes to task effort can adjust resource assignments instead of duration (and duration also adjusts assignments instead of effort).
• Default task and resource attributes can be configured per project or in a template for faster task creation.
• Color-code tasks based on assigned resource.
• Improved readability and added animations throughout main window.
• The Task inspector has been cleaned up and extended to support new options.
• Choose independent display formats for duration and effort values.

Known issues

• Image export and printing have multiple rendering bugs. We haven't updated this to match the main window yet.
• Splitting ALAP tasks may not split the task with default settings in the split task popover.
• Localizations absent or incomplete
• Exporting is somewhat untested
• Documentation has not yet been updated
• Resource schedules can now have a start and/or end date. This feature is unstable.

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