Marc Palmer

I’m still learning the basics of project planning, and I use what I feel is a common sense approach. I had a dig around to see if I could find a great project planning tool, as I’ve found quite a few great applications since moving to Mac.

However, it’s a mixed bag out there. I don’t doubt that what’s here is better than the simultaneously ubiquitous and dreaded MS Project. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some silly usability issues that these people can’t tackle.

Issue number 1: It has to look and feel good. This rules out the majority of tools I found, especially the Java ones like GanttProject which looked so clunky under OS X. GanttProject wouldn’t work at all with OS X look and feel, I had to switch to Metal as the widgets wouldn’t work, you couldn’t move items etc.

Issue number 2: Some project tools seem to do too much, providing a “complete” solution that complicates things for people who want to just get a project plan diagram produced to give to their boss!

Issue number 3: Some of the ones I tried failed the simplest of tests – can I add a task/activity within seconds and move it around. There are some applications where I couldn’t work it out in minutes, so I put them in the trash immediately.

My filtering process left me looking at a two options; Merlin, xTime Project 3. Both have good OS X integration, and look really good in both the UI and the charts they produce. They also both support opening multiple projects simultaneously so that you can see how resources interact across various projects that are running simultaneously.

However they too are a mixed bag, with little but very annoying niggles that left no clear leader.

Merlin only accepts resources that exist in your OS X address book. They tell me that they accept this oversight and will fix it, but you have to wonder how it ever got off the starting blocks like this! If you don’t know the name of somebody and have only a role to be filled, you have to add dummy Address Book entries like “Developer 1″! It also does not do any very useful resource conflict detection. It can detect over-utilized resources but the way you access this information is counter-intuitive and confusing, and it doesn’t seem to detect over-utilization across multiple projects.

xTime looked like the obvious winner to me – it didn’t have the resource/address book problems and it has a much nicer UI for adding resource from the address book. Drag and drop is used in more intuitive ways in xTime than Merlin. xTime has a generally nicer feeling UI which looks less complicated than Merlin, such as the view switching. However, and I just could not get over this, xTime does not allow tasks to have a duration of less than one day! I mailed their support people about it and they said that if I had learned project management at college I would know that no task takes less than one day. Hello?! I live in the real world, sorry about that! They are adding the facility anyway soon.

So Merlin doesn’t do cross-project conflict detection yet (coming soon I am told), but xTime can’t do tasks < 1 day in length.

After my “re-education” from the xTime support team and the < 1 day issue, I purchased Merlin and I’m pretty happy with it. It does feel like a V1.0 product, it has some niggles such as diagram layout issues when printing, but I will feed them back and get them fixed in 2.0

We’re currently selling our house and trying to find a new one to buy. It’s been six years since we last did this and a lot has changed – back then almost nobody really used the internet to send out house details, estate agents didn’t even know what email was usually.

However, given that property search sites and estate agent sites have been developing for a long time now I am still disappointed by how backward and un-user friendly these services are. There are lots of big property search sites – Rightmove, Propertyfinder, Primelocation and their ilk. They are all pretty much the same. Only one deserves notable mention – Propertyfinder – because it supports RSS feeds of your saved searches. A revolution in the world of property sales!

Rightmove is apparently the market leader:

• With Safari browser on Mac you can never get it to remember you, so you always have to log in to view saved searches – its quicker to just retype the search, but very boring
• No RSS (even if there was it would probably require a login which it couldn’t remember for me)
• You can’t search for multiple property types, i.e. House OR Character Property. Why assume people only want one kind of property?

Propertyfinder seems like rightmove with a bit more intelligence:

• It supports RSS feeds
• It provides a lot more useful info related to your search area and the properties – names of local towns, market information such as average time to offer acceptance, average prices in the area, and free past sale price information
• Doesn’t allow you to restrict your search to properties added in the last N days, you always get them all (unless you use RSS)

Primelocation is the worst of the bunch – the interface is ugly and clunky, they make you log in to access certain features, and they don’t seem to have nearly as much property – at least in the areas we are looking.

All of these fail to address basic and simple usability criteria:

1. Allow me to specify multiple property types in a search
2. Record from the agents more structured common data, so that you can search on this information too – i.e. is bathroom downstairs or not (in the UK at least this is often an issue), is there parking (off-road, on-street, on-street with permit etc), when was the house put on the market (sensitive issue I imagine but important to buyers)
3. Record structured locality specific data, for example in a hilly area, the properties should have extra fields that you can search when searching those areas specifically – i.e. “Has level gardens”
4. Capture the house build year, and allow searching on it. The distinction between “New” and “Resale” homes is daft, if people want a victorian/period house they always have to skip through dozens of “new” houses that are being resold. It is an inadequate distinction.
5. Show hit counts for the properties – show which are the most popular, the number of people who have viewed the full details. They have this information, the estate agents see it!

Many in the industry would undoubtedly say that much of that information is not in the vendor’s interest to publish, but the industry needs to sort itself out and start serving the people buying houses, especially with property at such high prices now.

The bottom line is, don’t waste peoples’ time sending them to properties they will not be interested in. People who have imagination to see beyond limitations will tailor their searches to be wider than those who want very specific things.

The laughable thing is that the agents waste their own time and money sending out inappropriate details to buyers because they don’t capture the buyer’s desires properly.

Plus, with our house on the market, its hard to see in this day what value an Estage Agent really adds when you are selling. About the only thing I can think of is (a) high street presence, and (b) somebody to show the buyers around your house. With future generations possibly more at home on their computers than looking through shop windows, I think direct sale via online sites like House Web are going to increase massively. There’s such a lot of money involved, I’m not sure I’d trust any Estate Agent, even if they were family!

It’s years since I bought a printer. My old mono laser NEC SuperScript 870 has lasted over 7 years and it is still working fine. However it’s a bit slow, and worse, has a parallel port so won’t play with my Macs without a USB to parallel connector bla bla. My sister will enjoy getting a new (old) printer from me.

Anyway I ordered an HP LaserJet 3050 yesterday, and to my surprise it arrived this morning. Great service I thought. It’s a cheap and cheerful mono laser printer with fax and scanner, hence copier too, and is sheet feeding for scan/fax so it takes less desk space. It connects via USB to the computer, and is Mac compatible.

Unpacked it all, ready to connect it up to the computer and… no USB cable supplied. Find a note buried in the docs “USB cable not included”. Turns out you have to order an HP-specific USB cable to even connect this thing to a computer.

Utter, utter, madness. Destroyed any good will I had formed towards HP – to trick your users into falling at the first hurdle is brain dead.

So, if you’re buying HP check that it includes all the cables you need, and if it doesn’t order them at the same time… or maybe better still find another printer that is actually ready to use out of the box and doesn’t have an artificially lowered price by excluding vital cables!

Oh more Demuths Restaurant website updates for me! I desperately want to see the new beetroot and chocolate cake in the flesh even though I couldn’t eat it! I like the Swedish theme of a couple of dishes, something you rarely see over here in the UK.

The cake shown here is a completely different vegan chocolate fudge cake… but isn’t it delicious looking! Anyway, Demuths is one of the few “gourmet” level vegetarian eateries in the UK. The food is just brilliant. There’s also a new cookery book in the pipeline, which I’m really looking forward to.
As a person who works with a fair amount of web content, you simply cannot emphasize enough the important of great imagery. If you have a “small” (read: low budget) website out there but it really matters to you in commercial terms, you simply have to spend some money on getting a great photographer to take those killer images you need to get your point across. On the web a lot of people see more than they read.

Bill Day has blogged some info about a “malware” application from Russian that sends SMSs to a premium rate number secretly, costing the end user a fortune. The thing is this is just a classic con “I’ll say I’ll do something for you, but actually I’ll shaft you instead”.

In the same way we can’t trust people that just turn up at our door (sadly), we can’t trust applications we install, no matter what platform we are using.