Mac project planning software

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