Fruity Picks #12 - Hyper Plan: Budget Visual Project Management

As a freelancer, I often find myself with my fingers in many pies. Currently, I’m doing some volunteer work for my local village museum, developing two websites, posting in my three blogs, and trying hard to finish at least one of the three books I’ve started writing. Managing my time is important to me, and with my background in project management, I like to have some semblance of a plan to keep track of what’s happening and when.

Whilst I am perfectly comfortable with software like MS-Project, it’s pretty much overkill for what I want but in the same vein, most ToDo applications aren’t quite good enough. I’m also a convert to visual planning tools having been using Kanban style boards in a number of consultancy gigs I’ve had.

When I came across Hyper Plan a few years ago I got quite excited, and after playing with it for a week or so, I’ve been using it as my project management tool of choice for my own work ever since.

Hyper Plan was created by Oryx Digital Ltd, a UK business owned and run by Andy and Claire Brice, and is aimed very much at people like me, who need flexible planning tools that are also affordable. Version 0.5.0 was released in beta at the end of 2014 and the latest version is 2.9.3 which went live midway through last year. The home edition costs £25 whilst the pro-edition is twice that but enables links (connections) between planning items. This is not a subscription model (thank goodness!) and is available on a 60-day trial.

If you are familiar with Kanban boards you’ll immediately feel comfortable with Hyperplan’s appearance. The screenshot below is for my writing activities.

My high-level, overall writing plan

As I mentioned, Hyper Plan is amazingly flexible. Rows and columns are completely user definable, and you can add as much or as little detail as required to manage your work. As items move through your defined workflow, you simply drag and drop them and the appropriate properties will automatically update. Planning items can be assigned to team members if you are in a bigger outfit than my one-man band, as can scheduled dates, detailed item descriptions and status flags. In the pro version, you can add timing constraints (connections) so that items are forced into a chronological sequence or can be linked by another relationship. Almost every property can be customised to your specific working practices - and it’s not often that a tool adapts to you rather than the other way around.

Almost everything is configurable

In addition, you can link to other Hyper Plan plans so it’s possible to maintain a master plan and directly access subordinate plans, although as far as I’m aware not changes will propagate between the plans so you still need to update items manually.

For Kanban purists, you can see the work in progress counts for each part of the workflow, but there is no way of limiting it automatically.

If you need to share your plans with a wider audience there are various output options available to you. Multi-user access is not currently supported but the developers have indicated that they will add this if there is sufficient demand. I suspect that for most people this will not be an issue.

This is such a great tool for managing work. I heartily recommend it, especially for freelancers, writers, web developers and anyone else involved in complex activities where you need to be on top of things. Download the trial version. You won’t be disappointed.

Blogging tools for the Mac

I'm relatively new to the art of blogging (although I've been writing for a number of years), and as a result I'm not all that familiar with different blogging set-ups and tools. When I decided to set up my first blog, ALLYGILL.CO.UK which is aligned to my business, some of the choices were really made for me. I had built the web site for my Process Management consultancy business using RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is great because it allows me some considerable flexibility without getting me dragged into the gory details of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, etc. on a daily basis. The pages are static, and I probably update them once or twice a month. Dreamweaver was too expensive and overkill for my fairly conservative requirements.

RapidWeaver also supports third party add-ons, and has a thriving developer community. One such add-on was RapidBlog which I purchased with a view to incorporating a blog in the future. RapidBlog is designed to work closely with Blogger, so the choice of a blog host was made automatically.

Blogger itself is a perfectly adequate tool for creating and managing blog entries, as is RapidBlog, but I wanted something with a bit more flexibility and more importantly, that didn't rely on an on-line connection as I quite often write on trains, planes and automobiles (I'm not a driver so don't panic). Some automatic content and configuration management was also important, which, for me, ruled out using RapidBlog as it would overcomplicate the way I manage my web site content.

I don't really remember how I came across MarsEdit. I imagine I read a review in one of the many Mac comics that I subscribe to and it struck me as being a fairly simple tool to use but one that ticked all the right boxes. It's also inexpensive which always goes down well at the Apple Harvest. I would have pointed out an excellent review I read the other day, but I can't quite put my hands on it at the moment. It was written by a staff writer for one of the UK specialist Mac magazines and is much better than anything I can throw together. I'll post a link if I can find it at a later date. Although MarsEdit provides some HTML formatting support, it is a bit basic and I recently added BlogAssist to the arsenal. This is another simple tool allowing that little bit of extra control over blog entry appearance.

Let me know if there's other stuff I'm not aware of. I have looked at WordPress and I'm aware that there's a wide range of associated development tools, but I'm committed to Blogger at the moment. This combination of tools serves me perfectly well and as a wise man said:

"If it ain't bust, don't fix it!"