DeskAway

It has most of the right features, but the UI is a bit unresponsive (maybe just the free version and my internet), and there are some unnecessary steps, like creating a document.  The rich text edit is featureful but just doesn’t feel right.  My only solid complaint is “feel.”  I really wanted to like DeskAway, but I’m not going to use it.

Joint Contact

Joint Contact is another application who’s (which’s?) developer left a comment on my blog and suggested I look at them. Joint Contact is a product developed by Arbutus Software Inc

I’d suspect the fear of a fairly incoherent and possibly inaccurate review on my blog would be a slight deterrent towards trying to convince me to me a customer. I guess for many companies, any press is good. Not that I could be considered “press” by any stretch of the imagination. Though I did get 21 viewers one day (“hi mom”.)

Joint contact seems nice and responsive, but my browser crashed on file upload.  Not Joint Contact’s fault, mozillas.  Firefox seems to croak on this more, but this time it was Seamonkey.  Looks like they’re backporting features.

Negatives:

Workspaces must be created before documents.
Navigation isn’t that intuitive.  Everything’s in small type on the right margin.  Probably learnable.  Until looking over there, I couldn’t even find tasks.

Anyway,  I’m burned out on reviews.

Wrike

Wrike was recommended to me in a comment by Megan McAlpine. I guess she works for wrike.

Anyway, I signed up for the trial and spent an hour looking at it. It’s pretty interesting. It is document centric. Actually, it’s folder centric. A folder has a description, can have files uploaded, and have associated tasks. I was a little confused by all the sample folders, some of which seemed more like search results (such a “By Project”.) But the folders are completely customizable. But it’s a bit of a pain to delete all the existing folders. Especially with the lag over a network connection.

The tooltip helps would be more useful if you could see what you wanted, rather than a quick run through of all of them which is distracting and confusing.

The timeline is quite attractive and the ability to modify start and end dates in the timeline is very nice.

The best feature of wrike is the email integration. You can create a task just by sending an email to wrike@wrike.com. The task will be added to a folder if you include the [foldername] in the subject in square brackets. If a folder doesn’t exist, it is created.

I haven’t seen the email feature working, but it’s only been a few minutes since I sent it.

– After several minutes, the task shows up in wrike. It’d be nice if it were quicker, but the idea is that you email someone a task, and only CC wrike. I’d rather see it the other way, and have wrike handle the sending. This way does have the advantage of simplicity. After all, how would you specify notification recipients (other than CC’ing them) instead — or have “watchers” for all emails sent to a folder (or sent by someone), etc. I’d like to see a way that incorporates tracking email threads (responses.) More tags (a la wiki tags) that give more email functionality might be nice. Things that power users could use (such as changing assignment or status) but new users could do via web (with nice tooltips for how to do via email. Think like keyboard shortcuts.)

Reports are nice (really more like filters of tasks, etc.) But they don’t seem to work either.

– Eventually reports showed up too.  Since it doesn’t involve email (except the tasks that are emailed) I don’t understand the delay.

I like how tasks have needed metadata, including multiple statuses (Active, Complete, Deferred, Cancelled), detailed descriptions, attachments and revisions. Tasks also have simple time tracking.

Tasks can be included in folders, but the “folder” taxonomy seems a bit awkward. You have to think of a folder as a tasklist, but that metaphor doesn’t always apply. You can ignore it when you want, but having a marker object of “tasklist” or “action” or something created inside a folder (and showed by default on a folder-level dashboard) would be more intuitive to me. (Though to be honest, adding a tasklist is an extra step I don’t want to do. But for the price of having multiple (or no) task lists in a folder, I’d take it.

I’d rather have Folders, Tasks (and lists) be grouped by project. (And have other folders that are not project specific.) Tags would be a nice meta/multiple marker for things like tasks.

I’m uncertain if the free version allow multiple users and if how, they are added.

Altogether an interesting take, with a unique design and some interesting new features. If it had the ability to have more comlex descriptions (and comments) and managed email notification (outgoing) then I’d probably try it.

Integrating MVC and CMS frameworks

The problem with most frameworks is that they’re all or nothing.  Some good ones, TurboGears and Symfony come to mind, take existing projects, which makes it easier to swap stuff out, but you’re still on your own.

Joomla seems to be going the route of adding it’s own MVC.  I’d heard earlier that they were going to rebuild on CakePHP.  This is going backwards, but going the other way, adding CMS to the framework is just as silly — like Zope.  I don’t want to use a framework if it tells me how to develop.  And I don’t want to create content in HTML unless I have to.  That’s what paying users get to do.

CMS is an application, and it should only be used to manage content.  Integration with authorization and the model is necessary to check permissions and generate from templates, but that’s it.  If a site user needs to edit their content in the site, then an edit button should forward them to the CMS app.  The site should not be run by the CMS app.

CuencaTravel.com

I’m starting work on a new site with my new partner, Patricio, a web developer.  He has his own business and web site, aplitec.net, which shows he has some design talent.  He’s experienced with PHP and Joomla.

The site is called CuencaTravel.com.  It aims to be a resource connecting visitors to Cuenca with local people and businesses.  The type of stuff you’d want to find on a travel website.

• A directory of businesses travelers might be interested in:
  hotels, restaurants, travel agents, tour operations, shops and artisans, etc.
•  Reviews and comparisons of businesses, attractions, sights, etc.
• A map of the city and the ability to find businesses, attractions, sights, etc.
• Blogs, galleries, comments, etc. by travelers and locals
• Articles and advice for travelers
• News and local events
• Advertising, specials, package deals
• Hotel & tour reservations and bookings
• A marketplace for local products from shops, artisans, etc.

I hope to use this project to refine my process ideas and test drive a qa site.  In essence, CuencaTravel.com will be the first qa-site user (apart from bootstrapping.) One Shore is still looking for others willing to try out QA Site and give feedback.  It’s free for 3 months, and maybe more, if you’re a good customer.  That includes a free VPS server and support.

Of course I want Cuenca Travel to succeed as well.

What I want in a framework

I want a front controller that takes care of sessions, access control, url-action mapping, logging, and resource loading.

I want an MVC framework that coordinates my business model with my display views. It should work with different persistence mechanisms. Views should be built from templates, components, and “page parts.”

I want a CMS the ties content to view objects, and works with the external user auth and sessions. I want it to be able to combine multiple views, or maybe a “portal” front end does that.

I want an ORM that is lightweight, but not opaque, handles the 80% by default but allows the 20%. Transactions should not be handled in the ORM layer.

I want applications (blog, forum, wiki, pm tool, bug tracker, shopping cart, etc.) that run by themselves, not as a web page. A blog post, or a discussion, etc. isn’t the same thing as a web site, though I might want to display them on my web site. Not instead of my website, or as my website. If you want to include a web application that displays your blog, wiki, or whatever, that’s fine, but keep them separate. You’d be surprised how much easier adding a web service is then, but unless you’re working with remote machines (a la a mashup) you’d find it’s not as often needed.

Of course what’s needed to make this happen is protocols. Web services are one way to build protocols, but not the best. Now, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir, and this is nothing new, but sometimes the choir is a bit out of tune. Now maybe your star soloist goes a bit out of tune on purpose to try and blend with your rookies and reduce dissonance, but while I’m tone deaf, it hurts my design-ear to see this.

I know there are sometimes practical reasons to do things the way they are done, but I don’t like them. Maybe I can help change some of them.

More PHP frameworks

Akelos — another one to check out that they liked over here:

http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/~tomahawk/summary.php

Masterblaster

(this was originally pulished on my personal blog fijiaaron.)

“He has the knowin and the doin of a lot of things.”

That’s what made the short guy on Mad Max beyond thunderdome valuable. Masterblaster was also the name of my parents’ Thanksgiving turkey.

But it’s the “knowin” and the “doin” that are valuable. And since I’ve been evaluating a lot of project management applications for my business

ActiveCollab
ProjectPier
GoPlan
BaseCamp
Others

While the theme seems to be task lists, they all have one fata flaw. They consider a task to be a line of text with a check box. If only all my tasks were so easy. ActiveCollab, the only one listed above with time tracking capability, doesn’t consider the time spent on tasks worth tracking. None of them consider that one task may be dependant upon (or block) another.

I understand that the idea of these web 2.0 tools is simplicity. But a task list that doesn’t connect to anything else, is really not an improvement over a list on scratch paper (except it can be viewed over the internet.) A plain text file does as much, excepting the “milestones” feature — which can be approximated by scrawling “due on $x_date” at the top of the page, and then writing TODAY in big letters and circling it.

If document management were a serious feature, they’d at least work on organizing them. What’s really needed is a way to tie documents to tasks. Or at least discussions or messages. Almost any task worth writing down is worth more than one line. It could be as simple as providing a link from a task to a message|discussion|note. And the ability to link messages|discussions|notes to one another — like a wiki, or what used to be called a “web site.”

If you have a wiki that can add attachments, a todo|task|check list is just a page. If you’ve got the fancy strikethrough style and ordered lists, you’re a step ahead of these things. Dependencies, importance (even if just limited to an important flag and a descope flag) are also important, and easily ignorable.

See, it’s not just the ability to do something that’s important, it’s the knowing how to do it. You might forget what you did to accomplish task X and need to do it again — or undo it. Or someone else needs to know how you did it, so they can duplicated it, or just satisfy Sarbanes-Oxley CYAbility.

ActiveCollab Evaluation

ActiveCollab has many more features than the other simple hosted PM apps, but still remains simple to use. There are a few confusing points and inconsistencies, but if it had a free account, it might be my first choice.

ActiveCollab has a better presentation than project pier. Of the last three, I preferred ProjectPier’s visual design, and I like it’s simplicity, but ActiveCollab works more features in with only a slightly more complex UI, that’s actually a bit prettier.

ActiveCollab features (and navigation include)

• Homepage
• Discussions
• Milestones
• Files
• Checklists
• Calendar
• Pages
• Tickets
• Time
• People

I like the ordering of the menu elements. This seems fairly right to me, though I might move calendar up to the front by milestones.
The homepage is similar to all the other apps, but I think the best of them all. It includes recent activities, but also links to assigned tasks, as well as an iCalendar feed and RSS feed of recent tasks. It also has milestone information on the front page.

This can actually be a bit much and you need to scroll down to see recent tasks — which truthfully, I don’t care about seeing that much anyway.

It also has project status including a progress bar of tasks. I like that.

Discussions are like messages. The ActiveCollab discussion and comment editor has nice rich text editing including bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, ordered and unordered lists, indentation, images, links, and some formats (headings, paragraphs, etc.) and styles (quote, important, etc.)

This is the best rich text editor I’ve seen in a web app. Maybe it’s an open source one I can use.

Discussions can be assigned a category, milestone, or tags. You can also set notifications, but this isn’t intuitive, and is somewhat clumsy, a dropdown or collapsible checklist would be nice. Apparently it allows multiple assignees. While an interesting feature, I’m not sure it’s a good practice.

The ability the create categories, and even milestones, on the fly would be nice, a la GoPlan.

Discussions can have files attached, but unlike ProjectPier, attached files don’t show up in the file list

Milestones have an annoying and superfluous field “Start on.” In my mind, a milestone *is* a date. The due date. And of course the deliverables associated with a product (or project) on that date.

Milestones can also have attached files, which again, don’t show up in the file list. I don’t think files should be attached to milestones, but they should be able to be associated some other way.

Files come with a description. Which is optional. I like that. They can be associated to a category, milestone, or tags. Also you can set notifications. For file changes, I assume.

I don’t really understand the conceptual difference between “category” and “tags” here — I don’t know if activecollab can have multiple tags, unlike project pier.

Checklists, are, I guess, task lists. I don’t know why the name difference. Especially since a checklists has a list of tasks. It also has a summary, and a rich text description.

But you can’t add tasks until after submitting the checklist. A little bit unfriendly.

A summary (or a comment) apparently has a minimum size limit. If for instance you use ‘no’ in a summary or comment, it fails silently. Failing silently is not a goPagesod idea at all.

The calendar feature is nice, but could be prettier.

Pages are confusing. Their like a wiki page. In this context, like a discussion or message. They can apparently contain a discussion – in that a description is rich text and it can have comments. They can also have tasks. And subpages. And attachments. Users can subscribe to a page. I don’t know what all gives a notification about a “page.” Probably any edit.

A page seems like a mini sub-project, only tasks aren’t associated to task lists (I mean checklists) or milestones.

I like the correlation a page provides, but isn’t that what the whole app is supposed to be providing?

Tickets are a basic issue system. They can be assigned category, milestone, priority, due date, assignees, and tags. They can include attachments. A ticket is basically a discussion with a few extra fields (priority, due date.) I don’t think it works. You’d probably want a real ticketing system, and would like integration.

Time tracking is a nice thought, but you probably are going to want to use an external tool. It’s entry is a bit confusing because there are no labels, except below on already created time entries. I’m all for keeping time tracking as simple as possible, but chances are, if you have to keep track of your time, you have to do it in a bigger and more annoying tool.

Tickets have their own mini time tracking too, which is a bit confusing. I’d think if you were trying to integrate time tracking, you’d want to associate it to tasks. Every ticket has one or more tasks associated that track time. Editing tickets, discussions, files, etc. can be calculated automatically, except if you walk away in mid-edit and come back 2 hours later.

People is the last category, but the free version of ActiveCollab only allows one person, so there’s not much to say here.

I give ActiveCollab a thumbs up for most features, but there is a bit of confusion and dissonance. Some of which can be fixed with simple descriptions, error messages, and better naming — such as calling checklists tasklists, or explaining how to add notifications and what is being notified, .

But some of the features were not so clearly thought out — or at least I don’t understand them. Pages, Tickets, and Time being the main culprits here. I’d guess because they are extra features that were bolted on without the considering (or wanting to change) the overall design.

Overall, I’d probably still use ActiveCollab if ProjectPier wasnt’ free. If it were less confusing, I’d probably shell out the money for it. I like that it can be hosted on your intranet.

Project Pier Evaluation

Project Pier was originally forked from ActiveCollab. They have diverged quite a bit since then. Mostly because ActiveCollab has been adding features, but the design is different too.

I’d say that Project Pier has a cleaner design and better semantics, but I miss some of the features of ActiveCollab: rich text edit, pages, calendar, iCalendar integration, tickets, and time tracking to list the most prominent. They are significantly different enough to warrant individual comparison. In fact, I’d say GoPlan and Basecamp are more similar than ProjectPier and ActiveCollab.

Project Pier adminstration is broken into:

1. Company information
2. Team Members
3. Clients
4. Add or Delete Projects
5. Configuration — general & mail setup
6. Tools – consists of email test and bulk email.
7. Upgrade -an automatic update option

A project contains the following elements:

1. Overview
2. Messages
3. Tasks
4. Milestones
5. Files
6. Tags
7. Forms
8. People

I think this is a pretty good division.

The Overview is similar to all the other tools in this category, prominently featuring a list of “Recent Activities” — Tasks, Task Lists, Comments, Messages, Files, Milestones, etc. and milestones due.

It has breadcrumbs navigation and search at the top of the page, and on the right side, links to forms, project status, involved companies, and a link to the Recent Activities RSS feed.

Links to add the four main elements are included:

Messages
Task Lists
Milestones
Files

These all have basic name and description, boolean options (such as private), notification flag, and tags. I like tags, only apparently one message/tasklist/milestone/file can only have one tag. This does allow multiple-word tags.

A message also has importance, and the ability to attach files. Comments can be enabled or disabled.
The number of options makes it slightly painful to scroll down to submit.

Messages are in plain text only. — Actually it looks like wiki text is supported, just not mentioned.

Task lists can be associated to a milestone (but need not be — I like that for when I’m still planning.)
Several () tasks entry fields are included at the bottom, for quick entry. Nice, but I’d like to see more. Maybe you don’t need so many rows per task for entry, especially when they’re displayed on single rows.

A milestone also has a due date and assignee.

Messages and task lists can be assigned to a milestone, but they don’t have to be. That’s nice!

Files can be put in folders, but folders can’t be nested. That might be a good enforcement.

Attachments to messages are listed in all files, and can be sorted into folders (and tagged.) Nice!
But I did see one glitch where the attachment to a message seemed orphaned.
Files can be moved to different folders.
There are default folders that can be modified in the administration. I like that.
File revisions can be tracked, but there appears to be no diffing ability. That’s always been a problem for binary files such as DOC, PDF, image, or spreadsheets, though — the most likely files to be uploaded. I miss Trac’s feature though for text or code.

As mentioned, it appears one item can only have one tag, which is unfortunate. Still, tags offer a nice sorting method, but not too different than folders (except messages, tasks, and milestones don’t go in folders.)

People from the company and client can be added to one project and permissions are adequate and not too complex.

All in all, I’d say ProjectPier edges out both GoPlan and Basecamp — taking the best features of both, being semantically clear, intuitive, and well documented. And most of all — FREE.

It’s an open source (LAMP) application that you download and install on your own servers, which is actually a plus, most of the time.

I miss the wiki capabilities of linking between pages and a calendar. A work break down can be a spreadsheet, but that gives a disconnect with tasks.

Tests, Requirements, and Tasks need more semantic information. And a defect tracking program is needed, but the simple issue trackers included in other apps aren’t really adequate.

— it looks like WordPress ate another post.  A draft of this was saved (what you see above.)