There’s a lot of designers who use Goplan to manage their projects and organize their creative output. This post is for everyone, although it may be particularly interesting if you’re a designer as well. Although we already talked about the changes coming to the file management functionality (click here if you haven’t read about them yet), there’s something we didn’t mention then.

The new image gallery (accessible from the File navigation) shows thumbnails for all the files uploaded to a specific project on Goplan, allowing you to quickly get a glimpse of artwork, schematics, diagrams or photos. With the new tagging and filtering mechanism, it also becomes really easy to filter out through the photos and focus on the ones you’re really interested on.

All this (and a lot more) coming really soon with Goplan 2. In the next couple of posts we’ll talk about the new plans and of the minor updates coming. Keep an eye out!

Hey everyone! Some of you might have noticed that we made a few updates to our servers today, as the site and blog (the application was not affected) were inaccessible for a while (for some people the downtime for the blog was of about 4 hours). The downtime was caused by some maintenance updates on our site and blog server. These problems have now been solved and both site and this blog are back to normal. Let us know if you run into any problems.

Since we’re talking about our website and blog, it makes sense to remind you that when we launch Goplan 2, we will be merging all our domains into one. This means you won’t need to visit the site on one URL and the application on another. Everything (site, blog and the application servers) will all be accessible from goplanapp.com. You don’t need to make any changes, obviously, as we’ll continue supporting the old domains for a while, and redirecting you to the right place for convenience if you visit them.

Time to start talking not about what we changed in previous functionality and UI, but about the new goodies. First however, it makes sense to talk about our previous chat functionality and how it had an impact on our decision to add status updates to Goplan.

Goplan 1 includes real-time chat functionality. Although it seemed like a good idea when we implemented it, we’ve come to realize through our own experience and user feedback that it required constant attention and a dedicated tab. When you’re trying to work, thats not that great. So we decided to go with a different paradigm for how we approach team-wide communication. Enter status updates.

If you use Twitter or Friendfeed you’re already familiar with the concept of activity streams or status updates. We’re bringing that concept into goplan for several reasons, the most important of which is that it is unobtrusive. If you need to know what your team is up to, you just check the team-wide status updates page and you’re done. Updating the status is super easy because there’s a readily available form on top of all pages – you just need to click “Update your status” to slide it down.

I suspect people who use Twitter will immediately see the benefit of having these updates on their company dashboard and projects. We’re also planning on having these status updates go to your IM (Google Chat, Jabber, hopefully others), and/or integrate with your account on Twitter, which will definitely be exciting.

We think this is great – and we hope you like it as well. There’s more stuff coming, and while we’re slowing down our posting frequency (there’s only so much we can/want to spoil about the upcoming launch), we’re also getting closer and closer to getting Goplan 2 out there, so keep an eye out. And if you have any feedback or ideas, let us know!

This update has been a long time coming – we’ve been really busy working on the product, sorry about the delay. Time to talk about our files. One of the things people complained about (and that we didn’t like much ourselves) on Goplan 1 was the file management interface. Each file took quite a chunk of space, it was hard to categorize and move things around, there were no thumbnails for images. All in all, it needed a lot of work – and work we did.

Interface updates: The first thing you’ll notice in the above screenshot is that we removed everything we didn’t need from the interface. Now we can actually fit a good number of files into the screen. We also made it easier to move files between categories, and we are in the process of creating specific ways to view categories – much like you do in your file manager (Finder on the Mac, Explorer on Windows PCs, Nautilus/Konqueror/* in Linux).

Categorization: As in the current version, there will be folder-based categorization of files. However, like everything else on this new version is taggable – you can guess how that’ll help. If you tag several things as, say, “design”, doing a goplan-wide search for “design” will give you all the assets tagged as such. We hope this will make it much easier to find information – we know it’s hard to find old stuff easily, so we’re making it better.

On the next preview we’ll go through the new dashboards for companies and projects. We’ll also spill the beans (for the very first time – no one outside our company knows this is coming) of one of the new features on Goplan 2. Have a great weekend, and make sure you come back to read the news on Tuesday.

It’s that time of the week again. We’re continuing our series of previews of the upcoming Goplan 2 functionality (you can see earlier previews for Tasks, Tickets, the new navigation) – this time, we’ll talk briefly about the new implementation of the Calendar. As with everything else, we scrapped the code from the current Goplan and redid it completely. This means we can do cool stuff like in-place event creation – and redo the interface with it.

Creating multi-day events is a breeze. You select your days by dragging and the create event modal pops up to confirm and ask you for an event title and extra details (this behavior is visible on the screenshot above). No use in hiding it, we love the way iCal works on the mac – so we got the best of it and put it into our new calendar. I think you’ll love it.

Sync: Having a great calendar is great, but it makes sense to let you bring it with you – we can’t assume you’ll be at your computer all day – so we’re working on tools to sync our calendar with the tools you bring with you. The previous Goplan calendar already synced with iCal and Google Calendar, so we’re improving that integration so you can bring your Calendar with you in your pocket (say, with an iPhone).

There’s aditional calendar screenshots up on Flickr, and if you look closely, you’ll find a couple of screenshots of our new file interface, which we haven’t talked about yet – but will next week. Have a great weekend!

I’d like to start off this post by thanking everyone who’s been sending feedback and ideas for Goplan 2 – you guys are awesome, and we loved your input on the last post about our navigation ideas. This post isn’t about the past, though, but the future. And Goplan 2′s Tasks in particular.

As with the rest of the app, we’ve completely reworked our Tasks implementation, and while the screen below might look like much has changed (apart from what we consider to be a much cleaner – and better – layout and design), things sure have improved. Here’s how:

The first thing we completely redid was the need to click through to tasks in order to create new subtasks. Just like you can quickly create tasks without leaving the task list screen, you’ll also be able to create new subtasks from the same screen, without any page refreshes. While that’s not necessarily visible in screenshots, we’ll be posting a series of videos highlighting the new functionality soon.

Also, tasks now benefit from our new filtering mechanism (a video on it is coming tomorrow), which makes it much easier to find the tasks that relate to you – either by being assigned to you directly, or just being in your particular area of expertise. That way, if you’re a design expert, you might click the “design” tag to filter everything out and focus on your work.

Coming (very) soon: a preview of our new calendar (you’ll like it, I’m sure!) and highlight videos of how the new features work. Keep your feedback coming, we love it. And get ready, we’re almost there!

In a brainstorming session today, a member of our team posed the question of whether it would be more effective to have contextual navigation on the left-hand side of the site instead of on the right. With the UI code rewrite we did for Goplan 2, the change between left and right becomes really easy, so we decided to ask refer to the opinion of our users to make a more informed decision.

The image above shows the left-side navigation we’re testing, and the previous preview posts we did show the older right-side navigation. Which do you prefer? Alternatively, we could just have the option to alternate between right and left on the user preferences screen, but we lean towards simplicity, so the extra option would be less desirable.

Interestingly, I felt weird about the change to the left-hand side at first, but now I’m actually leaning towards it. It almost feels like it removes clutter and mouse moves. Everything becomes snappier. What do you think? Leave a comment, we appreciate your input. Thanks!

As promised, we’re going to do a series of posts covering the functionality and experience of some of the features coming in Goplan 2. We start off this series (we intend to make it bi-weekly) by talking about our issue tracking system.

We rebuilt out ticketing system from the ground up to prepare it for our new tagging, attachment and filtering systems (which we will cover in one of the upcoming previews). Apart from filtering tickets with “open, closed, mine” (which gives you open tickets, closed tickets and tickets assigned to you respectively), you’ll be able to filter tickets by tag. This allows you to tag tickets using functionality “buckets” (like design, development, layout) and filter them to find things you can work on.

We also added a couple of features that some of our ticket-intensive users asked for, like closing reasons (now you can close a ticket and mark it as “won’t fix” or “duplicate”) and better priorities. We also simplified the priority/severity issue by removing severity entirely. This makes it much simpler to actually create and log issues without having to wonder what both severity and priority mean – they quite mean you’ll solve the tickets in the same order.

As you can probably guess by the screenshots above, there were quite a few cosmetic changes since the last time we gave you a glance of our UI. We’ll talk more about the interface in a future post and cover some of the reasons for these updates, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is that our contextual navigation (in this Ticket example, the ticket navigation) has been moved to the sidebar. This is the same for all screens, and makes it much easier to get to where you want to go.

The screenshots also hint at a couple of new things, so click each if you want to see them in full size. On the next update, coming on monday, we’ll talk about our revamped tasks and milestones! Have a great weekened!