Re: [Planner] similarities with JCVGantt

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 09:32 -0400, James White wrote:
> Lots of talk about Mind Mapping lately.
> 
> For me, I just want to see the planner do more planning.  But there is
> lots of work to do yet to make our planner into a complete project
> manager.  For starters, we might concentrate on more mundane things
> like: 
>       * drag and drop tasks to move them higher or lower in the list 
>       * context menu access to links - to move or remove an existing
>         link 
>       * see all of the menu items on a single screen. 
>       * hot-keys for simple actions like moving a task up and down the
>         list 
>       * have a resource be planned for in TWO or more projects
>         concurrently - which is going  to require database storage. 
>       * the option of mySQL storage - it is ubiquitous and simple 
>       * resource may have TWO or more hourly rates, or "roles" (shop
>         and onsite, for example) and still be planned for 
>       * project costing - we are SO CLOSE already... we just need a
>         bit more work. 
>       * plugin API for third-party reporting (or mind-mapping) tools
> The planner is coming along nicely and I am grateful that finally
> someone in the Linux/Open-Source world has provided us with a
> functional planner (none of the rest are so functional or reliable).
> I am grateful to see that it is being developed for Gnome - and so is
> faster by orders of magnitude than QT or Microsoft offerings.
> 
> I want to encourage the devs to make the planner into a better and
> better planner and project manager.  Mind Mapping is fun, but seems
> like a real tangential addition.  Perhaps more of a plug-in to be
> written by a third-party?

I agree - well, mostly.  Planner needs to concentrate on the basic
functions of project management. This is where I plan to concentrate my
time. Integration with mind mapping is in my opinion very much in the
'nice to have' category.

<soap box>
However, if someone wants to take the time and work on integrating a
mind mapping tool - then great!  This is the great thing about open
source - right?  We can all work on the tool and add features that are
important to us. </soap box>

Another approach to this mind mapping thought would be to develop an
import for it.  If one of these tools saves the mind map in an xml
format, it should be relatively simple to write a stylesheet to
transform it to planner format, and add an import menu item for it.

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>