Rate my startup: Gantto, easy to present Gantt charts on the web | Hacker News Reader

Rate my startup: Gantto, easy to present Gantt charts on the web

gantto.com

95 pointscrcarlson51 comments

1) If you have collapsed a rollup and it contains tasks with precedents for other tasks, then the rollup needs to have the lines added.

2) If you collapse a rollup, it should still be draggable in time (left and right) and this should move all tasks within the rollup as one thing. The first task seems to have that functionality, but that's not intuitive.

3) Why can't you drag up and down since you have move up and move down?

4) On the date picker... DD, WW, MM, QQ, YY, ALL... but where is financial year? Or rather... custom iterations (fortnights, financial year, reporting segment, etc).

5) If I stuck this on a web page... could I give it data somehow? Could I provide it with some XML (since I note you allow save in that format) via JavaScript?

6) Colours... but yeah you're getting to that. The templates... they're kinda ugly but you've got the right idea and people will want to fit them to their own company scheme.

7) Your zoom buttons need a "Return to default".

8) It's got to be said... but you really need to allow XML import from MS Project files.

9) Keyboard shortcuts. Think of the power users... they should be able to create tasks with the simplicity of moving through Excel... this is what your competition is. So they need to tab to go right (rather than next active control in the tab order) and return should go down to the next row.

Those are some starters :)

Thank you for taking the time to test drive. We are saving these comments and will use them to drive our next set of features and feature improvements.

It's flash-based. I would have skipped the link if I had known.

My corporate desktop does not include flash. Surely corporate users are part of the core audience for Gantt charts?

To provide the opposite anecdote: my corporate desktops have always had Flash, if nothing else but to allow Flash video tutorials, etc.

Thanks, this is a good data point. Yes corporate users are definitely our audience. The users we have talked to so far have had Flash or were able to get it. The reason we are posting is to get different points of view, so this is useful feedback.

Your demo is ugly (Sorry, had to say it), but it works and I like the fact that you can pan around by clicking anywhere. That is not obvious however and might need a hint somewhere. The custom scrollbar is not intuitive because of the coloring, I kept thinking the track was the slider and vice-versa. After playing a bit more with it I discovered you have color themes. DEFINITELY use one of those by default. The grayscale theme is super boring and completely opposite of your goal which I believe is to "show off" your project schedule.

I think you should be able to pan by dragging the chart header (the months/years).

Turn on alternating columns in the demo. Also use the square or round corners but not the one in the middle.

Also the task tree could stand to be widened a bit by default, it looks weird that in your demo you start off with a bunch of tasks only showing halfway.

Expand/Collapse should be a single button, the icon of which changes to indicate state.

When you do a snapshot it is not clear what the output file is going to be I just got a file called "chart" - is that an Image? Is it a MS Project file?

I'm not sure you want to use the full blow "File/Edit/Format/View/Help" menu. It blends in too much with the chrome of the browser window and you would probably be better served (in terms of UI/UX) by using standard icons for the most commonly used items. Also add contrast to that menu/toolbar (Still talking only about file/edit/etc...) so that it doesn't blend with browser chrome so much.

The units on the "Zoom tool" in the bottom right corner are not obvious to me (the P and W)

Otherwise its looking really good. Keep at it!

Thank you for the comments, we will definitely be using these to drive the next set of feature developments.

Just FYI, the snapshot is a .png screenshot and we can definitely clarify that better. There is also a saveAs which saves in our own format and ultimately will save to each of the various PM formats.

Probably just a coincidence, but -

http://gantto.com/

http://preceden.com/

Preceden's my work and if their design was based on mine, I don't mind at all. I tend to base my initial designs on sites that look aesthetically pleasing to me and then adjust it over time to be my own. The dark blue header, for example, was inspired by http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/. I'm sure they're doing something similar.

Site looks great though--wish you guys the best.

Thank you for the kind wishes! We looked all over the place for inspiration for our site. Though the resemblence here is just a coincidence, clearly we like your style.

Yeah, that site is neat. Our current goal is to build interactive presentations for different sets of schedule data, so not quite the same thing.

I think he was referring to the logo and color scheme being very similar.

Oh yeah, I see it now. Thanks.

100% flash? No thanks. Good luck though.

What do you have against flash as far as this tool is concerned? How and how much would having such a tool but entirely in HTML5 influence your buying decision?

Flash apps tend to crash a lot.

Although some HTML apps have this problem too, Flash is invariably laggy.

Flash doesn't work well on Linux, and many of the people in my world run Linux desktops. (And some won't run proprietary software on principle.)

The UI of Flash apps is always some homegrown awfulness that tries hard but is never as intuitive or responsive as native UI, and not even as good as web browser controls.

With Flash apps, printing usually doesn't work as you expect.

You can't save the page.

Flash apps don't really exist on the web. Even if you give each Flash app its own URL, that just means you re-download the same framework over and over again and then load the data.

It is cumbersome (for instance) to bookmark, or bookmark a particular view, or to link directly to other content, or to have a task expand to show an iframe of other content on the web. Some advanced HTML apps have similar difficulties in practice, but Flash apps have these issues in principle.

None of my existing web browser plugins work well with Flash content. For example, some people have spellcheck built into their browsers; now they can't use that when entering data. Even something as simple as cut and paste sometimes doesn't work quite right.

No, Flash apps only tend to crash on Linux and it is slow on Macs. So ignore that 0.1% of the paying online Gannt chart user market and you'll be fine.

Flash works great on Windows, and unlike HTML5 it works in IE6 which is what your market is still probably running on their corporate network.

No flaming intended, btw. I have a PC, Mac and a Linux netbook running right now on my desk. Chrome tabs die all the time in Linux when running Flash and my Mac beachballs sometimes running large swfs. My PC browsers (FF and IE) have never puked once over Flash.

The interface is laggy in a way that HTML/JS (when correctly done) are not.

Interface lag when I drag things means I'm never going to use it - it can't compete against the many good desktop apps out there for me (plus, being flash means it wont work on my smartphone and iPad, which would have been a case for giving up on desktop apps) HTML/JS apps can have a ton of lag in sending things to the server before it gets frustrating, but dragging something and having it not move until a little bit later is too frustrating for me to use.

Take that with a grain of salt, though, I'm one of the people who get's extremely frustrated when having to use monitors not at their native resolutions (curse you DVDs on HD screens!)

Looks pretty good, I should have a chance to properly try it out when another project starts up for me in a few weeks.

One minor issue: the horizontal zoom is a little counterintuitive.

The + button increases the number of weeks shown, effectively zooming out. The reverse for -.

Not a major issue, but it could throw someone off, especially because the vertical zoom behaves in a standard + to zoom in and - to zoom out fashion.

Great point, I think we can reverse the horizontal Zoom and hardly anyone would be annoyed. We would love to hear about your experience and take your suggestions for improvement when you get to your next project.

Really realy minor, and not related to my personal distate of flash, but while your the tool loaded, the loader bar filled in from left to right as any loader would, but when it filled up, a second "loader" began to fill in from left to right.

Basically, when the first "loader" filled up to 100% and I expected to see the page, I was a put off by the second unexpected loader.

The menu within the application looks perilously close to the browser UI — For example, users could easily click the back button when trying to open the file menu.

Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/NTVhYzA0

Thank you for the screen shot. This is a great point we had not thought through all the way yet.

Video looks decent enough. I would see this as a difficult feature to get people to know about. Preparing Gantt charts for presentations seems to be a niche enough market (project managers, IT consultants, managers, etc?) that you might have trouble getting them to adopt this tool. Certainly would be very difficult to get them to pay money for it.

Seems more like a feature you'd expect from a web-based project management software than something stand-alone. Is that your intention here? License the technology/tools to a service like that?

One of our hypotheses is that there is a market for visualization tools for PMs - mostly because the tools out there tend to focus on organization and analysis but not on presentation as an important aspect of communication. We are starting out as an addition/plugin on top of existing tools but if we do a good job it possible we could ultimately end up as a stand-alone app as well.

Is your video demo hosted on YouTube? I couldn't load it and my company blocks YouTube. If you are targetting the corporate market consider hosting the video on Vimeo or some other less-popular video sharing site.

Thanks for the feedback. We are hosting on YouTube which is likely the problem. We will consider hosting on another site.

Ok you can import from all the current tools but what about exporting to them?

This can give people the confident that I can work on this on my own but when I send the file to somebody I can send them in a format that they know (also, good for trials, I will try it but what if I don't like it, I will have to redo all the stuff in my fave s/w again)

This is a great point. We currently import from MS Proj but we don't yet fully export. I agree with you that it would lower the friction to starting up if it was guaranteed painless to transition back or work with other tools. This feature is on our near term roadmap.

Very important point. This will also help people to easily transition between online / offline working with tools that they already have. Especially, since such charts often include collaborative input.

Collaborate with that exec who uses MS Project, and work from your netbook with this web app on the go.

I'm sure some people on HN would find this app useful, but how on earth has this submission garnered 39 votes in 22 minutes?

I hope their aren't "pay $50 to get your post to the top of HN" services cropping up...

Checkout this thing I made posts are generally popular at HN... coz they cater to all the startup and hacker mentality.

Sure, but they rarely go to #1 and I've never seen one leap frog a pg article as quickly as this one did. Could be perfectly normal, but it just seemed anomalous to me.

Maybe Flash-based gantt charts are the new hotness. ;-)

I voted it up because its a pain point that I experienced recently. I suspect anyone who tries to map out a schedule for a project has in the past searched in vain for something like this.

I ended up buying OmniPlan. But maybe that's not necessary anymore! Good luck to the team, it certainly looks useful and promising.

We definitely didn't pay anyone for this privilege.

It's ~5pm on the east coast of the US, I imagine there's generally a spike in traffic at this time which might have something to do with it.

As an alternate to expanding a task group, you might consider a drill down that just shows the sub-tasks. In the video you were able to make them fit, but that not be the case for a more complex projects.

From both marketing and SEO perspectives, I wouldn't limit the product overview to a video. You should add a page with screen shots, features, etc.

Good thoughts, thanks.

Wait... hasn't this idea come and gone about 10 times in the last 10 years. I remember when I begged 37 signals to add this as a small feature about 4 years ago and they laughed it off. Also, some of the text in the biographies seem a bit exaggerated.

We agree it is strange that this idea has not been done by now. We keep expecting that we will find it around the corner, but so far it has not actually shown up. Basecamp is a great product for many elements of managing projects, but I feel it still falls short on the visualization end of things. They look to pretty openly support 3rd party extensions and they are on our road-map of data to visualize.

Not sure about overall feature sets, but if Gantt charts are all you want, try out redmine (http://www.redmine.org/). It's an open-source issue-tracker that has Gantt charts out of the box.

In my browser at work (IE7) on a 1024x768 resolution, your feedback button on the left covers your tagline (specifically the words 'easily,' 'automatically,' and 'effective.')

Good catch, thank you.

Just an suggestion.

If you made this as Atlassian Confluence Plugin AND/OR Atlassian JIRA Plugin -> We'd ve more than willing to buy into your idea.

Great feedback. Thank you. I honestly have no idea what it would take to accomplish this but we will start looking into it.

You'll want to be able to embed these easily in other pages, with very simple tags and url's, much like youtube. Does it do that?

This is a really good idea that seems to resonate with a lot of people. We can not do this yet, but it will be one of our top features to get to work on. Thank you for the comment.

This looks pretty slick, but 1) out of those who uses Gantt charts, who would actually use this and 2) who uses Gantt charts in the first place?

1) Our hypothesis is that those who use Gantt charts and want to present them either to executives (more status and summary) or to a team (more details and dependencies) and are sick of strange screen shots or hand-drawing outcomes in powerpoint. 2) There are several different scenarios where Gantt charts are helpful. A typical example might be when one wants to model dependencies to figure out what the optimal order of execution might be or what the critical path might be. Another example is if one wants to set a target date and work backward in time to figure out when a decision or task has to be finalized. 3)We used them all the time in medical device, less so developing this software product with a small team...

searching youtube for "gantto" yields nothing. you have to search for "ganttointro".

Gantto sounds "Ghetto".

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