teejae

Congrats jerpint!

How many people are attending? Please feel free to use this tool if it happens to work for you. Would love to hear if you actually do use this.

But get some rest, and enjoy tomorrow!

Yea for most of the social conditions, you can probably already use the "Separate/Link" feature.

Similar to hermitcrab's comment, I'm not sure about the right/left handed-ness. As I'm currently at table level, rather than seat level, I think it's something that can be figured out at the table level later.

Thanks for the feedback!

Definitely valuable constraints!

I'll definitely have to think about how to incorporate such things in a simple to use manner.

Thanks a lot for all the development of Optaplanner over the years! Your work is really amazing and valuable.

As others have mentioned, this is very culturally dependent. And culture isn't necessarily country or region. Different types of people like different things. This particular app is designed for those times when you need more assignment, for whatever reason.

Hope that makes sense!

Oh great! Are there any other features/abilities you might need to be able to use this?

I appreciate the feedback!

Thanks for the insights! At the moment, the app is targeted at "table level" rather than "seat level".

This already has different table sizes.

There's already a way to mark who should/not sit together

For location, I'm thinking of adding a draggable UI to put tables in relative places. But at first, I don't want to make this too complex for people to use.

Also, thinking of adding attributes to both groups and tables to get people to what they need (bathrooms, dance floor etc).

There's definitely already lots of apps/sites that let people do the pretty stuff, but they seem really manual at the moment.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts! Thanks for looking!

I agree that having serendipity adds to the mix. This tool is more an iterative tool, meant to help guide the decisions, rather than being prescriptive.

Yea, I would love to hear from one of those aunty/uncles! But I don't know any offhand. You have any pointers?

Thanks for giving the tool a try!

Yea, I went with Optaplanner, which is definitely more "user friendly".

Prioritization of parties is on the roadmap, related to table ranking. Were you thinking of prioritization in a different manner?

How were you thinking about "someone getting left out"?

Thanks for the thoughts!

Good points! I looked at Perfect Table Plan, and it seemed perhaps a bit "too complex" at the moment.

I agree that it takes some iteration, and that's why the UI is meant to help tweaking, and testing new ideas. You can lock people in place and keep tweaking, and go back in your work.

Btw, how many people attended your wedding when you used Perfect Table Plan?

Yep, there's already a way to select guests and keep them separated in the UI. Give it a try and lemme know what you think!

Haha! How many people attended? Would your in-laws have been able to use this type of tool?

Yea, I agree the versioning isn't really there yet.

Definitely great idea for the autocomplete and seat finder. Right now, I'm not storing any data on the server, so can't do lookup. Also I worry about personal data leakage.

I was thinking this could turn into a business of referrals, as anyone who uses it will probably know others who need it. And I was going to do this for free for smaller events.

You'd need to pay subscription to keep data, or for more advanced tools. Simple events don't really need much though.

Anyway, would love to hear any other thoughts you have! Your site looks very lovely and usable, which is what really matters!

Yea Optaplanner is pretty good. It's definitely gotten better over the years in terms of usability, especially with Constraint Streams.

Great for schools!

If you click on the Optimize, it's already a shuffling. I could add shuffling from there, but it really won't affect optimization too much, as the underlying state is similar.

I can definitely add randomization for fun, but I'm not sure how many people will use it yet. Trying to keep buttons to a minimum at first.

Have a link to your tool?

Thanks for the great feedback!

I agree with versions mattering. At the top, there's every version right now. Probably needs better UX.

Yea, I agree with adding attributes. I wasn't sure if most people would understand that UX. But it's on the roadmap, in lieu of groups.

Yep, dupes are definitely a thing. There's lots of places where everyone has the same names, though, so it could get annoying. Think Bali (5 names cycled), Korea (everyone's last name is similar). I haven't worked on this UX yet.

Great idea with the QR code generator! I'll have to look into this feature.

I'm using Optaplanner underneath, which is already open source.

https://www.optaplanner.org/

I'm using Optaplanner as the engine under the covers, which is open source and off the shelf.

https://www.optaplanner.org/

Right now I don't support multiple groups. That was on the roadmap, but I haven't put it in yet.

I figured most people didn't need multiple groups immediately, but if I hear it's important, I'll definitely prioritize it!

Thanks for trying it out with a more "realistic" data set. I have some friends' lists, but would love for others to try it with their own data.

Let me know what you think! Is this a show stopper?

Ooh cool!

FYI you can lock people to the tables and it optimizes around it already. Just click on the lock icon.

Interesting idea on the tolerances.

Right now I'm not putting in specific seat numbers yet. You just mean number them for UX purposes?

How's seatpuzzle.com doing? Looks like a cool app!

No writeup yet, since I've been working on the UX more than the optimization. I haven't optimized the optimizer yet or done benchmarking yet.

Mostly working on the constraints and what's important first to be able to tweak first. Trying to make this very user friendly.

I agree there's going to be some hand curation. That's why this tool was meant to help iterate over solutions, and not prescribe. You can lock people in.

Also, thanks for the specs. I was thinking of some of those things, but really glad to hear how you thought about it!

I haven't clustered people together yet in terms of physical location, because I don't have a way to express table locations yet in the UI. Trying to keep it "just simple enough". But I know it's important for many people.

If you have any more insights, I would love to hear it!

Thanks for trying it out!

With the spreadsheet, you can just put couples as single guest (+1 = 2 party size). So you can put a whole family as (Person+3) or something. See the template.

The "couple" was really the wedding couple as example.

I'm optimizing for probably 100+ guests.

Hope that makes sense!

I have a friend who had 400+ guests and 50+ tables. But they paid by the table, so saving whole tables would have saved lots of money. And friend stayed up all night before wedding stressing about who to put where.

Congrats elicash!

Sorry for the lack of docs. Try the "Import Guestlist" button. There's a template there as an example.

There's no UI right now for adjusting the guest list. You can only import from the template, saved as an Excel file.

If there's any features you need, please feel free to write either here or to my email.

Good point! Yea, I'm putting that on the roadmap as part of "table ranking" and "prioritizing guests". So maybe the head table is "rank 1", and "parents" get "min rank 1".

Also, for now, you can lock certain people to certain tables and then Optimize again.

Yep! I was scratching an optimization itch. Glad to see someone noticed!

Yep, I'm targeting an optimization engine at a more specific problem that might be useful to lots of consumers.

Yep, NP-hard! This is using an optimization engine. It's not brute forcing. But hopefully it's getting pretty good approximate results.

You can keep trying harder from the state, just click again on the Optimize buttons.

I admit, I haven't optimized the optimizer yet.