FUTURe
(See Screenshots: Gantt Chart,
Todo List,
Pert Chart,
Year Planner,
Day Planner)
Help wanted!
Help is needed in the following areas:
-
testing - need to test the UI, hunt bugs, play with it, feedback
-
coding - need help finishing it off!
What is FUTURe?
FUTURe is an application that will deal with time management, not only
for an individual but also for groups/projects. It is inspired by
Tools
for Thought by Howard Rheingold.
It attempts to deal with the problems that the different conventional
paper-based approaches face.
The conventional approaches are:
-
todo lists (list of tasks sorted by importance)
-
gantt charts (tasks are vertical axis, time is horizontal axis)
-
diaries (days
are laid out calendar style, tasks are placed within the days)
-
pert charts (tasks are laid out independently of time, only
the relationships are shown)
Each of these views are ways to remove/show aspects of the underlying tasks
that the users have entered. Each of these different views are better for
different tasks that the users can face.
By leveraging the processing capability of computers to assist users
in ordering their tasks, also the different views are inter-related so
that it is simple to move between them.
Status
FUTURe is currently at alpha release level.
The latest issue is 0.72
. The web loaded version is signed and supports save, load to users directory,
but if you have blackdown jdk 1.1.5 or later you can download
the files and run it as a standalone application (which is more stable because
it avoids using Netscape)
FUTURe has Gantt charts, Pert Charts, Year Planners, Todo list,
automatic levelling, multiple projects, calendars and much, much more...
FUTURe only deals with a single group of projects right now- no
linking to other peoples projects.
Some way to do this will hopefully be included in the beta.
Licensing
FUTURe is licensed under GPL
Practical Issues:
This project has been written in Java for several reasons:
-
Java is loadable via web browsers; this allows rapid spread across the
internet without any complex installation process
-
Java is fairly fast, so recalculation of the effects of a change to the
database is pretty quick
The downsides of this decision are:
-
web browsers are really flaky right now
-
Java takes longer to write in than say, Perl, but an application like this
requires a more high performance language, so Perl probably isn't suitable.
On balance Java is probably the right way to go right now. Other approaches
would be Perl, Python, C++, C. C++ and C take longer to write, Python lacks
loading on Web Browsers.
Ian Woollard can be emailed at wolfekeeper@wolfekeeper.screaming.net