The Botonomy News - October 2007

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Major ProjectPipe Usability Enhancements

We've been busy over the last couple of months making a number of refinements to ProjectPipe, with a focus on improving end-user productivity.

The most dramatic improvement is the ability for all major viewing and editing operations to be keyboard driven. For example, to view an item in an outline (or table), simply hover over it with your mouse and press "v". You are immediately presented with a dialog box containing all of the details about the selected item, as shown in the screenshot below:

This lets you review and modify the key details of the item that you are viewing. When you are finished with that item, press "v" again, and you return to the outline where you left off.

This new shortcut-based dialog system is significantly faster than navigating to a separate view or edit page, in both the response time and the amount of user effort required.

In addition to quick viewing of items, we've also streamlined many common operations to be keystroke-driven, such as:

Editing
Tagging
Creating dependencies or links
Creating new items, including:
- Duplicating an existing item
- Creating a child item
- Creating a sibling
Hoisting an outline (i.e. Drilling-down into a particular branch)

We are gradually incorporating a number of keyboard shortcuts into ProjectPipe. Most frequently used navigation, data creation, and data management operations can now be performed without leaving your keyboard, and we'll be adding more over time. Where possible, we are basing ProjectPipe's keyboard shortcuts on the traditional Unix-inspired shortcuts used in other popular web applications such as Gmail.

For a list of all ProjectPipe keyboard shortcuts, please refer to the keyboard shortcut list

Navigating around your project is also now faster in ProjectPipe, thanks to our Goto shortcut. When you press "g", the following dialog appears:

Then type the first letter of the Entity type that you'd like to view (Use Case, Requirement, etc.), and press enter to view that Entity data. For example:

gu[ENTER] - Goto Use Case list
gr[ENTER] - Goto Requirement list
gt[ENTER] - Goto Task list

You can also use the dropdown lists to use your mouse to select an Entity or custom query to view.

This new feature, coupled with the other new keyboard shortcuts, allows you to perform many common ProjectPipe functions using only your keyboard.

Pagination Improvements

We've also made improvements to ProjectPipe's pagination system. You can now toggle pagination, so that you can see all items at once, or view them in pages of 25 items. If you choose to paginate your results, you can page down and up using shift-J and shift-K respectively.

Search

You can now perform keyword searches across all of the data maintained within ProjectPipe. Results are grouped by Entity type, as indicated by the screenshot below:

QuickStart

With our new QuickStart feature, ProjectPipe automates much of your project setup work based upon answers to a brief questionnaire.

All you have to do is give QuickStart a start date, a list of business processes, and the key moving parts of your domain model (or logical data model), and QuickStart generates the relevant set of:

Use Cases
Requirements
Tasks (i.e. Project Plan, complete with simple resource balancing)
Test Cases
Documents (Project Glossary, etc.)
And more...

QuickStart is also a very useful tool when evaluating ProjectPipe, as it allows you to rapidly set up a sample project with your own data.

Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Adoption

We have rebuilt significant portions of ProjectPipe atop the critically-acclaimed Yahoo! User Interface toolkit (YUI). This allows us to leverage many of the rock-solid libraries that Yahoo! uses in their own websites, which serve billions of pages per day.

There are many web client libraries out there, and we've used several in various places in ProjectPipe over the years. We have standardized on YUI based upon its high quality, active community, and snappy performance.

There are three key customer benefits to this move:

We can ensure a consistent user experience across mainstream web browsers, since YUI adjusts for many browser-specific anomalies
We can innovate faster, since we are building atop higher-level platform abstractions provided by YUI
By standardizing on YUI as our client-side architecture, we can plot a future roadmap that balances a rich user experience, adherence to web standards, and a responsive user experience

PMI-DVC Tools Conference

On November 10th, we'll be presenting at the 2007 PMI-DVC Project Management Tools Conference, an event produced by the Delaware Valley Chapter Project Management Institute.

For more information, please visit the conference website.

Fall 2007 ProjectPipe Brochure

The Fall 2007 ProjectPipe brochure is now available as a PDF file.

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