Discussion:
Shadow Plan Alternatives
Troy Gardner
2009-08-24 18:53:56 UTC
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Since I've depend on Shadow so heavily, I've had my team build a clone of Shadow Desktop in Adobe AIR so compatible with Windows, Mac, XP and web.

The clone is just a stepping stone to get me and my team off Shadow+Palm. I have dozens of MB (!!) of Shadow files I want imported without breaking. It's not ready yet for me to step away completely from Shadow, but it's good enough we are using the tool to manage the development of the tool passing around the XML (in SVN)

Right now it's largely compatible with the xml shadow outputs. It's a basic UI that has CRUD operations, drag reordering, and delete/done filters at the moment and works with a single file at a time.

At the basic level, I just want a tool that does what Shadow at a basic level does but slightly better.

Like at a recent expensive conference, 6 months of notes were lost as the machine lost power right as Shadow was saving. The 1.5MB of notes was corrupted. Normally I'm religious about backups, but at the seminar there was no internet (and no outlets) so that wasn't possible. Thankfully I had a backup from before the conference but I still lost the 3 days (I was so mad!). So adding safe saving semantics and periodically saving a temp file are on the top of the list. As this sort of data lost (though not always Shadows fault) has happened to me several times.

Upcoming are features that diverge, One of the biggest is in handling dates, as I frequently need to time track and estimate for clients so need access to hours and seconds, eventually this will be entered with a stopwatch built in (tasks will have a play/pause button), and nodes will aggragate the totals below them heirchically.

It will have some advanced tagging. Right now we are working on 'user' tags, meaning when tagged with say Troy it knows that's me, and also implies the user->role->task, allowing me to filter on what roles need to be filled and where users currently are.

If interested in beta testing it (and you promise to keep a backup of your files, as it's still in beta). Ping me privately.
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