Bookmarklet works in IE8

We announced PlannerX bookmarklet last week. The bookmarklet lets you open PlannerX right in your Basecamp page. This makes updating your plans super quick and easy. We had a small issue that prevented it from working in IE8 (thanks Stephanie for reporting it!). We fixed that and even added a visual guide about setting up the bookmarklet with IE8. Enjoy!

PlannerX Bookmarklet in IE8

Login problems solved

Few customers mentioned they could not login to PlannerX despite making sure everything was setup correctly – username, password, URL, API access – everything. This was a puzzling problem, but we could solve it in minutes once we got access to the problematic account. It was actually our mistake. We forgot to handle dashes in Basecamp sub domains in a recent upgrade. It’s now fixed and working fine.

Easier login form

While we were on the login functionality, we also made a small usability improvement to the login form. You now don’t have to enter your full Basecamp URL. Just enter the initial company name / sub-domain part. .basecampq.com is added already. This will even make it easier for people to understand what they need to enter in that field! Here’s how the revised login form looks.

More usable login screen for PlannerX

Bug with new task saving solved

I am glad not many customers noticed this We had a jarring bug that wouldn’t save a new task if both the milestone and todo list were also freshly created. It was another quick fix, but a significant one!

How do all these small improvements measure up?

Here’s what Ben Thomas, a PlannerX customer had to say:

WAHOO!

Fantastic response.
Thank you ever so much. Wonderful.
That is brilliant. Thank you.

Ben

Makes my day!

Here’s how it looks

PlannerX Bookmarklet in action

Activate the bookmarklet from here

What are the advantages?

A lot of users found it inconvenient to open a new browser page and login to PlannerX. We felt that if we could integrate PlannerX within Basecamp, things will be a lot easier. While we were figuring out the best way to do this, Countdown guys released a bookmarklet that opens Countdown within Basecamp. We loved the idea and implemented it for PlannerX. We also revised our login process so that it works well with this system.

With the bookmarklet,

• You can now open PlannerX within Basecamp
• You don’t have to open another browser page for PlannerX
• PlannerX auto detects which project you are working on and loads that up
• If you select “Remember Me” on our login forms, you can go straight to PlannerX next time onward.

This is a significant improvement in usability for PlannerX.

Activate the bookmarklet from here

What is a bookmarklet?

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript that lets you quickly perform an action. They are typically stored in browser’s favorites / bookmark / links bar. Just like you open your favorite website by clicking on it in your Favorites bar, you load PlannerX within Basecamp by clicking its name in your Favorites bar. You can read more about bookmarklets in this Wikipedia article.

Credits

Our bookmarklet was inspired from the Countdown bookmarklet. And was coded by Malay Ladu.

Activate the bookmarklet from here

I wrote about it in December, and was happy that everything worked smoothly after the upgrade, and PlannerX worked without a change.

But I was in for a big shock (since I don’t read the 37Signals API developer’s mailing list!!)

The authentication system has changed. Instead of username and password, third party applications now have to authenticate via a 40 letter hex token. The token can be found under the user’s account info – hidden normally, available only after clicking a link!

This meant users of 3rd party applications that relied on Basecamp APIs – e.g. our PlannerX – would break. And won’t work until users entered their token as username and “X” as password. Crazy!

This scared me. We did not want to scare our users too! As it is, the dual login (first to PlannerX and then to Basecamp) is troublesome, having to find and paste the token for login would really be the straw that broke our camel’s neck!

I came to know about this today, and the deadline is less than 2 days away! This means, if I don’t do something right now, over this weekend, PlannerX will come to a grinding halt, and simply spit out authentication failed errors to all users.

Really a big price for not monitoring the API mailing list…

I took a few deep breaths and continued reading the mailing list.

Surely, the whole topic led to a lot of confusion and discussions among developers. The deadlines for rolling out new authentication system were pushed back so that all developers could accommodate the change.

But there was a silver lining. A new API was added that would work with the username and password as usual, and provide logged in user’s profile information – name, phone numbers etc.

Along with a silver bullet – that 40 letter hex token!

Bingo!

I just finished an update that now makes PlannerX compatible with the new token based authentication system for Basecamp.

And what’s the change for PlannerX users? Nothing! You can continue using the system as usual! When you login with your username and password, we automatically look up your token and use that for all further API communications with Basecamp.

Simple solution to a complicated issue. Took 15 minutes of development, 25 minutes of testing, and 20 minutes writing this post! Not too bad for such a big change! Was certainly less than what I feared!

If you are using OpenID for logging in, you will have to use the 40 digit token as username and “X” as password while you login to Basecamp via PlannerX.

Cheers! I can now have a good weekend!

(PS: I am onto a whole lot of other upgrades to PlannerX. Watch this space for more!)

All this has resulted in delays on the Planning module for activeCollab. We wanted to launch it last week. But have been tied up.

I think all the enhancements we are making to PlannerX, will also make Planning module stronger, so am focusing on PlannerX for now.

Planning module will come soon! Wanted to let you know we are working on it!

• No projects found error. Seems to occur when there are a lot of projects on Basecamp account.
• String can not be parsed as XML error. Occurs due to Unicode encoding issues. Affects people using non English characters – and this is majority of our customers!
• 404 Error on plan save. Occurs when you promote / demote existing plan items.

If you are our customer, I want to let you know that we are working on these items, and will have solutions soon.

I am a little upset and worried due to these issues. At the same time, I am thrilled by the commitment of PlannerX users! Kudos!

Here’s how you can try it:

• Make sure you have an OpenID profile. I use MyOpenID.
• Add a new user to your Basecamp account and give access to her for relevant projects (this is not necessary if you have users configured to use OpenID already)
• Log in to Basecamp using the new user. Go to “My Info” page. Switch to using OpenID with your OpenID URL.
• Save settings. This authenticates using OpenID and saves the settings.
• Once this is done, you will get a “Reveal my special username/password” link right below your OpenID URL.

Special Username / Password for OpenID

• Click on the link to reveal your special username and password.
• Now use this username, this special password, and your current Basecamp URL (e.g. something.projectpath.com) on PlannerX.
• You will be logged in and see your project list (or get straight to the project plan if you have only one project assigned).

What could go wrong? What should you check if you can’t login with OpenID?

Here are a few things to check if you can’t login using OpenID.

• Are you using your special OpenID username and password? Remember, it’s not your OpenID URL that you can use, you need to use the special username and password. The password will be some combination of characters and numbers.
• Are you using your correct Basecamp URL? Again, this is not your OpenID URL, but your Basecamp URL – it may look like yourcompany.basecamphq.com or yourcompany.projectpath.com
• Have you enabled OpenID access for this user? Confirm by logging in with that OpenID to your Basecamp project. Does it work?
• Do you have projects assigned to this user? If you have no projects assigned, you will get a “No projects found” message in PlannerX.
• Does OpenID login work with some other Basecamp Extra that uses Basecamp API?

Still not working? Let us know the details and we will investigate!

Like the blog mentions, PlannerX is an online service that lets you manage your Basecamp project plans effortlessly. PlannerX gives you a single page view of your entire project plan. This is shown in an outline view, so it’s easy to expand/collapse. And guess what, this plan is fully editable! You can use your keyboard to quickly navigate and edit items. You can even add new milestones, to-do lists and to-do items. You can assign items to people on your team quickly and add due dates to milestones – even using shortcuts!

PlannerX even shows you a Gantt chart of your plan. (It’s really neat, I must tell you!)

Overall, it will make you at least 5 times faster in viewing, managing and working with your project plan.

• Take a live demo.
• Signup for PlannerX.

We look forward to your comments! Let us know how you like it!

Gantt Chart in PlannerX - v1

Yes! This is one of the sleekest Gantt chart implementations for Basecamp. It’s a view only Gantt chart, but it’s been a feature people have been asking for years!

There are still rough edges in terms of the UI, but your plan shows up well on the Gantt chart. Completed items show in green. We distribute to-do lists equally in a milestone, one milestone’s due date becomes next milestone’s start date, and to-dos occupy the full duration of to-do lists.

You can’t edit the plan, plan edited in Outline view won’t reflect in Gantt view until you save it (since we need IDs to establish parent-child relationships, and need to expand dates on milestones). Printing does not work across browsers – but you can right click and save the plan as an image to print it later.

It’s been a full night without any sleep! So I will retire to bed now! But will look forward to your feedback.

Many thanks to AnyCharts team – they make an awesome Gantt chart component. They even gave us a special price, and worked hard with me to get their component to work with Flex! Thank you Timothy and Anton!

Go ahead, take our live demo! Try it out yourself!

Should we include Gantt Charts in PlannerX?

This has been a big question! We know there are many people out there (in most web based collaboration / project management communities – including Basecamp and activeCollab) who really want it. And then there is this idea of focusing on collaboration to make a project success – rather than charts!

We don’t have Gantt Charts in the current version of PlannerX.

But, we are working on adding some level of Gantt chart support in an upcoming version. It’s difficult to create Gantt charts with Basecamp because Basecamp does not have due dates for to-do lists or tasks. Nor does it have estimates and dependencies. activeCollab does make it easier to add / manage these.

Bottomline: Our activeCollab version may have Gantt Charts sooner than Basecamp version. But we are surely thinking about this.

If you want Gantt Charts, please vote for it over on our GetSatisfaction support system!

• Definite time saver. Easy to use. No fuss.
• Looks Brilliant
• Looks pretty cool. Love to add this.

A common feedback from all people we talked is that it’s easy to use and strips out all complications.

These comments make us proud because we spent considerable time tweaking UI and usability of PlannerX. As a matter of fact, about 15 days ago, Naveen Dhanuka – a good pal and usability expert, told me that PlannerX is “clumsy and highly unintuitive“.  Now, it wasn’t that the product was in finished state at that time, but his comments upset me. We had already spent weeks trying to get it to work with keyboard and make it really easy to view the plan and edit it.

Naveen gave me a lot of suggestions. I realized that many people won’t even know what an Outliner is. Since I (and my team) was using OmniOutliner for long, does not mean that everyone else will be familiar with a tree structure and creating a work breakdown with that.

The next fortnight was spent ironing out the workflow and adding hints and making overall usability improvements. (Thanks Naveen!) Here’s a sample of some feature we built in PlannerX trying to make it easier for the users.

• If there is only one project, it will load / reload by default
• When a project plan opens, first row will be in edit mode – indicating that editing is possible!
• Changed icons for three levels of outline to explicitly say “milestone”, “to-do list” and “to-do”. We designed them to be similar to Basecamp icons too!
• Added a hint / status text at the top of the application. It shows up when you start, and in between where we felt we could show a hint. E.g. if you use indent button, it will tell you that you could also use the Tab key!
• Focus mode – ensured that icons for levels remain intact. (Tech Note: We are using AdvancedDataGrid Flex component to show the outline, and we change its data provider when you focus.)
• Naveen was really mad at our use of red color! I kind of like it, but we reduced it a bit in the UI
• We have Quick Help to show keyboard shortcuts and explain key concepts.
• Milestones show as bold!
• Completed items show in light gray.
• We also took great pains to ensure focus stays in proper places. E.g. batch update (Ctrl + .) takes focus to the text field to make entry, pressing enter updates all selected items, and brings focus back to item you were editing.
• Focus mode – font size is bigger to let you focus on milestone / list you are working on!

While I look back at it, it’s small things like this, that would make an application more fun to use. We kept the graphic design very simple – bare bones actually – and focused more on interaction and speed.

What do you think about PlannerX’s usability? What are your suggestions?

We are eager to hear!