Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Available on iPad & iPhone

Wednesday, April 20, 2011  Bianca Berends  14 comments

A few months ago we decided to poll our users on what they wanted us to built next and we have been working hard to grant the first two of these wishes!

iPhone and iPad Compatibility.
Tom's Planner is now compatible with the iPad and iPhone (got 39% of the votes!). No app is required, just open Tom's Planner in your mobile browser and you're good to go! The look and feel is exactly as in a normal browser, there is just one thing you need to know when working with Tom's Planner on your mobile browser:

The magic is in the Loooong Click!
Now you can adjust schedules when you're on the move so your project plans are always up to date. You'll have insight in your projects on-site, in meetings and are able to share progress with clients. And in combination with the collaboration feature you no longer risk multiple versions of the project schedule circulating in your team!

Tip: create an icon of your Tom's Planner project plans by favoriting them in your mobile browser to go directly to your schedules when you need to check them.

Android users need to have a bit more patience, but we haven't forgotten about you.

The iPad & iPhone compatibility is available for all Tom's Planner accounts (including the free account).




New Import Features
From now on you can import files from Excel and MS Project! No need to start from scratch in Tom's Planner when you've already built your project in Excel or MS Project, just open the tool, click on the import button in the toolbar and choose were you want to import files from.

A total of 22% of our users wanted us to built this feature, a lot of them commented that it would really help when recommending Tom's Planner to colleagues and friends, they can save time and start using Tom's Planner straight away!

What's Next
Of course we're not stopping here, the other features on the wish list will be coming your way in the next couple of months:
  1. Special columns like start/end date, total duration, 'drop downs' for resources and/or progress (20% of the votes).
  2. The option to create Sub-Groups in groups in the columns (11% of the votes).
  3. A Filtering Feature that lets you 'show' or 'hide' elements based on colors, specific words, values etc. (8% of the votes).

We'll keep you posted on updates!

The Tom's Planner Team

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14 reacties:

Fantastic! I'm really happy to see that you guys are taking user feedback into consideration and adding the most requested features.

A very useful tool. I'm very pleased to have found this. Thank you.

Hi Olivia,

Good to hear your like Tom's Planner! Feel free to spread the word :-)

Tom

Any news about the version compatible with Android?

Sorry not yet, but it is on the ToDo list!

Thanks,
Tom

We Androids need it so much!

I know! We're doing the best we can!

Thanks,
Tom

'Nudge' re support for Android. I have just (finally) got myself a Smartphone (a lovely Samsung S3) and find that there is still no support for this on Tom's Planner. Remember that we (Android users) are now in the majority!

Hi Richard,

We know! And we're sorry we still haven't come round to it, the To Do list doesn't seem to get shorter! You can now log in with your Google or Facebook account: a small consolation prize? :-)

Thanks,
Tom

Navigating Tom's Planner on the iPhone and iPad is a drag to the point by which it's rendered almost useless in terms of functionality.

I find it interesting however that this (the iPhone and iPad usability) is the feature that is heavily advertised. I for one signed up hoping for this but ended up being frustrated at its lackluster performance on the iPhone and iPad.

I've been an avid MS Project and Omniplan user, until I realized that I need something more simple because project management was taking a lot of my time. Tom's Planner has a great web interface and keeps things simple, but its equally important to develop its multi interface mobile usability. This is something that every developer seems to be now aggressively striving towards.

Hi Mike,

I am sorry you feel that way and we do understand your concerns. Generally we get a lot of positive feedback on the iPad compatibility but we found that people need a bit time to practice and get used to navigating around in the schedule. It's less intuitive than you would probably expect from us.

Did you notice that you can only scroll the grid by using the scrollbars at the bottom and the right of the grid. This method of scrolling is not as intuitive as we would like it to be. We opted for scrolling with scrollbars instead of dragging the grid around with the one finger drag gesture because we also wanted to make it possible to select (and move) multiple elements in the grid at once. We used the one finger drag gesture for that because there didn't seem to be any other sensible alternative. This left us with scrollbars as the only obvious alternative for scrolling.

Also the relatively tiny screen limits us in our possibilities. Especially because schedule tend to be rather large. As with other applications, the iPad is very well suited for consuming media/content but it's not as useful for producing major content. If you want to write an article or report a laptop or desktop works so much better. With Tom's Planner it's the same. If you want to setup a schedule we recommend you using a PC or laptop. But if you want to consult your schedule or make some changes to it the iPad works fine (even though it takes some getting used to the scrolling). From our usage statistics we can see that it is used a lot in combination with the iPad.

That all being said we do see how the current scrolling mechanism is counter intuitive to the interaction model used on the iPad. When we revisit the iPad compatibility next time that's certainly something we will reconsider and try to improve and we will take your feedback into account.

Kind Regards,
Tom

Do you have an ETA on android? Wondering whether to start using this for new year long project with team...but we have samsungs

Sorry, no ETA on android compatability. At the moment we are working on translating Tom's Planner in other languages, which is taking up a lot of development time.

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