Just launched from Andy Brice @successfulsw who also runs http://www.perfecttableplan.com/ which is unbeatable for table planning. (I also love the fact that buying a license key gives you access on both a mac and windows!)
Hey @charlieirish thanks for sharing. @successfulsw Hey Andy, looks like you've put a lot of thought and hard work into this! Well done.
I downloaded and tried it out. Nice easy install on the Mac, no problems. I liked the way you alerted me to some sample plans being available and asked if it was ok to copy them into place so I knew where they lived on my machine.
Watched the video and that gave me a good start. Didn't bother reading the user guide (typical user :-)
When creating and moving cards, I like that they animate into their placeholder so I can see where they belong, rather than instantly appearing when I could miss their location amongst lots of other cards.
This is really interesting for visual thinkers, in that you have a very flexible arrangement of cards to solve different problems e.g. simple weekly tasks, scrum board, conference schedule with parallel tracks, etc.
Thoughts
- I'm going to continue playing around with it as I like visual thinking and planning, so tools like this interest me if they help get things out of my head and crystallise my thinking.
- I haven't tried creating my own card structures/properties yet. I think I'll enjoy playing around with that, but suspect some users might find the number of options/configuration possibilities a bit overwhelming.
- For some people who live by calendars and reminders, I can imagine they might want a possibility of adding card events into an existing calendar system. Not sure how practical this would be, given that the system is so flexible and a traditional schedule is only one small use case of it.
A few observations
- I altered an example plan, then clicked to 'Open' a different plan. It let me open the plan and didn't prompt to save the changed contents of the currently open plan. Not sure if by design or a special edge case with the example plans, or a bug.
- The zoom feature slider works fine if I grab the handle and drag, but if I click discrete points on the slider, it doesn't jump to the clicked zoom level.
All the best!
Eddie,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I think your comments are a pretty good summary of what Hyper Plan does.
The key thing to note (which trips some people up) is that adding cards can create new columns and rows in the grid (you don't have to create the grid first). Did you get that straight away?
I have avoided standard calendaring features as there are so many apps that already do that. However Hyper Plan does support dates and numbers as well as categories. I am planning to improve date support soon (e.g. with a date picker).
Hyper Plan saves changes automatically (no need to click 'save'). That is why you weren't prompted to save when you opened another plan.
The zoom slider working when you drag, but not when you click, is a bug that I wasn't aware of. That should be an easy fix in the next release. Thank you for alterting me.
@successfulsw Hey Andy, you're welcome. I started to understand the grid thing after a few minutes of playing around. I think I clicked around and hit the 'Hyper Plan help' menu option and quickly scrolled through and saw a picture of rows/columns. Made me immediately think 'this is as easy as Excel to add/remove columns and rows...' I hadn't immediately realised the rows/columns didn't need to be pre-defined. I can see how this can be missed. This is useful as it allows you to explore and discover ways of presenting and working on the cards.
Thanks for coming back with the clarifications.
Product Snacks
HyperPlan
Product Snacks