MapleXp

First about 2 small improvements.

Tasks and work items can now be deleted directly from their respective “modify ..” dialog boxes.

Now .. Hidden tasks.

This is a more advanced feature directed at people who collected lots of data over time and have many tasks they are no longer interested in.

Now it is possible to hide any task and thus make it invisible. There are a few simple rules that govern this new behavior:

• no data is actually deleted; this is only about how tasks and work items are presented to the user
• –> you can unhide tasks at any time
• making a task hidden makes all its subtasks hidden, recursively
• –> you can unhide only tasks that were explicitely made hidden
• –> you can, however, make a task hidden even if some of its children are already hidden

Icon code

Due to this new feature there are also new icons to represent tasks status.
You can see the following icons in the task tree to show whether a task is pinned or running:

• container task (no change here)
• regular task
• pinned task
• running task
• pinned running task

Hidden status is represented by icon color

• regular task
• first hidden task (task, that was made hidden explicitely)
• hidden task (hidden task, because its parent is hidden)

Any combination (shape + color) from the two groups is possible.

Visibility combo

Another new UI element is a drop down list shown above the task tree. It allows you to enter one of the following modes

• regular tasks (only regular/non-hidden tasks are shown)
• regular tasks + first hidden ones (there are shown regular tasks and first hidden ones)
• all tasks (all tasks are shown)

License

The hidden tasks feature requires the Classic license level 5.
Without this license installed you can hide or unhide any tasks but you cannot use the visibility combo to filter them (it defaults to “all tasks”)

features

Licenses

The very first change in 1.5.6 is a new license file format.
To obtain an updated license please send me your registration data in form of three lines:

Registree Name
Company Name
City, Country

Please, include information if you have ever donated to MapleXp.

Another related change is removal of public/private licensing model. From now on MapleXp operates only private (per-user) licenses.

Status bar

There are now 2 panels shown in the status bar on the right:

• database file (only file name; full path shown in tooltip)
• present setting for time quantum (also has its tooltip)

Putting time quantum into status bar allowed for static labels:

• in the summary panel of the tasks window
• as column name in the work items window

Bug fix

A small bug related to “stop & review” command was fixed.

To reproduce this bug you would have to:

• enable feature “do not register work items shorter then …”
• put check at “ask before the work item is lost”
• click “stop & review” before your job reached set number of seconds

In such a scenario a dialog box is shown which allows either to register or to ignore that “too short” work item. After “Register” had been clicked the work item was added to the registry, whereas some users expected the “Review Work Item” dialog box to follow. Now this dialog appears and allows to correct the newly registered work item.

features

There are some changes in 1.5.5 I would like to describe.

1. First off all, the installer has been changed in few ways:

• the main change is that this version is a per-user installation which does not require administration privileges to install MapleXp (default location not being “Program Files” folder, though)
• it has some basic UI which allows you to choose the installation folder for MapleXp

Installation is still side-by-side which allows you to keep all versions at hand.
This allows you to run some older version in case the newer one had any bugs.

Though, I am going to add some “uninstall” feature in nearest future.

If there is any demand for “administrative” installation please email me. I can publish both versions.

2. I reviewed available SQL CE versions.

There are actually three releases: RTM, SP1, SP2.
MapleXp is linked agains SP1 but it should correctly load any of the other versions. If you had problem with this please drop me a line.

3. MapleXp is published in two .NET formats (native, 32-bit)

The 32-bit versions has a seperate shortcut in start menu. What is the difference?

On 32-bit windows there is no difference; both executable will be running as 32-bit apps.
On 64-bit windows the native image (default one) runs as 64-bit app, 32-bit image runs as 32-bit.

Who may need the 32-bit image then? Users who run MapleXp on 64-bit windows but have only 32-bit SQL CE installed. (RTM was only available as 32 bit). If this is not your case, don’t bother.

4. Changes in interface.

I decided to remove the “honor time quantum” checkbox which was available in the work items and tasks windows. Now you can see both values at the same time. For the tasks window it is the total/summary time; for the work items window these are 2 columns with duration.

I added some encoding to point out what current time quantum setting is. This is for example A/30S. How to decode it:

The first letter represents “calculation formula” and can be one of A (ANY = count each started unit), H (HALF = count if half if the unit passed), F (FULL = count only whole units).
After slash there is actual time quantum (in seconds or minutes).

Please enjoy!

features

MapleXp One version 1.5.4 Beta has just been released.
It can be downloaded by means of the following link: maplexp-one-beta-1540.msi.

This release brings the following new features:

1. Command to restart a work item

This command can only be applied to the last registered work item. It replaces that last work item with a job, which has the same starting time as the work item.
It can be used when you stopped a task but found out that you keep working on it. Thus you can think of this command as of “undo stop”.

2. The Setting window has got two new configuration values in the “confirmation” tab.

They are connected to this new “restart work item” command and the recently introduced “start task continuously” command. It allows you to set up a threshold time (in minutes) which will trigger a warning message if the last work item finished more than specified number of minutes ago.

As title of this post may suggest MapleXp has been renamed to MapleXp One. You can think of this “1″ as a first generation of MapleXp or a single user MapleXp. This change affects (1) the way MapleXp is presented amoung installed applications (2) the target installation folder (3) folder for user settings

New location of user settings folder means that you will have to reconfigure the application and load user licenses again. This is some extra work but please know also that this version brings also a completely new format of configuration settings which is even more important reason why any old configuration must be lost.

features, releases

German speaking users of MapleXp will be happy to learn that the application has been translated into German. If you find some mistranslations please let me know, they will be corrected in the next release.

The previous version of MapleXp was linked to SQL 3.5 SP1. It was not possible to run the application against SQL 3.5 (no SP). Now this has been changed. You can run MapleXp against both releases of SQL Compact Edition. If you are a new user and have no SQL Compact installed on you box it will be installed automatically by the installer.

One big changed in user interface is that I removed one of application windows. You may have noticed that the “Task” window does not have any functionality that the “Summary” window does not. Thus I removed the “Tasks” window completely. You can manage your task structure directly from the other window which is now called … Tasks.

To make this new window more flexible I also added 2 new commands to the menu (both main & context). These are: “Stop task” and “Stop & Review Task”. I hope this will make your life easier.

Please don’t hesitate to comment on MapleXp either here on by sending emails directly to me. (support email to be found on the webpage)

features

Most changes in this version of MapleXp are related to how task are represented in task hierarchy control. There are 3 major changes:

1. I decided to change the term “active” to “pinned”. Pinned tasks are tasks that are used frequently and should be always at hand. These tasks are displayed in the notification area menu and on the list in Task Controller window. The previous term “active” had a notion of a task being worked on and could lead to some confusion.

2. You may have noticed a tick put next to a task name in the notification area menu. It was displayed at the current task independently whether it was running or not, which was very misleading, too. Now this tick is shown only next to a task that is currently running.

3. A new set of icons was introduced to make a difference between tasks shown in the task hierarchy control. They have the following meaning:

pinned task, not running

pinned task, running

regular (not pinned) task, not running

regular (not pinned) task, running

container task (no work items can be registered for this task)

I hope you enjoy the changes, more are to come soon.

features

Just a few words to make clear how MapleXp treats work items that span over midnight. Night owls can have many such records. Let’s say we have the following work item:

How is it shown in the Work Items window? How is it shown is the Summary window? Take a look at the following three screenshots that present the Work Items window along with the status bar.

In each case work item duration shown is 4 hours 30 minuts, which is very true for an work item that started at 9 PM and finished at 1:30 AM after midnight, next day. What is different in each figure is the total time shown in the status bar. Why? Because of how work items filter was set in the “record selection” panel. The rule used here is that MapleXp takes into consideration only that part of work item duration which is within set period. And the same rule applies to the Summary window.

Why is it important? If you went through your work items day by day summing up the total time shown in the status bar (or in summary window) you would finish with a correct total.

features

When there is a running task …

This setting tells MapleXp what it should do when a database is closed while there is a running task. This is not a completely new option but it has been enhanced in this version. The following figure shows that you can now define separate behaviours for different reasons why a database is closed.

Each of the three lists contains available actions which are:

• leaving the task running
• stopping the task
• cancelling the task
• asking a user what to do.

The last action is not available for the case of system going down. This should be clear; after you have decided to log off and system is closing your applications it is not the time for MapleXp to display any dialog boxes.

If you have chosen to be asked what to do with the running task the following dialog box will be presented to you:

Please note, that there is a new button in this version of MapleXp called “cancel close” (or cancel quit). This gives you a chance to stop the action you initiated. (of closing a database or quitting the application)

features

This is some summary of what has changed in MapleXp 1.4.8

I have decided to switch to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 which has some new excellent features for developers. Lots of code has been reviewed and refactored to prepare MapleXp for further development. I have also added a few improvements visible to the users.

Task creation time can be shown in the status bar

There are two new settings that enable showing task creation time in the status bar, as shown below.

Enabling this feature results in the following to appear in the status bar:

Duplicate Work Item command

You can create a copy of an existing work item. Select a work item you want to use as a base and choose “duplicate work item” command from the menu.

The “new work item” dialog will appear with all fields prefilled

Simplified Summary window

I removed information on a currently selected task from this screen. The name of a task is obviously known from the task tree on the left. Task description and creation time are shown in the status bar. Now the right panel of the summary windows looks like the following:

features

Hello,

When I decided to get rid of projects I never thought so many people will ask where they vanished. Honestly, for some people they were “projects” for some others “customers” etc. Most importantly, nobody lost their hierarchy of task.

From what I can see from emails, the most important feature of projects was the ability to identify tasks as project/task pairs. I understand your task names repeat many times in the hierarchy. So do mine. That is why I introduced “task path identification”. It allows you to prepend the name of any task with up to two names of its root tasks – which is more than abandoned project/task paradigm.

If I could give you back projects? Hmm .. nobody has given me any rationale to do so. So please, let us discuss this … but only in relation to existing “task path identification” feature.

I believe it was my big fault to disable this feature by default, which made users land with bare task
names after upgrading to MapleXp 1.3. Please see the following screenshot and enable “2 levels” .. then
let me know what you think.

features