It’s been a week since I released the first version of HacknPlan beta and I asked the gamedev community for feedback. You people are amazing!! I received a lot of information, bug reports, suggestions, opinions… The comments are pretty good generally speaking, and even though this is just a beta and there is a long way ahead, I’m glad to see there are a lot of developers that already found it useful and didn’t doubt to start using it right away. Awesome!

I can provide some numbers right now: we are 591 hacknplanners as of today (do you mind if I call you that? ^^) and 448 projects have been created. That is a lot for just one week! I can’t thank you enough!

So, what have I done with the valuable feedback you gave to me? Let’s take a look.

First week:

This first week we already solved a few important bugs and “design issues”:

• Special characters in project and milestone names: The bigger issue detected, the one preventing to create project or milestone with dots or some other special characters in the name, has been fixed. The project and milestone urls have changed, so if you already used the tool and have any saved or bookmarked, they won’t work. It’s also a good advice to refresh the browser cache to avoid possible issues.
• Unique project names: The projects names were initially designed as globally unique within the application. This annoyed some people because they had to find an available project name, not being able to create their own “test” project. Now this is fixed, and names are unique only at user level.
• Milestone wrong due date: There was a small bug in the milestone list, where the due date was showing a different date than in the milestone details page. That is fixed too.
• Profile picture changing issue: After changing the profile picture, the page was still displaying the old one (it was being cached), but now it works as expected.
• Navigation issue after sending a task to another milestone: Sending a task to another milestone was causing that the back button was sending you to an invalid page (the url that contained the task you moved with the old milestone id, which is no longer valid). Now is fixed and it will send you back to the page you were before opening the task detail page.

Current week:

Our goal is to deploy new features and improvements to the application weekly (plus the critical bugs, that will be fixed right away), and this week we are working on several bugs and interesting improvements:

I’m using HacknPlan to plan HacknPlan itself, isn’t it beautiful?

Bugs:

• Problems uploading profile avatars from Firefox.
• Issues moving tasks among columns when the user is not an administrator.
• The “Category Distribution” chart does not show the legend in the milestone page.

I hope you are enjoying HacknPlan and, if you haven’t tried it yet, well, you’re not planning like a final boss!!