Software Update: TaskJuggler 2.2.0

TaskJuggler is an open source program for managing projects. It has an extensive package of functions on board with which various things can be arranged. It helps you plan resources, costs, risks and communication to bring the project to a successful conclusion. The program can export the entered information to cvs, html and xml so that it can be used in other applications. For an overview of various screenshots, we refer you to this page. The developers have released version 2.2.0 with the following announcement:

In December 2001 the TaskJuggler Project had been started. Only 4 months later, the first public release happened. Now, 5 years after the team wrote the first line of code, we are happy to announce our 16th successful release, TaskJuggler 2.2.0. Again, this release is a major step forward in OpenSource project management.

We have taken the two different approaches for a graphical user interface and combined them into one fully integrated GUI. This new Graphical User Interface offers easy access to all TaskJuggler features and now supports native report printing. Try it out! You will be surprised how well TaskJuggler 2.2.0 compares even against our high-priced commercial competitors.

As usual this release also comes with numerous improvements and some critical bug fixes. All current TaskJuggler users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Have Fun!
The Task Juggler Team

Version 2.2.0:

• The two graphical front-ends that have been present in earlier TaskJuggler releases have been merged into one new front-end. It’s called TaskJugglerUI. The ktjview2 and TaskJuggler executables are no longer included. This was done also to avoid name clashes on Windows/Cygwin.
• The TaskJuggler user interface now supports printing of high-quality task and resource reports.
• Major usability improvements for the GUI. It’s now fully navigable by keyboard. The scaling/zooming of the Gantt chart has been improved.
• HTML reports are now rendered with an embedded browser instead of launching an external browser.
• Export reports are now loaded into the editor when selected in the report browser.
• The GUI now supports multiple project templates. The templates can be customized on loading to reflect the current date.
• Added date picker to GUI editor. By pressing CTRL+D the user can insert or change a date using the comfortable date picker widget.
• The GUI editor now supports search and replace over all files.
• The computation of completion degrees of container task has been improved to produce more meaningful values ​​for all milestone or all effort tasks.
• To get Gantt and resource reports in the GUI the column ‘chart’ must be specified. They are no longer displayed automatically. This was done to have more consistency between the printed version of the GUI reports and the other reports.
• The default separator for CSV files is now a semicolon since this is what OpenOffice.org uses by default. But this can be changed if needed.
• The projection scheduling mode has been fixed and extended. In strict mode bookings will be scheduled only after the current date. In sloppy mode, bookings will also be scheduled prior to the current date for tasks that have no bookings at all. The modes can be set in the scenario definition.
• Fixed reporting of value 1,000 in US currency format.
• Fixed reported task duration value in all report types. Value was only correct when unit ‘days’ was used.
• Fixed account reports which had summary lines that were all 0. In HTML reports the summary columns were rendered all black.
• Fixed detection of cyclic brother tasks. This caused taskjuggler to go into a memory hogging endless loop.
• Fixed priority handling bug. Under certain circumstances resources were allocated to lower priority tasks even though they should have been assigned to higher priority tasks.
• Fixed critical bug that turned ‘precedes’ of parent tasks into ‘depends’ of child tasks.
• Fixed cost accounting for non-working resources. They were always accounted to 0.

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