FTF

(First Things First)

What and why

So far none of the free project planners do time accounting very well. Well, neither does ftf but it DOES let you do clumsy but functional time accounting. What do I mean by time accounting? You can tell ftf how many hours a week you have for a class of projects (example: work and home) and then when you input a time required for a project and what bucket to take that time from then ftf will estimate when you will be done with the project. If you will be late then ftf blocks that out in red.

The Agenda (written in Ruby for fltk) version doesn't show lateness of a project. The categories are currently hard coded but I use it for my daily planning.

News

  • 11/14/2003 I have a version of ftfplan for the Agenda PDA available. It is better than the STk version in several ways but it is still alpha software at best.
  • 4/10/2003 - Started up at sourceforge. Unfortunately my name of choice, ftf, was taken so ftfplan it is!

    • Plans

    11/14/2003 I abandoned the STk version. Scheme is just too hard for a non-programmer such as myself. I picked up Ruby in a weekend and after a few long evenings wrote the Ruby/fltk ftf version. Ruby is such a refreshing language to work in. My code is very rough and I'm sure I'm not doing lots of things in the best way but it works! So my plan is to write a workstation version and to write a syncing mechanism. Give me another six months : (

    4/10/2003 I am about 80% ready with the next release and expect to get it out here May/June 2003. It is a spare time thing so don't hold your breath!

    Download

    ftf-ruby.tar.gz

    If you want to run on a i386 Linux machine you can install the following .debs ruby_1.6.8-1_i386.deb, fltk_1.1.4rc2-1_i386.deb, ruby-fltk_0.9.0-1_i386.deb. I'm sure these break something - they were made using checkinstall (i.e. they are not proper .deb packages). They work for me. To run on the agenda you need to install ruby which can be found here http://agtoys.sourceforge.net/ruby/.

    The original version of ftf can be found here.ftf.tar.gz

    You can visit the sourceforge page here: sourceforge.net/projects/ftfplan

    Note that you should download and install STk from kaolin.unice.fr and ensure it works before attempting to get ftf working. ftf should work on most Unix like oses and on windows (untested).

    Support/Warranty/License:

    License is GPL, there is no warranty and support is catch as catch can. See the file COPYING for details. Generally I do like to hear from folks trying out ftf and I do intend to continue improving it.

    Screen shots

    Agenda ftf:

    ftf itself:


    add item:



    To do

  • Speed ups - especially for large project files (11/14/2003 - the Ruby version does not have this problem)
  • Resource editor (must manualy edit the data file for now) (11/14/2003 - the Ruby version only supports one resource - thats you, but the schedule editor is sorta there)
  • Documentation
  • User interface improvements

    • Contact

    matt at essentialgoods com

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