QG Software Blog

It’s been a year since 5pm was released to the public! It’s also Friday, which makes it a perfect day for a celebration.

Because of this occasion, we are also offering a 30% discount for life to anybody who opens a paid account today - just open a free trial and then email our support with the discount code “1year”.

Want to find more about 5pm? Visit our website at www.5pmweb.com .

Our 5pm project management service, while designed to fit into most popular screen sizes, still takes full advantage of bigger screens and higher resolutions. It also works great with the new and popular widescreen format. There are a couple of things that make it possible:

1. Dual-panel layout takes the maximum advantage of the horizontal space, especially in combination with (2)…

2. Customizable interface - you can resize the panels and even show/hide/resize columns inside those panels, creating your own layouts. Here is an example of two different 5pm layouts:

Check more on interface customization in our short video tutorial “Customizing the Interface”.

3. Timeline view is a natural fit for widescreens due to its horizontal layout.

Almost 40% of our 5pm users have widescreens.

Do you have a widescreen monitor? If not, there is a big chance that you own a widescreen TV. Nearly 30% of all LCDs are widescreens.

Websites are traditionally developed with a vertical layout in mind. The majority use fixed width designs, that fit into smaller resolution screens - the most common ones (800×600 used to be the standard, now it’s 1024×768). The rest of us, with newer and bigger screens, are a minority. Our higher-then-average resolution usually comes with empty space around web pages. While you are reading this blog, you are most likely enjoying the nice blank space on both sides of this article. Join the club.

With widescreens things became even worse. Once again, those who have bigger screens and higher resolution, and now, a widescreen format, don’t gain much from this extra horizontal space. Because of that, it became a common practice to open the browser in a smaller window on the side, and use the rest of the screen space for other applications.

Sure, there are websites with “liquid” layout (full screen width), but those come with the long-text-lines problem, and, once again, widescreens are the ones that suffer the most.

With widescreens gaining more popularity, the UI layouts will adjust too, especially for web applications, favoring customizable horizontal designs. It will be interesting to watch this trend evolving.

Meanwhile, check 5pm demo - widescreens are welcome.

Two new Video Tutorials were added to 5pm website:

• Customizing the Interface (2:14 mins)
• Advanced Features (3:31 mins)

To register your 5pm free 14-day trial, visit www.5pmweb.com

If you are a nonprofit or an educational institution looking for a project management solution - contact us directly at support (at) 5pmweb.com. We can offer you a special discount up to 50%.

Need a project management tool for your business? 5pm™ is a next generation web-based project management tool. It’s flexible and simple to use. Give it a try at www.5pmweb.com.

5 pm now supports Opera 9(Mac and PC).

5pm is a next generation project management tool. Register for your free 14-day trial at http://www.5pmweb.com.

Today we added support for the latest Apple Safari 3 browser (both Mac and PC) to 5pm.

Need a project management tool for your business? 5pm™ is a next generation web-based project management tool. It’s flexible and simple to use. Give it a try at www.5pmweb.com.

5pm is officially released now.

You can give it a try - there is a 14-day free trial. Don’t hesitate to contact us with suggestions and comments.

Visit: www.5pmweb.com for more details.

A little over a week ago we updated our website with screenshots of our 5pm™ tool and even added an online demo. After running it “under the radar” for a bit and showing it to our existing clients, we are ready for you to give it a try:

www.5pmweb.com

The demo is fully functional, so you can do pretty much everything with it. Don’t be afraid to edit or delete stuff - all demo data is restored nightly.

Your feedback is highly appreciated.

The sign up for 5pm™ will start pretty soon. Submit your email on our website in order to get notified.

Imagine a timeline view of your projects and tasks, with start dates, deadlines and status. Not a complex Gannt chat, with dependencies and resources, just a simple, tight view. The one you can glance over and see exactly where the things are.

This is exactly what we implemented with our 5pm™ Timeline - one of the features of our upcoming tool. You can preview it here: www.theoworlds.com/labs/02/

Today I was just drafting a post in my Blogger. I decided to print it out and go over it later before publishing it. I pressed Ctrl+P and… Instead of sending it to the printer, it sent it to the Whole Wide Web?

Apparently, Google decided to make the shortcuts “more sane”. What used to be “Print” in desktop world (for Windows), became “Publish” in, no not the web, just this particular web application.

I guess, Google is big and they know what they are doing - “pushing envelopes”, “reinventing” and so on. “Publish” is a function that is used much more often than “Print” when it comes to blog posts, so I see where they are coming from. But that’s not the point.

Web and desktop applications are getting mixed up on our computers. We can use Gmail and Word, or Outlook and Google Docs at the same time. And, while the desktop world is pretty standardized, web is still a Wild West. Sometimes those two worlds clash, like they did for me today, when I pressed Ctrl+P.

Why is this happening? I think, all those “web2.0″ applications are written, for the most part, by a younger crowd. They don’t have strong ties to desktop “legacy” standards and don’t hesitate to replace them. At the same time casual users still double click now and again on web links. So, next time, when you hit a key combination that did the same thing for past decades in most of your applications, and instead of that it submits your taxes to IRS, don’t be surprised. The Wild Web is still being settled.