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Seattle, Washington – Left Coast Logic announced the launch of SmartPlans 3.0, a major upgrade to their top-selling personal project planner for iPhone and iPad. SmartPlans introduces the concept of “Multi-Planning,” where users can create and manage multiple personal projects and fit them into their daily schedules. The new version adds cascading detail views, milestones with alerts, dependent sub-projects, and integration with the iPhone or iPad device calendars. In its first few days, the new update broke into iTunes “top sellers” list.
Multi-Planning
To manage multiple projects, users first set how many hours a week they can dedicate to working on projects – assuming they also have other things going on at school, work and at home. For example, I choose to dedicate 20 hours a week to my projects. Then, using an intuitive GANTT chart, I can move and ‘resize’ entire projects with my fingertips to see how that affects my overall workload. If I have three overlapping projects and they are consuming a total of 30 hours a week, in SmartPlans I can either drag an entire project to a different month in the time-line, or extend the deadline of one or more projects, decreasing the weekly workload to my optimum 20 hours. The result is a realistic balance that fits in with my other daily activities.
Advanced Features
In SmartPlans 3.0, tasks can be dragged and dropped into groups called Milestones with deadlines based upon where they fit in the project plan. Users can set up alerts several days before a deadline, to help keep them on track. Any Project can also be linked to the Milestone of another project, creating dependency relationships between projects.
Calendar Integration
SmartPlans 3.0 now integrates with the native iPhone and iPad calendars. It does this by exporting Milestones to the device calendar as “All Day Events” and converting the underlying Tasks to actual calendar appointments, each with special indicators to show that they come from SmartPlans. This makes it easy to view project items in one’s normal calendar, integrated with other appointments. By synchronizing those calendars with the company’s all-in-one organizers – SmartPad (for iPad) or SmartCal (for iPhone) – it is possible to mange personal projects, appointments, and other to do’s all in one place. Projects can also be viewed by other friends, family and colleagues by sharing those calendars via CalDav, Google, Outlook and Exchange.
“If SmartPlans is the forest, then SmartPad and SmartCal are the trees,” explains managing partner Michael Jardine. “Now they are connected very sensibly via the iPhone and iPad Calendars. Later this year, we will connect them directly to our free Cloud organizer, SmartDay Web.”
Easter Launch Promotion
To celebrate the launch, Left Coast Logic is offering half price through April 8th.
Device Requirements
* iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
* Requires iOS 5.0 or later
* 3 MB
