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Show HN: Ultra-portable Gantt chart tool for very regulated environments

115 points by aerugo_ 6 months ago | 29 comments

I work for government agency with a lot of security considerations. We can't install anything and using public webapps is out of the question. Going through clearance or procurement to buy or install something is a pain.

I needed a project management tool, and what we had on offer was too clunky and old. I built SimpleGantt to be ultra lightweight and portable. It's one HTML, one Javascript and one CSS file. Each project is saved into a single .yaml file.

If you have a SharePoint environment you can "host" it by uploading the repo to SharePoint after renaming simplegantt.html to simplegantt.aspx. That allows anyone with access to open the tool by simply having the URL.

Try it at: https://aerugo.github.io/simplegantt/simplegantt

This is a couple of days of tinkering, and mostly exists to keep me from going crazy while managing projects with lots of deadlines and dependencies, so don't expect much. But another person in the same position, finding this might lead to calmer days.

greatgib 6 months ago

Thank you very much for this project, not only because it looks nice but also to have created with a long lost spirit: "I do something nice for myself and I share it with the world" open source, and doing something straight simple with dependency!

I wish more things are released like that.

Also your tool might be very useful because there isn't a good Gantt tool that is lightweight anymore, i search for one recently and my only solution in the end was to use an excel template...

My 2 feedbacks if you are interested: - it is annoying to have the "category" required to create a task. Maybe you could create a task with an "undefined" category if none provided? - a great feature would be to be able to export the result output or view in a PNG picture or SVG.

yodon 6 months ago

Following up on the category requirement comment - if I hadn't read the parent comment here first, when trying the app I probably would have walked away concluding it didn't work.

The first button in the bar is create a new task. That's the first thing any visitor will click. If you try to create a task there is no category available, no hint they are required or important, no reason why I'd care what category the task is, and the error state is indicated by a green highlight - the universal signal for "everything is good." All I would have seen is, hmm, I can't make a task, this must be broken. Move on.

I mention all of this because the app looks like a fantastic new tool and I suspect this small issue would have a much bigger impact on adoption than you might anticipate as the author of the tool.

OldGuyInTheClub 6 months ago

n+1 to the Category comments.

Feature request: Allow planning by days following Authorization to Proceed or similar undefined start date. I realize this runs into its own problems but 99% of the time I don't know when that date might be yet I need to lay out a schedule to support a proposal to get the funding to do the job being planned. Weekends, holidays, and other specifics are less important than a view of task relationships and milestones over weeks and months.

Even the huge MS Project cannot or will not do that.

aerugo_ 6 months ago

Interesting idea. I might do it, I see where you're coming from with it.

mickdarling 6 months ago

I second the annoyance from the "category" being required in the task creation section without having any way to create a category in the task creation section. Creating a category isn't even a heavy lift process in its own creation section, so letting the user create a category in the task creation section should be simple.

It looks like a light weight tool. Thanks.

aerugo_ 6 months ago

Great feedback! Thank you. Obvious now that you mention it. I just fixed it. Pull the new version and you will be able to add uncategorized tasks.

dijit 6 months ago

That's really nice, such a good idea.

Over the last 15 years the browser has become more and more of an application delivery platform, and that notion has caused SaaS to run basically everything.

I realised this not too long ago, and incidentally it was due to gantt software.

We, like everyone it seems, use Jira for issue tracking, but the actual roadmapping of resources and dependencies leaves a lot to be desired, tools like Microsoft Project are not only prohibitively expensive- they also don't work on MacOS.

Similar issues can be levied at Omnigraph.

Only SaaS tools like "InstaGantt" seem to fit the bill of cross-platform, lightweight and reasonably cost effective.

Note: I'm currently not using Instagantt, despite it being the closest to good I could find, because I dislike subscriptions. :(

HPsquared 6 months ago

I've had a fair bit of success making miniature "local HTML with embedded JS, no external resources" apps like this. You just have a single file that runs in the browser like an Excel macro but much more secure. You can have the JS and CSS embedded within the HTML file too, which makes it even easier.

I'd use a plain file picker for loading instead of the file system access API. That's even less security cross-section.

zekenie 6 months ago

Reminds me a little bit of https://markwhen.com/

aerugo_ 6 months ago

That's really neat! SimpleGantt needs to be a bit more feature-complete than is easily supportable with something like that, but I love the simplicity. I am an avid user of TiddlyWiki and this would be a great addon to that platform.

starky 6 months ago

I just discovered this last week. It works really well as an Obsidian plugin. The downside is that some of the usual Gantt chart features like dependencies are a bit weird to use.

bsenftner 6 months ago

This is very nice. Is there any possibility of having an "hours" unit of time in addition to the days, weeks, months options? Lacking that, allow the unit of time to be a float, a fractional value?

I've worked in very large scale project management, to the tune of 3-8 companies working together on a single project, each with 1,200 to 2,500 people working on the project from each company, and all the tasks are managed by fractional hours per person, and then summed into working groups to accomplish the hundreds of thousands of individuals tasks over a 12 to 36 month schedule. Think animated media production.

I'd love to integrate something like simplegantt into this work. Currently it's fed managers' scheduling excel files, with no easy way to visualize the entire schedule across all participants without an external moderately lengthy process to compile all that info.

freds39 6 months ago

Feature request: A really useful addition would be the ability to reference an existing (remote) chart via say a URL parameter for display.

kopirgan 6 months ago

Looks pretty interesting.. Wonder if this can be done with nothing but browser, CSS, html and a JS without those extra CDNs.

HPsquared 6 months ago

For truly locked-down environments that's the way to go. You can only be sure the code will always be the same if it's 100% local and offline, or verifying signatures somehow.

mattigames 6 months ago

You can verify signatures of JS and CSS files to make sure they are only loaded if they are exactly what you expect them to be by using the "integrity" parameter, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

kopirgan 6 months ago

Yeah. Guess it'll involve some trade off in terms of UI.

cloudking 6 months ago

Download the CDN libraries, point to local

aerugo_ 6 months ago

Yeah absolutely. Once I am sure of what libraries I will need, I will probably remove the CDN dependencies and just bundle everything.

joshcsimmons 6 months ago

This solve a problem I've had across a few highly regulated environments (banking an defense most notably). I've started a few half baked solutions but this is very functional. It seems like you had the same impetus for dev.

Great work on this!

fffrantz 6 months ago

Gonna give this a shot! Looks promising for SharePoint sites that are internal.

solarkraft 6 months ago

> If you have a SharePoint environment you can "host" it by uploading the repo to SharePoint after renaming simplegantt.html to simplegantt.aspx

Sharepoint just runs arbitrary aspx files???????

aerugo_ 6 months ago

No, it's not "running" the file, it's the browser that runs it. For some reason, if I keep it as HTML, the file will not open in the browser when opened from a Sharepoint directory (mounted in the filesystem or opened through the browser), even though it runs perfectly fine when opened from a local folder. I discovered that simply renaming the HTML file to .aspx allowed it to be opened from Sharepoint. No idea why, I have zero knowledge of .NET and its ecosystem.

w4rh4wk5 6 months ago

Also, thank you very much for this! This is something I've been looking for in the past and it looks very polished and easy to use, easy to integrate!

whatever1 6 months ago

So few options for good Gantt charts. At the end we all have to implement one for our specific use case.

cyanydeez 6 months ago

Why would you not pin and bundle CDNs. Those are just as insecure.

aerugo_ 6 months ago

Ease of development mostly. I am still in the experimentation phase with this. Once I know what I want to use, I will bundle.

xvelasqu 6 months ago

Looks simple but extensible, will check it out. Thanks!

fasten 6 months ago

sounds cool! ->how do you handls larger projects or integrates with existing workflows such as jira