Cardboard Schedule -- Open Source Release

I just released the source code to Cardboard Schedule, a small project planning app I put together a few years ago. Distinctive features of Cardboard Schedule are:

• Encourages a person-centric view of software projects. This is in contrast to Gantt charts, which are task-centric.

• A unique user interface. Not brilliant, but definitely unique.

• Aimed exclusively at small software projects teams. Does not try to be all things to all people.

• It will not let any work be scheduled a weekend. In fact, it point blank refuses to acknowledge the existence of Saturdays and Sundays.

Cardboard Schedule sold enough copies to pay for a PC and then some, but in the end, hours with my family were more important than hours with my computer, and Cardboard Schedule development stopped. The last license was sold more than a year ago¹.

All up, building and selling Cardboard Schedule was a great experience. I got to delve into dark corners of Swing—image manipulation, printing and drag-and-drop—none of which was simple under JDK1.1. The experience I gained from deploying a single application over multiple JVMs and operating systems has been useful on almost every other Java project I’ve worked on since. I also learnt bucket-loads about shareware marketing, building and running hosted web sites and intellectual property law.

The reason for open sourcing Cardboard Schedule at this point is that I found an organisation that both wants to use the product and has the resources to look after the source. Maybe others can benefit from bits and pieces of code too.

Stay tuned. I’ll be writing another couple of articles on Cardboard Schedule.

¹ Actually I didn’t “sell” that last license, I bartered it for a 50USD donation to ICCF, the organisation supported by Vim.