Roadmap Planner
Road to nowhere or stairway to heaven? Plan your journey
$24.99 Developer KeepSolid, keepsolid.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later Visualizing the road ahead is crucial for the success of any business or project, no matter if it’s a Fortune 500 corporation or a singleperson small business being run from the home. The most popular way to do this is with Gantt charts, which illustrate the schedule for a project or entire organization using bar charts spread across a scrolling timeline.
Roadmap Planner is a Mac application guided by the same principle, but goes a step further in an effort to make the results more visually appealing. The software includes a handful of prebuilt templates to get you started quickly, each with their own color scheme and font selection so you’re not stuck with the same old plain-looking bar charts.
At the top of the window is a Zoom tool; the handles at both ends are used to jump into a closer look at the project, at which point you can scroll horizontally by grabbing the scrubber in between, or by using two-finger swipe gestures on a trackpad. The collapsible panel at right provides tabs for Item and Project settings, but otherwise there are no application preferences to be found.
But it could use at least one of them: the first thing US-based users will notice after zooming in all the way is that dates are displayed only in day before month, rather than the expected month/day/year format.
This won’t be an issue for customers in most of the rest of the world, but to not have a preference setting for overriding this is downright unacceptable for a productivity app in this price range.
There’s also little in the way of documentation available, although a demo video on the company’s website is serviceable for getting up to speed. One convenient feature we did like was the ability to Quick Look documents saved from Roadmap Planner in the Finder, making it easy to confirm you’ve got the right file before sharing it or launching the application for it. Otherwise, the software does a pretty bang-up
job with its drag-and-drop simplicity. Users can create a backlog of items in the Project tab, then click and drag to move them onto the timeline as needed. Items can include a description as well as notes, with custom color-coding for each project; adding dependencies to link related projects is also a snap, thankfully. the bottom line. Roadmap Planner nails most of the big picture stuff, but leaves a few of the small details in the rear-view mirror. Maybe the 2017 model will do better.