During 2007 I worked on a massive project that almost killed both me and the team in terms of the sheer amount of work we managed to squeeze into a very tight timeframe. As the project went on for almost 7 months, we needed a way to let the team members know where we were and how long was left. So I came up with a countdown that was displayed over my desk showing how many days of coding, testing and UAT were left which served to focus the dev team a bit more. It worked a treat but was very manual.
Anyway, during the latter half of last year all our developers laptops were upgraded to run Vista and of course get the excellent Sidebar. So I figured it would be cool to develop a sidebar gadget that provided the same information but could focus the developers every time they looked at their desktop instead of having to look above my desk.
So here is the fruit of my labours, the Countdown gadget.
The gadget at the moment lets you set a date, an event title and a colour for the background. I have a few other bits I want to introduce like consuming an iCal feed and the ability to check a network drive for a date but they will come in a later iteration.
Of course the use of the gadget is not constrained to just software milestones, you could also use the gadget for things like:
- Days until birthdays
- Days until going on holiday
- Days until public holiday
- In face, days until ANYTHING YOU WANT!!
At the moment I am after people to test the gadget, once it’s been tested for a week or so and anything nasty has been worked out of it, I will submit it to the Live Gallery and give it to the world.
If you are interested in testing this gadget, drop me a line via gadgets@blurg.net or leave a comment on this post.
Update : The testing is over and build 1.0.0 has been released at the Live Gallery for download.
blurg.net 