If you’ve been around for a while you have likely seen the Goplan homepage. It’s been pretty successful in letting people know what Goplan is about and it actually made a couple of appearances in design books which is obviously something we’re happy about.

But now it’s gone. Althout the page was aesthetically pleasing, we can’t really say we were happy about how the information was organized and how limiting the one-page layout was - heck there wasn’t even a link to proper screenshots of the application. Here’s the new (and hopefully improved) homepage (which you can view in all its glory here):

If you have any comments, we’d love to hear them. Also, we’ll be adding some video tutorials and user videos to it so you can see both how to organize your projects with Goplan as well as how it helps others be more productive in their work. Enjoy.

We’re starting a whole series about tiny details on the Goplan interface and functionality that you might not know about. And since this is something we’ve gotten some feedback on, we’ll start by showcasing some of the ways to input dates and times into things like the Goplan calendar or Task due times.

Thanks to some Ruby on Rails trickery, our time input is quite flexible - one of the reasons why you don’t see the typical calendar popups like on a few other sites. Here’s a few examples of how you can type in times and dates on Goplan:

Above: the default (and quite clunky) method of typing in dates by writing them out in the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format. It works, but it’s quite a hassle if you want to be really specific. Let’s see how to make it a little better.

Above: If you want to type in times in an easier way you can type in times like “3pm”, “4am”, “5:30pm”. Makes it a little easier - although that’s definitely not the end of it.

Above: Have something you need to do tomorrow and don’t want to type in the whole date? Here comes the trickery: writing “tomorrow” works just as expected. You can also combine words with times in the shorter format, so writing something like “today 10pm” or “tomorrow 3am” will return the expected time.

Above: The trickery goes even further - you can type in dates relative to the current date in plain english. An example would be “two days from now”, which in our case (since it’s July 2nd) would return the 4th of July. Finally (and as you’d likely expect by now), you can combine the previous example with simple time inputs by writing “one month from now 1pm”, which is admittedly much easier to write than “2007-07-02 13:00″.

Time input is just one of the tiny bits of functionality that makes it much easier to use Goplan to manage your projects. There’s a few other hints that we’ll get into soon - so keep an eye out on this blog.

Got code chops and looking for an excuse to try out the Adobe AIR platform, the Goplan API or both? We just uploaded to Google code an open-source version of a very simple application that lists tasks on a Goplan project. Thanks to the AIR platform, this app runs on Windows and Mac (hopefully Linux too, soon) out of the box and is pretty easy to extend to do pretty cool stuff with your projects on Goplan - we have a few ideas of our own, but more on that soon!

So if you’re a developer who wants to give new technologies a try, get the source code from Google code and hack away at our code! It’s not complex (as I’m sure you’ll see) but the goal is to show just how easy it is to get started building cross-platform apps relying on the Goplan API. Hack away! We’ll have exciting news for developers soon.