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The Project Panel
A good way to introduce the new iPad app without getting too distracted is to focus on a single panel. Once you see how one works, you'll be comfortable with all of them.
An obvious candidate is the Project Panel. It's the hub of getting things done for a given topic so it's likely that you'll spend a good chunk of time here. ( Don't worry Managers, we have new panels planned which will help you to stay on top and in control of multiple projects simultaneously.)
Unlike all of the other panels, this panel is wide. It takes up the full screen and serves as a background to all your work on a project. The aim was to make it feel like you've entered a project. So no matter how many sub panels you drill down through, there’s enough space to see the project logo in the top left - so you'll always know what you're working on at a glance.
On the left of the Project Panel, you have a standard list of all of the usual project sections - Tasks, Milestones, Messages etc. If you use either the iPhone or the Android app you'll be pretty familiar with this layout.
Tapping on a section will slide in a sub panel from the right. As you bring in more and more sub panels, they'll re-arrange themselves automatically to give you the best view given the amount of space available. You can drag, or throw, a panel off to the right to get rid of it - but it doesn't have to be the top panel, you can drag any one and get rid of multiple sub panels with a single gesture.
If you're in portrait mode the activity section takes up most of the screen. This is where you can keep in touch with everything that's happening on the project. Just like Latest Activity in the Web App, you'll see all of the tasks, messages, milestones, comments, files and notebooks as they’ve been added or edited over the last while. If you want to find out more about a particular activity, simply tap on it and a new panel will slide in with the extra details.
When you rotate the iPad into landscape mode, instead of simply expanding out the activity column, you get some statistics about the Project. The top green progress bar represents every task in the project - irrespective of who it's assigned to or when it was completed. If it's a long running project it can be fun to know just how many hundreds or thousands of tasks your group has gotten through!
The next section breaks down all of those tasks that have either a Start or a Due Date. You can instantly see the proportion of tasks that are due today or, hopefully not, have run late. Tap on any of the donut graphs and a very handy panel slides in listing just those appropriate tasks. So it's your one stop shop for everything that needs to be done straight away, or should have been finished before now!
When you're finished with those tasks, throw away the panel and you're back to the Project and the final section - the people section. Here is the avatar of every person working on the project. If you haven't uploaded a photo of yourself yet then now you have some incentive, as every time you open a project you'll see the community of people pulling together to get it over the line.
Syncing
Unlike the iPhone or Android apps, you don’t have to remember to sync with the server. Every time you slide in a new panel it instantly checks to see if there’s any new information ready to download. It’s pretty much transparent so mostly you won’t even notice it happening. But for those of you who still have the habit : pull to refresh is there for when you feel the need. Wrapping Up
That's it. We have a cunning plan to make this panel even more useful, but we'd love to hear what you think. What would you like to see here? Be as mad with the ideas as you like - they may not make it in, but they might inspire something that does!
Read more about what we have planned for the future of the app.