Just a short note to say that I just launched a little resource planning app for MacOS called, imaginatively, Resource Planner. If I had you at "Resource Planner" you can go ahead and go to the app page to get it. If you want a bit of background, read on.

So basically, I built this app because I'm currently doing some resource planning at work, which means that there are a bunch of projects and responsibilities and stuff that my team is planning and I need to figure out whether we have the resources for it. And by resources, I mean people. I know it's kind of gross to call people resources, but I also figured calling this app "People Planner" is kind of gross.

This is a thing I've done as part of various jobs for many years, and usually I just use a spreadsheet. And it was... fine. And if vibe coding didn't exist, I'd continue to use a spreadsheet. But vibe coding does exist, and I wanted a nice and easy way to do this, so I made it.

The basic model for the app is you create 1-n teams, resources, roles, initiatives (AKA "projects") and programs. Or you can just skip teams and roles and programs if you want to keep it simple.

Then for each initiative, you create an assignment and add 1-n resources to that assignment, and a % of time you think they'll be working on that project each month. This is not at all a scientific way to plan resource time, and everyone will tell you not to do it this way. But sometimes, you just kind of have to do it this way.

You can also assign costs to resources. This means that once you've entered all of your assignments, you can see how much you're 'spending' on a given project. You can even put in other costs for the project, like software licensing, or pizza for the team or whatever. And you can also put in an expected return. This is kind of handy for figuring out if your project will actually be worth it after you've ballpark'd all of your resource assignments.

There are also reports by initiative and team and stuff. You can export them as CSV, JSON or as a somewhat nicely formatted PDF.

Oh, and everything is saved locally as a file on your computer.

I have to admit, I haven't actually put this through its paces yet, but I am planning to do so this weekend so there will probably be a bunch of changes and fixes after I've done that.

If this is something that you think you'd enjoy, you're probably a sociopath. But if this is something useful for you otherwise, check it out at the link above!