Tag Archives: Mac OS X

Was Merlin a project manager? (part three)

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There is usually a long story behind a successful product. This applies for Merlin and my first visions about it in 2003.

Here is how the drama started.

And this is how it continued.

Was Merlin a project manager? (part three)

…It was decided, we would get someone to write a piece of software just for us. As mentioned before, we were not developers so could not do it on our own. The creation of a first concept was quickly completed. Our own partners and customers helped us on its definition. My intention was to refinance the project through the sale of software licenses to selected customers. I was even thinking, that with a bit of luck, our own license could even be free. Pretty naive…

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Was Merlin a project manager? (part two)

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There is usually a long story behind a successful product. This applies for Merlin and my first visions about it in 2003.

Here is how the drama started.

Was Merlin a project manager? (part two)

….We were looking for alternatives. Someone in the company started to [ab]use MS Excel as a project management tool. In the beginning I found this to be a good idea, and followed willingly. Some weeks later we had scripted a great amount of data sheets with innumerable charts. It was fine for separate projects but made our overview on all running projects smaller day by day. When colleagues began again to do their job manually, bypassing the scripts and their automations, it became clear to me that we needed yet again another, better solution.

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Was Merlin a project manager? (part one)

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There is usually a long story behind a successful product. This applies for Merlin and my first visions about it in 2003.

But first things first. Back in 2002, founding ProjectWizards, I decided to switch to Mac OS X. It was a relatively new operating system based on NeXTSTEP, which Apple bought and developed further. The excellent quality that Apple machines had, and still have, was one of the main reasons for switching. With MS Office X, we had a good basic software package for daily work. And even though Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac were always a step behind their Windows versions, they contained the functions we needed. Last but not least they offered a relatively good compatibility to Windows files. All this was necessary for our job at ProjectWizards; Project management. And here is where the drama starts.

We tried at first FastTrack Schedule by AEC. It was the only Mac OS X application for project management available, with all limitations and problems of a classic OS 9 application. The software had some inconsistencies making its professional use by ProjectWizards impossible.

The next step wasn’t any easier. Virtual machines were not performing well on PowerPC based Macs, so MS Project on MacOS X was not an option. We had tested Windows machines with terminal server, accessed by “remote desktop”. But this was not really a better solution either…

– To be continued –

Merlin: MacOS X Firewall

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As you know Merlin has very powerful publishing features that allow you to publish your project files, and share them with other users or other applications.

You can publish your saved project files to:

When allowing external access to your machine you should consider setting up a Firewall. This is usually done in your router, but some users would like to use the built-in MacOS X Firewall. Here is a small description of how to set your Firewall for Merlin 2 and Merlin Server 2 on a current MacOS X 10.6.1 (snow leopard) configuration.

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