Control Your Gantt Chart From Your Phone — Tilt, Swipe, and Play

What if you could walk into a boardroom, scan a QR code, and control the Gantt chart on the big screen from your phone? Like a presentation clicker — but for live project data.

The Idea

Every project manager knows the boardroom shuffle. You're presenting the project timeline to executives. The Gantt chart is on the big screen. You're hunched over a laptop, clicking through zoom levels, scrolling to find the right date range, toggling between views. You're talking to the back of a monitor instead of making eye contact with the people who control the budget.

We thought: what if the phone in your pocket could be the controller? No app to install. No Bluetooth pairing. No dongle. Just scan and go.

How to Use It

Five seconds. That's the setup time.

1. Open /nimbus-gantt/demo on the desktop or conference room display.
2. Click the Phone Remote button in the toolbar.
3. A QR code appears on screen.
4. Scan it with your phone's camera. A controller page opens in your mobile browser.
5. Connected. Start controlling.

No account required. No login. The QR code contains a session token that links your phone to that specific Gantt instance.

What the Phone Can Do

The controller puts 16 command buttons on your phone, organized in four sections:

The Tilt Magic

This is the feature that makes people's eyes go wide.

Your phone has a gyroscope. The Phone Remote reads that orientation data 20 times per second and sends it to the desktop. The desktop applies it as scroll velocity on the Gantt timeline.

• Tilt right = scroll forward in time.
• Tilt left = scroll back in time.
• Hold the tilt = continuous scrolling. The further you tilt, the faster it scrolls.
• Level the phone = stop scrolling.

It's like a Wii remote for your project timeline. Walk around the boardroom, tilt your phone, and the Gantt chart on the big screen follows your hand. The executives are watching the data move, not watching you fumble with a trackpad.

Under the Hood

The architecture is deliberately simple. No WebSocket server. No peer-to-peer connection negotiation. Just Redis.

Why not WebSockets? Because this approach requires zero infrastructure. No persistent connections. No socket server to scale. Redis handles millions of reads per second, and Upstash charges per request, so an idle session costs nothing.

The Sonification Button

This one deserves its own section. Tap the sonification button on your phone, and your project schedule plays as music.

Here's how it works: the Gantt iterates through every visible task. On-track tasks play notes in C major — pleasant, consonant, harmonious. Overdue tasks play notes in a minor scale — dissonant, tense, immediately recognizable as “something is wrong.”

The pitch maps to the task's position in the timeline. Earlier tasks are lower notes, later tasks are higher. The duration of each note corresponds to the estimated hours. At the end, a resolution chord plays that tells you the overall project health by sound alone.

In a boardroom demo, you tap sonification, the room goes quiet, and the executives hear whether the project is healthy before you say a word. It's unforgettable.

Why This Matters

It's not a gimmick. Think about how presentations actually work.

When you present to executives, you want to be standing, making eye contact, telling a story about the project. You don't want to be sitting behind a laptop, scrolling with a trackpad, breaking the narrative every time you need to change the view.

The Phone Remote turns your project data into a live performance. You walk. You gesture. You tilt your phone to scroll through time. You tap a button to switch to the treemap. You trigger sonification and let the data speak for itself. The executives don't just see the project — they experience it.