Project management app Merlin goes 2.0

Ah, project management on the Mac... one of those application categories where the near-blasphemous suggestion "Why don't you just run MS Project in Parallels and be done with it?" isn't completely and utterly unreasonable. If you've already been down the FastTrack, done the Project X thing and you can't wait for OmniPlan to hit 1.0, perhaps a visit from a wizard would do you good -- the new version of Merlin shipped last week. (Not Merlin the Mann, Merlin the app.)

Merlin v1 was a promising if slighly unpolished effort from German development house ProjectWizards. With version 2, they've added more view options, enhanced import/export, built bridges to mind-map applications like NovaMind and MindManager, and thrown in resource integration with Address Book and Entourage.

A demo download is available and the full package goes for 130 Euros. Granted, it's not as cheap as a couple of months of Backpack, but it makes such lovely Gantt charts...