The idea of "flipping" the card over so you can see lots of details fixes my main beef with Pivotal Tracker: everything is so tiny (seriously, attach a screen shot and try to look at it) and you only get a certain amount of space for comments.
This looks like you could have a real discussion on the back of the card.
If you can't customize columns, you've already lost :) But I really like the way you explicitly mention Kanban and Scrum, which Trello doesn't mention at all.
Thanks! Well customising columns is the obvious next step and is on the top of the list, so that won't be far away.
To be fair they also have comments and todo lists per card, like Pivotal, so Wallboardr is a bit behind at the moment. I've been wondering how essential sub-card todo lists are for a while, I've found myself wanting them, but MVP ideals have avoided so far.
The Trello site is written in plain English - it's easy for anyone to think of ways they could use Trello. The Walboardr site is full of 'buzzwords' that make it attractive to a segment of the market ('swimlanes', 'burn-up charts', 'points per status', 'backlog', 'iteration' etc.). Trello looks like it's trying to be a general purpose tool, Wallboardr does not.
Note that this isn't a value judgement - if it's _intended_ to be a niche product that's really appealing to one market segment (so they'd always choose it over e.g. Trello because of its specialization), that could be a good thing.
I initially wanted Wallboardr to be a fairly free-form board that wasn't specific to any industry, but as it developed I thought that approach was lacking in power for my primary audience which was definitely developers.
But it's very interesting to see what Joel and the guys/girls have done because I think they are hitting a sweet spot between power, simplicity and industry-neutrality.
I second that - Wave came to mind. I find the product to be absolutely brilliant and flexible. Always wanted to build something like this myself - will be interesting to see how many people 'get it'.
From what I can see it's a lot simpler than Basecamp - it seems to be great for a single view if lots of small things rather than managing the detail of larger things (if that makes sense).
"vote" is a little weird... Everything about this is pretty intuitive except for that. It's only mentioned once on the summary/info page and in the welcome board after signup there should be a card that explains what voting is supposed to be, exactly. (besides just the ubiquitous like equivalent)
I get the impression this started out with "voting" more prominent than it is now.
But otherwise, this is really pretty neat. One of the first hosted solutions I've been interested in since I got tired of basecamp.
Voting is actually a kind of "test of concept" of the idea of Trello Plugins which enhance Trello boards in interesting ways that not everyone necessarily uses
Edit You CAN disable voting by going to Preferences under the main board menu.
(Disregard the following.)
Currently, no, because it's kind of a half plugin.
You can ignore it, though, nothing really changes if someone happens to vote on something. But internally, we've already found it quite useful for things like helping decide a name of a new project and voting on features.
Its cool that you can have a public board with public comments. But it would be even cooler to have a finer grained control over who can do what. i.e. have a board with some of the lists public read-only, others private, others read-write so anyone can edit, and public append-only, for things like bug reports etc.
since there is not feedback link I could find, I'll keep it here ;) :
- color labels are nice, but real text tags would be good too. lists are not enough. having a 'bugs' list doesn't help as soon as the bug moves to 'under work'
So I guess with the top navigation bar of Fogcreek.com having lots of available space, we can expect to see a lot of new offerings from Joel and company?
We have the hosted versions of both and I've heard more than once "I can't believe they(fogcreek) doesn't do something in project management because most of the current solutions suck."
Man - I would kill for this. We use fogbugz / kiln right now, and integration into these boards for cases / users / pushes would be the icing on the visibility cake.
Minimally for now - a FogBugz link in a comment will show a little kiwi icon on the front of the card, which you can click to follow that link. The planned API will likely lead to a plugin.
Looks pretty awesome in my 5 min trial. Back of the card is very well done.
This will could go way beyond the software crowd to a general organization app..I just hope this thing scales well and they clarify their upload limits and such.
Edit 1: I tried their iPhone app and it's very far from their web interface - took me 6-7 clicks just to get to a checklist for one of the items. It's commendable that they have a app on launch though so I am sure they will work out the app interface with time - currently it's an order of magnitude less usable than their webapp.
One of the devs whipped the iPhone app up in essentially 2 weeks after some of our earlier plans with a contractor fell through. It was literally meant to be there on launch read-only. We know it's got a ways to go, but given the time constraints it was the best we could do (IMHO it was better than anything I thought we'd be able to do... Justin really cranked on it)
Perhaps you guys could push out an update that more clearly communicates that it's for viewing only? I searched the whole app looking for how to edit things before slowly coming to realize that it wasn't possible.
Love it though. The web UI is great and the iPhone client looks promising.
Feature request: reorder boards. I'd like to use this to manage our software project, and I can imagine a ltr task progression, but then boards have to be features.
I couldn't log in with my Google Account (approval with G worked fine though).
Anyway, I created a regular account and my initial impression is very positive. I feel a little disoriented and the "See all boards" could be a lot better (make the boards and their relationships easier to figure out visually). Will use this for a while to see if it will grow on me.
Most exciting thing about it is that it's written in CoffeeScript & Node.js.
I really do have a feeling the combination of the two is going to be the Ruby On Rails of this generation of the web. And the shift from server-side development to client-side is going to be a huge one.
It's funny how the tiniest moments can really give you a glimpse of the type of person someone is.
For instance, in that demo video, at the end when Angella Kim makes the reference to Jello (in the heat of the moment) was one of those moments that makes me want to just give her a hug and put her in my pocket.
Also, this product looks good. I am wondering though, what will this cost and how will I be charged.
I hate that it just says free right now...with no indication about how this will be maintained.
I would hate to start using this, just to see it disappear in a few months - because it was free only. I know that if they are wildly successful and it starts racking up big bills they can charge for it, but I want to know how will that affect me. I trust Joel to do what's right by early users, but this is a concern I have with new stuff that I don't see a sustainable path.
I will probably still create an account, but not knowing whether this can be around, or I will be charged in 6 months after I am addicted is a bit annoying.
According to the blog post (http://blog.trello.com/launch/), "It’s free. (We might charge something for premium features in the future). You can make one board or 100."
Agreed. I have a strong suspicion this will cause me to throw my tiddlyspot out the window. Per-board privacy security allows me to have my "Feature 1" board, "feature 2" board, "Bills to pay" board, etc mixing business with pleasure in a way that tiddlyspot doesn't allow.
Originally posted this on the announcement blogpost, but my comment is still awaiting moderation, and joel is posting here. :-)
Several major +1s:
1) Use of Google login, with ability to set a password to log in without that. I LOVE this, and it fits with what Joel (and Jeff Atwood) have been proselytizing for a while about the use of OpenID.
2) Awesome, responsive UI.
Also a few -1s:
1) No indication about pricing plans. Is this going to cost money one day? EDIT: I see now that you mention in the blog post that it’s free. And the site says "Creating an account is free and easy", but you know how often sites say that but mean "creating an account is easy, but to use our software in any meaningful way you’ll have to pay."
2) I had a problem when I created a new board. The UI took a while to respond, during which time I got confused, created another new board with the same name, and ended up with two new boards with the same name.
Suggestion: The menu that opens when you click the arrow in the corner of a card should open with right-click as well. This is how assembla’s card board works, and I like it that way.
Suggestion: Labels should take one click, rather than two. On the menu row for labels just have six colored squares to click on. Maybe that won’t work so well for smartphone users, but for a desktop, I’d rather save the click.
Not directly related to this string of comments, but as far as providing feedback... How can I do this? I don't see an obvious place to provide feedback.
Markdown code blocks don't seem to be working. (You can't put 4 spaces before code, but backticks work)
#2 occurred 15 minutes ago. Not necessarily related to that issue, but possibly another quirk.
Related: Is there a way to delete boards, or just to close them? I now have two junk boards (the original duplicate, and an empty board I just created to test) and I can imagine that list can get full pretty quick.
Sniffing around the source, looks like a Backbone.js app -- cheers. I'd love to add it to the homepage as an example, if you want to email me a brief paragraph of description.
Edit For those poking around, check out the top-level "Models" namespace.
We do. Its hard to list every framework/library in there, so they're not all mentioned. Look for a future technical blog post that goes into more detail on what we used.
I user Chrome 14 and updates take over 5 secs to be synced across different tabs. Some kind of a bug or the backend app polls the db regularly to push new messages ?
We're scaling back a little to handle the usage spike from the initial launch, so some users will get polling even if their browsers support websockets. As the load stabilizes, we'll be switching them back on and you should see performance improve quite a bit.
Express, Async, Mongoose, Redis, Socket.io, CoffeeScript, Less, and Underscore, off the top of my head. We also use Node Inspector during development; that's a great little tool.
Really awesome. I'm using the same libraries right now in my own app and struggling hugely with Backbone. Would love to see some of the posts someone referenced a few posts up to explain how you fit it all together.
I am a bit curious about it's performance characteristics (e.g. number of node.js instances launched, method of load balancing, etc). Do you experience any problems with GC?
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. The site was built ground up using backbone.js for all models, views, and routes.
291 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadThis looks like you could have a real discussion on the back of the card.
Any thoughts on comparison folks? http://wallboardr.com
To be fair they also have comments and todo lists per card, like Pivotal, so Wallboardr is a bit behind at the moment. I've been wondering how essential sub-card todo lists are for a while, I've found myself wanting them, but MVP ideals have avoided so far.
But we have a stacked burnup chart! :-P
But very interesting to hear that there would be interest in an open source version. Hmm....
Note that this isn't a value judgement - if it's _intended_ to be a niche product that's really appealing to one market segment (so they'd always choose it over e.g. Trello because of its specialization), that could be a good thing.
I initially wanted Wallboardr to be a fairly free-form board that wasn't specific to any industry, but as it developed I thought that approach was lacking in power for my primary audience which was definitely developers.
But it's very interesting to see what Joel and the guys/girls have done because I think they are hitting a sweet spot between power, simplicity and industry-neutrality.
I get the impression this started out with "voting" more prominent than it is now.
But otherwise, this is really pretty neat. One of the first hosted solutions I've been interested in since I got tired of basecamp.
(Disregard the following.)
Currently, no, because it's kind of a half plugin.
You can ignore it, though, nothing really changes if someone happens to vote on something. But internally, we've already found it quite useful for things like helping decide a name of a new project and voting on features.
They have api.
- color labels are nice, but real text tags would be good too. lists are not enough. having a 'bugs' list doesn't help as soon as the bug moves to 'under work'
playing with an account now, the drop and drop has a nice little effect on it. Promising!
Almost like Workflowy on steroids.
This will could go way beyond the software crowd to a general organization app..I just hope this thing scales well and they clarify their upload limits and such.
Edit 1: I tried their iPhone app and it's very far from their web interface - took me 6-7 clicks just to get to a checklist for one of the items. It's commendable that they have a app on launch though so I am sure they will work out the app interface with time - currently it's an order of magnitude less usable than their webapp.
Perhaps you guys could push out an update that more clearly communicates that it's for viewing only? I searched the whole app looking for how to edit things before slowly coming to realize that it wasn't possible.
Love it though. The web UI is great and the iPhone client looks promising.
A "board" is the whole thing. A "list" is one column. Each list has multiple "cards". Each card has multiple checklists (on the back).
Lists, cards, and checklist items can be reordered by dragging. "Boards" don't have a natural order so you don't reorder them.
Anyway, I created a regular account and my initial impression is very positive. I feel a little disoriented and the "See all boards" could be a lot better (make the boards and their relationships easier to figure out visually). Will use this for a while to see if it will grow on me.
I really do have a feeling the combination of the two is going to be the Ruby On Rails of this generation of the web. And the shift from server-side development to client-side is going to be a huge one.
For instance, in that demo video, at the end when Angella Kim makes the reference to Jello (in the heat of the moment) was one of those moments that makes me want to just give her a hug and put her in my pocket.
Also, this product looks good. I am wondering though, what will this cost and how will I be charged.
I hate that it just says free right now...with no indication about how this will be maintained.
I would hate to start using this, just to see it disappear in a few months - because it was free only. I know that if they are wildly successful and it starts racking up big bills they can charge for it, but I want to know how will that affect me. I trust Joel to do what's right by early users, but this is a concern I have with new stuff that I don't see a sustainable path.
I will probably still create an account, but not knowing whether this can be around, or I will be charged in 6 months after I am addicted is a bit annoying.
Several major +1s: 1) Use of Google login, with ability to set a password to log in without that. I LOVE this, and it fits with what Joel (and Jeff Atwood) have been proselytizing for a while about the use of OpenID.
2) Awesome, responsive UI.
Also a few -1s: 1) No indication about pricing plans. Is this going to cost money one day? EDIT: I see now that you mention in the blog post that it’s free. And the site says "Creating an account is free and easy", but you know how often sites say that but mean "creating an account is easy, but to use our software in any meaningful way you’ll have to pay."
2) I had a problem when I created a new board. The UI took a while to respond, during which time I got confused, created another new board with the same name, and ended up with two new boards with the same name.
Suggestion: The menu that opens when you click the arrow in the corner of a card should open with right-click as well. This is how assembla’s card board works, and I like it that way.
Suggestion: Labels should take one click, rather than two. On the menu row for labels just have six colored squares to click on. Maybe that won’t work so well for smartphone users, but for a desktop, I’d rather save the click.
Shouldn't Assign be "Hover + [Space]" rather than just "[Space]"?
Markdown code blocks don't seem to be working. (You can't put 4 spaces before code, but backticks work)
Related: Is there a way to delete boards, or just to close them? I now have two junk boards (the original duplicate, and an empty board I just created to test) and I can imagine that list can get full pretty quick.
Green: Online and active, Yellow: Online, but inactive, Grey: Not online
When someone is online it means that they're connected to Trello, but they're not necessarily looking at the same board as you.
Edit For those poking around, check out the top-level "Models" namespace.
I'm working on a node/backbone/mongdb (I don't grok coffeescript) app at the moment, and any real world apps and write ups just make my day : )
By the way, GREAT app, definitely had one of those "didn't know I wanted it 'til I saw it" moments watching the video.
;-)
I noticed that it's just 1 line.
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. The site was built ground up using backbone.js for all models, views, and routes.
http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples-trello
The only thing that would make it perfect-er is an Android app. :-)