Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

https://trello.com

by moses1400 • 15 years ago

595 269 15 years ago

trello.com

dlikhten• 15 years ago

Its really nice. I am liking it better than PivotalTracker. Except Pivotal had that whole velocity thing.

yarone• 15 years ago

Joel's never-fails-to-be-amusing blog post about it, here: http://blog.trello.com/launch/

thedjpetersen• 15 years ago

This is really great, I like that the board is basically set to a kanban when you start. A api would be really cool so I could sync my github issues.

100k• 15 years ago

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.

nodesocket• 15 years ago

Great use of node.js for a realtime app. :P We currently use interstateapp, but will give trello a whirl.

jamiemill5• 15 years ago

Damn this is pretty similar to the direction my app Wallboardr is taking, except status columns aren't customisable yet.

Any thoughts on comparison folks? http://wallboardr.com

MartinCron6• 15 years ago

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.

jamiemill5• 15 years ago

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.

But we have a stacked burnup chart! :-P

msellout• 15 years ago

Allow sign up with Google account.

jamiemill5• 15 years ago

You're absolutely right. Only 2.7% sign-up rate from this thread and I'm sure Google account login would have made a big difference.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

If you end up open sourcing it, let me know, I'd be interested in helping out.

jamiemill5• 15 years ago

Oh, thanks for the offer! That's a difficult decision, I was hoping to capitalise on it commercially soon as a subscription service.

But very interesting to hear that there would be interest in an open source version. Hmm....

jrmg2• 15 years ago

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.

jamiemill5• 15 years ago

Hi jrmg, thanks for the great feedback.

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.

tptacek• 15 years ago

So this is Basecamp + Backpack, modernized and combined?

BenSS• 15 years ago

I actually thought 'Wave for Business' at first glance due to the the more free-form nature.

barmstrong• 15 years ago

I thought Pivotal Tracker, but more general.

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

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).

Adaptive2• 15 years ago

"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.

spolsky5• 15 years ago

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

Adaptive2• 15 years ago

Now that's an interesting teaser. Looking forward to reading more as plugins develop.

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

If it's a plugin, can I disable it? In a team of 3 developers, this makes no sense.

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

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.

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

another feature request: import from pivotal tracker ;)

They have api.

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

another one: I should be able to add people from my organization to a board w/o going through the invitation confirmation process.

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

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'

beagledude• 15 years ago

would be nice if you could purchase an installable paid version for internal company use. It looks like a step up from pivotal tracker

playing with an account now, the drop and drop has a nice little effect on it. Promising!

rednaught• 15 years ago

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?

vtbose• 15 years ago

"...It’s just a list of lists, really."

Almost like Workflowy on steroids.

pragmatic2• 15 years ago

Does this integrate with fogbugz and/or kiln?

pragmatic2• 15 years ago

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."

vailripper• 15 years ago

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.

thedufer8• 15 years ago

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.

bbq• 15 years ago

Joel mentioned plugins so I can only imagine integration will exist at some point.

thom• 15 years ago

Anything that reduces the likelihood that I'll have to work on a project with Mingle is good news to me.

adparadox• 15 years ago

Agreed. We currently use Mingle at my job, and Trello looks like it would solve the same problems without the complexity.

nyrulez• 15 years ago

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.

mhp8• 15 years ago

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)

jjg4• 15 years ago

An update was just approved in the App Store tonight, so look out for that. More updates are planned in the coming weeks too.

shawndrost• 15 years ago

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.

spolsky5• 15 years ago

Er, I think we have that, but we may differ on terminology.

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.

gurraman• 15 years ago

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.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

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.

marcamillion• 15 years ago

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.

buzzcut5• 15 years ago

Angela was just as nice in person as she appears to be in the video.

pagefruit• 15 years ago

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."

tathagatadg• 15 years ago

Ultimate GTD tool ...

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

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.

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

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.

shneusk• 15 years ago

apply labels by hovering over a card and hitting a number key

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

Cool, but if it ain't documented, it don't exist. (I guess now it's documented in this HN comment. :-))

mhp8• 15 years ago

I think #2 problem was related to this by looking at your comment timing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2993983

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

#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.

mkopinsky7• 15 years ago

What do the colored squares over my avatar mean?

jjg4• 15 years ago

It indicates your online status.

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.

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

The blue icon means you're an admin of the board (or organization). The green/yellow/grey icon means you're online/idle/offline.

sgentle2• 15 years ago

Seems to be down. I'm curious... nodejs problems? SSL?

ronnier• 15 years ago

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDf1RqeLfo

mhp8• 15 years ago

TCP queue connection problems. We had a load balancer configuration issue. We're watching closely.

sgentle2• 15 years ago

Thanks. Back up now and looks great.

jashkenas2• 15 years ago

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.

tghw2• 15 years ago

Node, Backbone, CoffeeScript and MongoDB

mwill• 15 years ago

Thanks for this! Any chance you'd consider writing a full blog post later down the line about your experience with this stack?

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.

kylemathews• 15 years ago

Any reason you didn't use Socket.io? I noticed you're polling the server every few seconds for updates.

mahmud• 15 years ago

What is your aversion to software written before 2011?

;-)

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

what framework(s) on the node side?

Sembiance• 15 years ago

What are you using to 'minify' your HTML code?

I noticed that it's just 1 line.

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

Thanks! Here's the pitch.

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.

jashkenas2• 15 years ago

Much appreciated. I've added it to the list of notable examples here:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples-trello

thedufer8• 15 years ago

You might be interested to know that we used Underscore.js pretty heavily, too.

smussman• 15 years ago

I've been trying to find software that fits how I use index cards as a to-do system. This is perfect!

The only thing that would make it perfect-er is an Android app. :-)

jvandenbroeck• 15 years ago

Amazing! I'm starting to use it today, most todo/list/project apps suck, this looks really good -- so far =:)

The only thing I don't like is that there is instantly a member added to the first board "Trello" - which makes me wonder if somebody is looking at everything I post on the board -- and makes it seem less private/thrust worthy.

avolcano• 15 years ago

Seems very similar to AgileZen, but more basic: http://agilezen.com/

Seems interesting anyways. Really love the interface.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Interestingly doesn't work in IE8...

Only found out because I wanted to view the source and it failed in Chrome so tried IE (turned out view source failed because of the load on the server atm).

Joel, btw, the favicon's missing, it's explicitly referenced in the source but returns a 404.

EDIT: Forgot to say like the look of it, good job.

spolsky5• 15 years ago

Thanks for the nice words! I'm not sure about IE8, but, this being a new product, I specifically told the team not to worry about any non-current browsers. By the time this product hits its stride, IE14 will be shipping.

phillco2• 15 years ago

Too bad XP users will still be stuck with IE8 ;)

troels• 15 years ago

Does it have an API, so I can integrate with other systems? If not, is that planned for?

thedufer8• 15 years ago

There are definitely plans for an API, but its not there yet.

sylvinus• 15 years ago

Second the need for an API. I could see so many plugins for this (github being the first)

mindblink2• 15 years ago

Great! This is exactly what I was looking for a long time for our content generation and feature implementation workflow. Idea board => Doing board => Done board. Thanks, Joel!

mindblink2• 15 years ago

And now all we need is APIs to do syncing to existing To do solutions, like Toodledo, Remember the Milk, Todoist, etc.

phzbOx• 15 years ago

Great app and highly intuitive.

The home page clearly explain what the software does, the signup process is really simple and straightforward, and it's free.

Once you get inside, you have a fake board which is there to help you get started.. It took me 2 minutes to try and understand how everything worked. No magic, no complicated features.. really simple and intuitive.

I love the "reverse of a card" concept, the small animations when you drag a card, how you can easily "add people" to cards, how an avatar is automatically generated for you (With your first letter and a small icon), and more importantly, how there're just a few well-done features instead of a thousand of useless and over complicated stuff.

Furthurmore, it seems that the app introduce the concept of plugins where anyone could potentially incorporate only the features they want.

Overall, 10/10, great app!

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

Thanks! We're glad you like it and found it easy to use.

MartinCron6• 15 years ago

Joel, serious question, if you're listening.

In the blog post, you mention that these teams are adopting the Lean Startup philosophy of ship early and ship often. Does that mean that you've softened on the "never ever write any code without a spec" dogma from "the Joel Test"?

I've personally found that when you're doing tight iterations and continuous deployment, writing old-school spec documents feels, well, old-school.

If I can go straight from human conversation w/ whiteboard sketches to working, tested code running on production servers without creating intermediate written documents, I think I'm winning.

spolsky5• 15 years ago

It's more complicated than that, and it's hard to answer here.

Basically -- if you're building something big and complicated and you should know exactly how it's going to work, a big written spec really helps.

If you're building something brand new, a startup, or a crazy idea that you need to test quickly and iterate, you should use lots of little specs. It's ok if the specs aren't so fancy... a detailed map of what goes on the screen and what everything does is probably fine. It's ideal if you write lots of small specs for each small feature ("user story") right before you implement them and roll them out.

I just don't like the idea of typing code when you haven't thought through what it's supposed to do (in a disciplined way). Doing specs in small quick chunks, then writing code, is probably the best approach for lean/agile startup teams that don't yet have customer/product fit.

MartinCron6• 15 years ago

Thanks for the response. I see where you're going from. I only brought it up because my development organization would fail that part of the Joel Test, where many totally dysfunctional organizations I have worked with would pass. Doesn't pass my initial smell test.

It's easy to see someone jumping in and writing and re-writing code when they haven't thought it through as wasteful. People have a harder time seeing that writing and re-writing specs can be similarly wasteful.

kurin• 15 years ago

As someone who can't draw a thing, there's a phenomenon I've noticed that might apply. Every time I need to draw something out, I try to hold it clearly in my head, where it looks so complete, but of course it never works. My suspicion is that instead of actually seeing the details of what I want to draw in my head, my brain has filled them in with "here be details," which makes for a nice mental image but that doesn't really play so well on paper.

I also think the same thing happens when we write software with loose mental maps. Our brains fill in the gaps with "yadda yadda yadda," to make it feel complete, but really there's nothing there at all.

olavk2• 15 years ago

I would really like a tool that would allow a spec and development notes to evolve just as a program evolves. It should start out with being as simple and low-overhead to use as a few post-it notes, but as the projects gets bigger it should be possible to impose structure, like categorize notes into functional spec or requirement, user stories etc, prioritize etc.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

Sidenote: "Trello" is Greek for "crazy".

tianshuo• 15 years ago

Hey Joel, this is terrific, and what's on my mind for quite a long time. None of the present kanban implementations are good, and I've been thinking of using node+socket+backbone to build one in my spare time. I've also downloaded the iPhone version but it lacks a lot of polish. TL;DR I like trello, and could I join your fabulous team?

badclient• 15 years ago

This actually sounds more like lean startup than unlike it. Yes lean startup encourages getting to testing your ideas quickly, but it also focuses on reducing process waste. If you have a mature product and enough data points suggesting major new feature, I think it'd be a waste to try and recollect those data points or build half of the features just for the sake of being lean even if in the past you have been mostly spot on with taking customer feedback and releasing successful major features based on them.

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

It could just be a very limited spec.

libraryatnight• 15 years ago

This is VERY cool. Makes me wish I were working on something with other people lol

mmaunder• 15 years ago

DoS'd right now. More info about trello on the blog which is still up:

http://blog.trello.com/launch/

yhager• 15 years ago

When signing up, the verification email does not content a link if viewed in text mode. My email client is configured to show the text portion of the email when it's available.

tseabrooks2• 15 years ago

Wow, this is seriously great. The one thing that stood out to me (from the blog post) was the wall of 42" Plasmas in the office just for displaying Trello. While obviously not everyone can afford a wall of TVs it really would be nice to have a way that everyone could always see who should be working on / is responsible for what.

I imagine a board for "existing modules / features" That has the current "responsible" person for that item.. and a "new feature" board that has an easy way for people to see who is currently implementing said new feature. Though that would overlap somewhat with fogbugz (search for the task and see who it is assigned to) the board would have the advantage of being more high level and still being easily visible after a task is complete.

Joel (or FogCreek persons), I'm using fogbugz / kiln at home and for my side projects is there some plan to provide integration with those existing projects? Magically linking based on case numbers? Updatet he responsible person on a card based on who is currently assigned some case number?

tseabrooks2• 15 years ago

I'm starting to use the service now and it immediately occurs to me that an excellent feature would be the ability to forward an email and have it create a board / card for me a la fogbugz.

TomGullen• 15 years ago

How is this going to be monetised? I want to use it but just want to make sure we don't get too excited/committed if it's going to cost a lot of money!

simonbrown• 15 years ago

The blog post implies freemium.

> It’s free. (We might charge something for premium features in the future). You can make one board or 100.

jongraehl• 15 years ago

"hide until this date" (preferably parsing description for a date, not a separate entry step) would be nice.

bane• 15 years ago

Love it! It's basically a todo checklist app with a completely rethought interface...and general enough you could use it for everything from software development to portfolio management to sales pipeline review.

Great stuff.

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

Played around for a few minutes.. I didn't see a quick way to filter the view to only the non-archived cards that you (or any other single person) are a member of. If you start to build up tons of boards/cards, is there a way to quickly filter the view like this?

prawn2• 15 years ago

I expected this would show up when you clicked a person's avatar, but it didn't. Expected it would show something of a personal to-do list.

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

In general, I think more work is needed if the numbers of everything (members, cards, etc) all scale to large numbers. I love the interface and would actually like to have this internally, but I worry that things would get out of hand quickly. I think board hierarchy (nest boards within boards) could go a ways towards making it better, but I'd have to play with it. They should try scaling up to large numbers of boards/cards (1000?) to which you are a participant and see if any of the concepts need tweaking.

adamjernst2• 15 years ago

Press q.

IanDrake• 15 years ago

Joel, you must have been to one of my clients that have a giant whiteboard of post-it notes doing something similar.

I think this might be your best product yet.

twidlit• 15 years ago

its Pivotal tracker on a zoomed out view (project level). Really nice!

swanson2• 15 years ago

Any plans for adding multiple lists per column (two at 50% height, etc)? That would be the only thing I can do on our current Kanban board that I couldn't do on Trello.

I really like the app though, it's like a distilled, get out of the way version of Jira.

rorrr• 15 years ago

That would break the usability. Right now you know that horizontal axis = lists, vertical = items in lists.

The only thing that I don't like is horizontal scrolling.

jjg4• 15 years ago

Try resizing your browser window for a couple other viewing options.

swanson2• 15 years ago

Maybe - I think that the border around the lists is clear enough separation. I agree about the horizontal scrolling, that is why we have multiple queues per column on the whiteboard. If you have lists with only 2-3 items in them at a time (think WIP limit) then the bottom half of the screen is empty.

chrisaycock• 15 years ago

Joel's presentation at TechCrunch Distrupt:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/joel-spolskys-trello-is-a-s...

latch• 15 years ago

A 7 minute video? That seems long...curious how many people who'd land on this page would watch it all. (I got through 56 seconds of it).

akavlie2• 15 years ago

I just watched it all. It's a great video.

parallel• 15 years ago

If you're really interested in introducing this into a working business, and have spent days researching the options a 7 minute summary (advert) like this is a gift.

LearnYouALisp6• 15 years ago

I just went straight to the page, signed up, and started exploring it.

dfischer2• 15 years ago

I'll just leave this here: http://www.kanbanpad.com

jrmg2• 15 years ago

Do you work on this?

It looks intriguing to me, and the page does give the impression that it's nicely designed, but I have no idea what it does. Something to do with tasks, and project management, and it "works on mobile too". Maybe I'm expected to know already kanban, what it brings to project management, and how it works?

Watching the Trello video, and browsing around the http://trello.com/ landing page, I immediately have ideas about how I could be using Trello - that's not the case on http://www.kanbanpad.com/.

dfischer2• 15 years ago

I do.

Thank you. Good point.

We try to lower the barrier to entry so much so, that if you just type your e-mail and hit "let's go" you can already start playing with it, instead of having to watch a video.

However we are putting together a nicely animated video that should explain it with a nice elevator pitch.

Thanks for the feedback.

mvkel6• 15 years ago

It definitely has all the trappings of a Fog Creek app: - The overall UI: built by programmers who dabble in design - A seven(!) minute video about how _simple_ it is to use. It's easy! Instead of just raising your hand, you mark a light on the corresponding tote board, which informs your manager that you need more information.

I hate to be contrarian, but there are many other apps out there that solve this problem much more succinctly. I'm not sure who thought a solution like this is needed.

Also: "lemmur"

adamjernst2• 15 years ago

OK, but can you give us some specific improvements you'd make? Or parts of the design that you'd change?

mvkel6• 15 years ago

Sure, I do have a contracting fee for such occasions :)

enra• 15 years ago

I would say change the colors. They're as fresh as Windows software from the 90's.

The typography is rather ugly and makes the UI look stuffed (so maybe tuning the font, font-weights and font-sizes would help)

Overall the UI looks stuffed and heavy and colors make it seem depressing. The actual task something like two words, but about half of the space is occupied with heavy indicators of comments or other UI elements, so you tend to focus on the UI and not the actual information.

I guess the UI works in the basic level, but it's not that well or tastefully executed, and definitely looks like coder design.

LearnYouALisp6• 15 years ago

Where is the delete/remove button?

phillco2• 15 years ago

As someone who's used FogBugz and Kiln for some time, and has just played around with Trello, I'd say this:

FogBugz definitely suffers from what you describe. Despite what Fog Creek might say about it being easy, it feels clunky and indirect. And slow -- it's 2011, yet everything that manipulates the case table (arguably the most important part of the app) seems to require a full page refresh. It definitely suffers from the "you must mold your brain into our mindset to use" mentality. Furthermore, it's languishing -- most of the updates release to the On Demand version in the past year feel like small tweaks, many related to Kiln. Where's the leadership?

Kiln, on the other hand, is excellent. No problems whatsoever. Does what it's supposed to and does it well. No friction.

Now, Trello. I've only used it for a few hours, but already I look forward to using it for as many projects as I can. Simply amazing and simple and intuitive, all at the same time. It has negative friction -- practically invites me to put everything I have on it. I don't know what Fog Creek's doing in regards to product design, but it's working.

(And granted, most of those FogBugz problems could simply be because of a hefty anchor of legacy code. Maybe FC has simply moved on entirely)

mvkel6• 15 years ago

Insightful points. Thanks for the background.

buzzcut5• 15 years ago

Stay tuned for some significant changes to address much of what you've said about FogBugz here. Definitely not moved on. Just going to show it all to you at once.

rohitarondekar• 15 years ago

"...but there are many other apps out there that solve this problem much more succinctly."

Links please.

mvkel6• 15 years ago

What Trello accomplishes could also be accomplished in Campfire without needing to keep a browser window open. There's also Yammer, to some degree.

Obviously Trello's approach is different, but my point was there are other apps that have simpler approaches to the same problem.

bennoleslie• 15 years ago

http://agilezen.com/ is very close, and actually has a bunch of other useful features too. Although I've got to say that trello is a lot slicker than agilezen.

mhp8• 15 years ago

Harumph, grouchy pants. Well, one of the designer/UI peeps at 37signals liked it! so there! http://twitter.com/#!/rjs/status/113751685091950592

But in typical usenet style, I will engage each of your points directly and anxiously await your rebuttal.

- "The UI stinks." I think this is the number one thing we've gotten praise for. It's hard to please everyone, but overwhelmingly people have told us the opposite of what you are saying.

- "The video is too long / The app isn't simple enough." I sort of agree with this. The video is kind of long for an app this simple. I got a bit bored in the middle (and I'm the Fog Creek co-founder). But if you wait until the Jello line at the end, it's totally worth it!

- "People already solved this problem." Right and wrong. I think there are a few other solutions which are pretty close to this idea (some of them are even posted here in the comments, and we've since discovered more as people tweeted them to us) but I think we'll get more traction because we aren't building a software dev tool. We're trying to build a horizontal tool, and our future releases will reflect that focus. The majority of the existing tools are aimed at developers.

- "Joel pronounces lemur incorrectly." I'm pretty sure he did that just to annoy you. It apparently succeeded.

snowtiger• 15 years ago

"The UI stinks", but I like idea and functionality behind. Just like online group sticky note board I'd like to use

mvkel6• 15 years ago

No rebuttal here! Thanks very much for the clarification.

If you're getting praise for the UI, go for it. I think my biggest issue is the relatively narrow nature of the design. The cards, the columns, etc. Example: http://cl.ly/1i01452a3l0V1X3K3N1f -- line breaks like that are difficult on the eyeballs.

Little things, like using color-coded labels for organization sound good on paper, but are very tedious in practice. Lots of calendars use this with good intentions, but you'll find yourself asking, "is that a grey, or taupe task?"

Walking the user through the on-boarding process would help immensely in describing the product. Right now, there's a bit of information overload with everything being visible on the screen. It'd be neat to see an approach where you're presented with nothing, and are told to "create a list. Great! Now add yourself to this list. Wonderful! Lists are used for X, Y, Z"

I do apologize for being so gruff in my original comment. If you're getting great feedback on Trello, there's obviously something there. Good luck with it!

prawn2• 15 years ago

Can someone confirm a bug or let me know if it's just my browser? (Firefox/XP)

View back of a card in the first list. Choose Move.... Try to move it to a specific position (2nd, for example) on another list (in my case, the third/final list). For me, it just goes to the top of the list.

Edit: Tried to use this move method (rather than dragging) to shift something from List 3 to Position 3 on List 1. It shifted to Position 2 instead.

danso• 15 years ago

What kind of offline support do you foresee? I haven't tried using the iOS app yet...but I'm thinking of the use case where I've cached the current state of the board and want to check off/add things to the board while I'm on the subway, and have it sync automatically when I get back on. Possible, or are there too many moving parts for that to be implemented easily?

Joakal2• 15 years ago

I don't like this, it's telling me to go upgrade my browser as punishment for having the wrong user agent. When I'm trying to have privacy.

My agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7

I'm using 6.0.2 browser, however.

It's a pretty common user agent: https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php Eff does not provide the most common user agents list so I have no idea what's latest user agent to use. Many web statistic collectors also don't mention user agents.

coffeemug• 15 years ago

This product was designed to do a really good job helping people that have to get things done. Like any other software project, they must have had thousands of issues and limited resources to fix them, so they had to triage. With all due respect, the kinds of users that spoof their user agent to protect their privacy is probably fairly low on their priority list.

Joakal2• 15 years ago

"Thousands of issues and limited resources to fix them"? They seem to have the resources to make it by design to block such user agents rather than advising users to upgrade.

icebraining• 15 years ago

Firefox 5.0 is the most common nowadays; XP is also still the leader; So, the intersection between the two is probably high. According to UserAgentString, there's only one string (well, two variations):

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
    Mozilla/5.0 (U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

By the way, have you considered using this[1]? Seems the best option to prevent tracking.

    [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/randomuseragent/

joeyespo2• 15 years ago

This looks really cool. I'm excited to try it out, individually and with others.

Even better that you can immediately sign up and give it a try. As opposed to Asana, which has similar intentions, but is doing a private beta with larger companies only. Yes, Trello is much easier to get excited about.

EDIT

Some feedback: so far I really like it. It's intuitive. And it has some nice features out of the box that are lacking in other products such as assignment and voting. Assignment allows central authorities to exist, as well as hand-offs between people. Voting is awesome. I immediately see two uses for this: democratizing, and to allow collaborators to vote on what they want to do. The latter being something I've always personally wanted in a collaboration tool. Combining that with a central authority can be very powerful by allowing people to voice their interests, yet keep the project moving and avoid conflict.

As for the initial reaction: some of the views are pretty intimidating. Even thought there's only three lists at the start, it is still a little much to begin with. A lot to take in. If you ever implement a "minimize list" feature, that could easily reduce the noise for a beginner while still allowing you to explore all the features when you're ready to.

The edit screen has a lot happening in it too, but I think that's less of a problem since it's only visible when actually editing cards and you'll soon be using everything in there.

Also, I'm sure it's already in the works, but keyboard navigation will be huge for upcoming power users. Right now Vimium provides that for me, but it'd be great to have it built in.

It looks very useful! I'm already having fun with it and I'll try it out on an upcoming collaboration. Is there going to be a UserVoice (or similar) site anywhere for additional feedback? I'll happily leave this and other feedback there.

buzzcut5• 15 years ago

Keyboard shortcuts: https://trello.com/shortcuts

tzury• 15 years ago

being an asana user for few months, I just registered and used it for a small project.

Quite confusing, not sure which one is better!

joeyespo2• 15 years ago

Awesome. How did you like Asana?

I was really excited about their initiative when I first heard of it. My day job at the time really needed it, or something like it. But it was private, and PM wouldn't jump on anything without seeing it in action, so that had no traction.

LearnYouALisp6• 15 years ago

The first thing I looked for when I picked up a card was a "recycle bin". Also, I cannot delete an organization I created.

I realize this is developing, but I would like to request some buttons for important actions. Some choices are not accessible enough, and thus require too many clicks to perform.

It would be nice to simply minimize the board and see a list of other boards I can open. For more complicated projects, as the user above noted, minimizing lists would be a helpful feature.

I would also like to be able to edit a card's text from the main screen without having to open it up and then click on the title again (e.g. to correct a mistake).

Thank you!

imrehg• 15 years ago

Does it look a bit more complicated and crowded version of Co-human? http://www.cohuman.com/

I'm on the fence, I kinda like both and love neither. Especially so far none of these organization tools helped me to be more efficient. I guess I'm holding them wrong.

padobson• 15 years ago

I have a number of small business clients who have been looking for something exactly like this. I'm going to be telling each of them about it the next time I see them.

thedangler• 15 years ago

How did you make those scroll bars within the divs?

Thanks

swlkr• 15 years ago

I believe it's just an overflow. Yep Inspect element says overflow-y: auto;

est• 15 years ago

I love checklists, but could you please add task dependency and Gantt chart support?

akkartik• 15 years ago

Upvoted for presumed satire.

foxylad• 15 years ago

Joel has finally escaped the Microsoft stack! Welcome to the exciting, crazy and raw world of real software - I think you're going to love it.

smosher2• 15 years ago

Looks promising, but two things jump out at me.

My first question is where's the API? This is something I plan to use but I will want some way to export the information to non-users, dead trees, etc. (I'd need it anyway for private boards, The boss wants it in excel etc.)

I'd also like to question the wisdom of closing the 'public' content off from non-users. Choosing 'Public' will make the board visible to all Trello users. Very closed-web, I don't use Orkut anymore and I wouldn't be on github if it wasn't so visible and ubiquitous. Not a complaint, just food for thought.

thedufer8• 15 years ago

We were in private beta until today, and changing that wording got missed. Public boards are, in fact, visible to anyone, regardless of whether they're logged in.

smosher2• 15 years ago

Oh, very cool.

skeptical• 15 years ago

Since everybody seems so enthusiastic about it, I thought I would also leave my not so enthusiastic opinion for the sake of broad feedback.

If i should be honest I didn't like it so much. It felt too cluttered, the interface has way too many visual elements for my brain to process in efficient time. It's also missing more obvious visual indicators such as color or shapes. The list look all the same, they don't even have different icons identifying them, only the the name. That will do it but it's not the ultimate visual indicator.

As a person that barely uses the mouse, I don't find this so practical, it's click after click after click, but I guess that problem affects almost every web application out there.

I might be too focused simple/minimal things, this tries to lay information in a rather complex data structure, which in practice it means a lot of mental exercise before you get the info. I believe many like it, not me, give me a search box and a list of results every day.

twakefield• 15 years ago

Very slick UI, the use cases are virtually endless.

How about email integration where you can forward emails to different lists? Is there an API that we can integrate with Mailgun?

Use case I had in mind is for a sales funnel (or any funnel) where I can bcc the list corresponding with the stage in the funnel as I am corresponding with a lead and have the email move through the lists accordingly.

rhygar• 15 years ago

This is pretty good. And even better its free. How are you going to pay for this? Premium accounts or something?

LearnYouALisp6• 15 years ago

Hopefully they will pay for it with Stackoverflow ad revenue.

minikomi2• 15 years ago

Thought it might be fun to have an open board for this thread.. https://trello.com/board/hacker-news-board/4e70123412dcf45f5... I hope this works for sharing.

mhp8• 15 years ago

Its a bit tricky because while your board is public, we can all see it but not edit anything.

minikomi2• 15 years ago

Oh.. I didn't realize that was the case. Thanks for letting me know!

draebek• 15 years ago

This looks really great. I've been wanting to write something like this for use in our small-ish team, but there is probably really no point if we have this.

I would love to see more e-mail integration: someone mentioned mailing in to it to create a card, which could be pretty cool, but probably just as importantly I'd like for it to have options to send us e-mail when cards change. Some people like getting notifications pushed to them via e-mail versus having to check the site.

Thanks for writing this!

wenbert• 15 years ago

I'm using this already. I'm managing 3 clients right now and I already can see the benefits. I can see everything - so will my brother (co-hacker) when he accepts the invite! I'm using this as a to-do list.

I'm still going to use this with caution. I do not want to rely heavily on something that I could not afford in the future.

Hopefully, the pricing/freemium will not make me back-out.

ellyagg• 15 years ago

You can actually view the live Trello Development board itself here:

https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113...

I'm impressed they're so transparent with their development process.

city41• 15 years ago

It's mostly read-only, which you'd expect. Except I was surprised I was aloud to vote on their cards. I wonder what prompted that design decision.

thedufer8• 15 years ago

Voting and commenting on public boards can be allowed for everyone, restricted to members, or turned off. We chose to leave it on because we like the aspect of simple, quick feedback on where things are going.

DodgyEggplant• 15 years ago

Beautiful product. Who is the designer?

anon_d• 15 years ago

Too complicated; just use etherpad.

erichmond3• 15 years ago

How big was the team who built this? Stunning achievement, you guys should be proud.

erichmond3• 15 years ago

BTW, I realize now this could be read sarcastically. I didn't meant it that way at all. I know from the blog post it took 9 months, but I'm also curious the composition of the team that built it.

buzzcut5• 15 years ago

There were two full-time devs, two designer-devs (they write code, for example the iPhone app, but also spent lot of time on UI, usability, and design), and two interns for 12 weeks over the summer.

8ig8• 15 years ago

I found this glossary helpful: https://trello.com/glossary

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

This is really cool. I like it a lot. But I think "organize everything" is a bit of a hyperbolic catchphrase. It seems to be very task-oriented. It doesn't feel like something you can just throw random ideas, say for a screenplay, into to organize them.

Still, as long as it stays free or even inexpensive it might be my goto tool for task management. I'll need to try it. I like that it works on my iPad without much fuss.

icefox• 15 years ago

So I honestly don't get it. Is this a poor mans bug tracker? A possible re-invention of a bug tracker? (something wacky and different version of a bug tracker to see if it sticks?)

I have seen people mention project management a bunch, but the view really isn't about viewing what people are doing. In fact items that don't have people assigned to them still show up. The 10 foot view isn't even that good as they all squares and text. At a glance you can not tell what changed recently, what is late etc.

I had to really grimace when it showed the internal team that was using it and one of the stacks was "bugs" and it had the most number of items and was scrollable. ugg Does that scale to thousands of open bugs (or how about just 50)?

So either this is for all of those people who have never discovered the overview page of their bug tracker or maybe it is trying an experiment to see if the process of creating a bug tracker for a project is too difficult and here you just click "new project" and blam done and later on you export it to a real bug tracker... Maybe this is all just tricking users into using a bug tracker without them knowing?

Anyone get the same feeling?

meatmanek• 15 years ago

Well, to fuel your fire, Fog Creek also happens to make a bug tracker, http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/

Vitaly7• 15 years ago

In my view this looks like a great tool for agile workflow. A replacement for the board with sticky notes.

regarding the scale ... most if not all bug-trackers become a junk yard of bug reports. thousands of them. most never get fixed. lots never get looked at. This tool lets you store things that you are going to do in the near future. And the rest... lets deal with it when we get there. I think if you can't remember it a month from now, it probably not important.

In any real project you can never deal with all the bugs and reports. so you usually deal with the most serious ones and the ones that get reported most often. the important ones go on todo right away, and the often reported ones do not need another place for them. people will keep reporting until you deal ;)

so this tool is effectively lets you plan your activities in the short and medium term. once you get to the 'next year' you will have other priorities and new things to do. there is no need to plan it now.

Im definitely going to try it. Currently we mostly work with Pivotal Tracker and also trying out Trajectory from Thoughtbot. It looks like Trello might be a decent contender in the space.

larrywright• 15 years ago

In looking at it, it looks much more generic than Pivotal Tracker (which I'm a current heavy user of and absolutely adore).

Pivotal Tracker is very focused on being an agile workflow tool. You enter a card, estimate it, start it, deliver it, and then it gets accepted or rejected. This is great for agile projects. Where it falls down is if you want to use it for non-development efforts, like say a marketing project, or building a new data center. Projects where that workflow doesn't really apply.

In my opinion, this is where Trello seems like it could shine. It's one tool that everyone can use to manage their work.

I don't see myself leaving Pivotal Tracker any time soon, but I will definitely keep an eye on Trello.

jagira• 15 years ago

It is a simpler version of Pivotal Tracker.

johdex• 15 years ago

I am also a bit surprised we are seeing a kanban tool from fogcreek. At work we have used fogbugz + the kanban plugin. Although the kanban plugin does not allow for the same level of fanciness when editing notes, the fact that it is integrated with fogbugz makes it more attractive. I'll take a look at Trello, I suspect the UI may be nicer, especially when accessed from mobile devices.

SonicSoul2• 15 years ago

to me it looks like just a simpler version of Fogbugz. I am guessing on the back end they re-used a lot of code. Fogbugz offers more features, but this is more accessible, easier to use, and more basic so it can be used in many different ways.. I think it will put FogCreek in front of more developers and managers and get them into more spaces like GTD (rememberthemilk.com) areas...

subbu• 15 years ago

I tried to solve this using WhoIsWorkingOnWhat.com (hn submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1979671). It didn't get much traction. I was obviously a no match to Joel. I am thinking of open sourcing the app when I get some time to clean it up.

ayanb2• 15 years ago

From the js source -

This application uses other third-party javascript components distributed under appropriate licenses. For more information, see the following files at http://trello.com/js/lib/

backbone.js,

highcharts.js,

json2.js,

markdown.js,

socket.io.js,

underscore.js,

...apart from jquery/jquery-ui.

Jach• 15 years ago

Mostly a nitpick, but it'd be nice if the home page had a little <noscript> text for those of us who browse safely and are wondering what it is at a glance or why we should care enough (besides the Spolsky reference) to enable scripting.

Anyway, it's pretty slick with the UI. I'm going to check it out for tasking myself, and if I like it see how it works for a school project with others.

zv• 15 years ago

Did anyone notice "Artist Exploitation Inc" in video?

ayanb2• 15 years ago

Few things I am really digging from a design perspective -

1) The slight tilt of an item in the process of doing a drag and drop of tasks

2) The modal boxes for adding invites, viewing task details etc.

3) The scrollbar on the right(Activity) pane. (Was digging around in the css, is this done in Javascript?)

Well done!

Zolomon• 15 years ago

Allow a user to create an account and tie it to his Google Account like on StackExchange!

dongsheng• 15 years ago

Looks similar to Jira's GreenHopper (http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/), each tracker issue is one card, and you can see what's in progress, todos and what has been done.

milep• 15 years ago

Oh you US people, I get internal server error when I try to activate account which contains ä character in the full name field...

And when trying to change my name from the account page: Display Name can only contain letters, numbers, spaces, or the following characters: -_'.@+

Does this affect the Google account login also, it doesn't work for me either.

elisee• 15 years ago

Internal server error on the confirm link, and my full name has an "é" in it, so I guess it's the same issue. Also, log in with Google Account does nothing / doesn't work either.

You really don't wanna let me in, do you? :)

sschueller• 15 years ago

Same problem with the ü in my name.

dmarinoc• 15 years ago

Same for me, with an "ñ" in my last name.

Kinda ironic after reading Spolsky's article "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!" :D

link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

jongisli• 15 years ago

Same for me. My google account also has problems. I've already fixed my email for the account with the special characters... am I done for then?

rbreve• 15 years ago

Python sucks at unicode, maybe they used python, not sure though.

damncabbage• 15 years ago

It's "Node, Backbone, CoffeeScript and MongoDB".

(From the horse's mouth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2994009 )

uriel• 15 years ago

Off topic: Proper, consistent and through UTF-8 support is one of the various reasons I'm starting to prefer Go to Pytho. It is sad that Python 3 didn't take the opportunity to properly fix this.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

Err... what? It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot, sure. But I haven't had unicode issues since I learned how to handle things properly years ago, when I was first getting into development.

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

Same problem for a member of my team with a accented e in her name.

mhp8• 15 years ago

This should be fixed now (11:45 AM EST Wed Sep 14)

pknerd• 15 years ago

Would give a tough competition to 37Signals guys.

asadullah• 15 years ago

This is a very good organizing tool. Reasons:

- I do the exact same thing, but using post-its. Here is a photo of one of my early methods: http://i.imgur.com/hEVtT.jpg. Later I started using post-its for the tasks, so that they could be resorted.

- I was thinking of making the exact same app, by converting by manual process mentioned above to an automated one. Design docs: http://i.imgur.com/VGtJI.jpg. Here is the Adobe Air version of the application done by an intern in a few days: http://wikisend.com/download/962662/FinalVersion.air

- The most important productivity reasons that I noticed AFTER using this method were: 1) Limits to a few projects on my screen at at time 2) Can assign priorities by drag-drop (or unstick and paste) 3) Can see projects and tasks in one look

- The point is, that if I had time to develop an app to automate my manual workflow, Trello would have been the exact type of app I would have made, verifying that software development project managers are also going this route.

betageek• 15 years ago

Nearly freaked out when I saw this as it's very similar to something I'm working on but, on closer inspection it's just a surface design similarity.

Glad to see positive reaction anyway, sometimes seeing a product that's like to the one your working come out isn't a bad thing, it just tells you your on the right track

deleo• 15 years ago

Going for Basecamp's jugular :)

mehi• 15 years ago

My first impression is that Trello isn't a (good) product (yet) but it will certainly leverage on Joel's marketing machine.

Observations: The organization information should not be public by default. I haven't found a way to delete an organization (is it there?).

The interface is unusable on iPad/mobile.

The card pop-up window is hard to use when there's some actual information attached to it. The bird's eye view is confusing and offers little information.

Activity log grows fast with information I would not need: voting events, add/remove members, etc. Make two activity logs, one with useful information and one with tracking (investigation) information.

In Opera and Chrome the red connection establishing notice appears all the time.

The in/out/public permissions are easy to use, but users may actually need more granularity.

SonicSoul2• 15 years ago

is it just me or does the background music make this demo seem like a movie preview? seems like Joel is about to meet his long lost brother, who at first, completely ruins his life, but in the end makes him learn a lot more about himself!

newman314• 15 years ago

No delete card functionality

PostOnce• 15 years ago

I was looking for a trash can to drag a card into, or an x to click or a delete button or something.

If there is a delete functionality, it's not intuitive or apparent.

LearnYouALisp6• 15 years ago

This is the first thing I was looking for!

ZipCordManiac2• 15 years ago

Why delete when you can archive ?

epo2• 15 years ago

Another vote to be able to import and export data.

rpwilcox• 15 years ago

Hey, cool, a nice looking Kanban board! (The ones I've seen to date have either been pretty ugly, or too many features for what I want. This one looks just right)

jdangu• 15 years ago

I don't like how this public profile URL can't be turned off.

ares2012• 15 years ago

Seems like a simple Kanban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban) board. I'm not sure why this is new, there are a lot of options for Kanban out there.

JayInt3• 15 years ago

a) its free b) its free :D

Most of the kanban boards out there worth their salt cost some serious pennies if scaled to a large team!

plus... as far as I know Trello doesn't have the functionality for WIP Limits

This board also integrates nicely with GoogleApps, if it has integration with tfs (not sure if it does) then it would stand a good chance of owning a piece of the PM scene in .net land

jim_h• 15 years ago

The page doesn't display completely if javascript or cookies are blocked.

It would be nice if it was mentioned somewhere.

AndyKelley• 15 years ago

I showed this to my manager, and he responded:

"Holy shit. This is EXACTLY what I was envisioning. This is freaking AWESOME. Since the data is stored outside of [our company], security might have a conniption fit if they found out that we were using this for managing internal project data.

I'm certain a tool like this could be highly useful to many other teams..."

Can Trello address this concern?

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

You want Joel to send someone in to give security a slap?

rexreed• 15 years ago

Joel - if you're still reading this thread (it's getting long) - I've been looking for a tool like this for a long time, but the lynchpin for me is the ability to track work hours so I can bill against it. I constantly run into tools that either let me track time or projects but rarely both in a way that works. This web app works well, but without time management, I'm forced to track the very same projects in another system for the sole purpose of billing. Oh what can we do here? At the very least, is there an API where we can add time tracking and billing to this?

I hope you'll see this comment!

bugsbunnyak• 15 years ago

Just signed up - great so far. One request: make the back of the card resizeable to variable width, or have a preference to make it fit-to larger area within window. Wrapped c++ stubs look even uglier than regular c++!

ibisum• 15 years ago

The only thing I don't like about this is that my company won't own the data if we use it. By own the data, I mean, be responsible for it entirely, without any outside entity having anything to do with it, whatsoever.

Other than that, looks awesome. I hope there is a standalone installable version of this somehow, some day ..

wunluv• 15 years ago

Since reading the news about the release, I thought I'd try it out on a wee project I'm working on. So today, I tried to remember the name, and guess what? I did. Good job with that. I went to Trello.com, and found out I could just click the login with Google button. Yes! No forms or anything. I'm happy. I'm now logged in and it's taken me a total of 3 minutes to get fairly comfortable and start work.

Thank you so much for this service. I hope free accounts are grandfathered in :)

p.s - Please make it so that I can invite more than one person per click.

JayInt3• 15 years ago

Joel,

Is there a place we can make feature requests?

ryanisinallofus2• 15 years ago

I was pretty skeptical after my hate-hate affair with FogBugz but Trello's design, marketing and OOBE are far and away the best in the category. I need to use it more but it just doesn't have whatever Pivotal has that scares away non-devs at first glance. Joel, this is definitely my favorite Fog Creek product yet.

ryanisinallofus2• 15 years ago

Some very interesting interaction design work too. Can I ask who did it?

kvirani• 15 years ago

Getting an internal server error when trying to signup (after filling out the signup form and clicking the "Create New Account" button on the signup) ... http://cl.ly/020I2N0Q3d143L2f040a

ZipCordManiac2• 15 years ago

I can use this. Great product. How will they monetize it ?

Mike_mike• 15 years ago

It looks so similar to KanbanTool [http://kanbantool.com] (intuitive UI, board, easy drag&drop, comments etc.) - but it is much less customisable and powerful.

I'm just wondering if Trello is a finished product or do you guys planning to implement real-time updates, notifications, history, more customisation, priorities and any features like KanbanTool has at the moment?

And is there enough place on Kanban market for another tool?

gitsetgo• 15 years ago

Have used it for a week and absolutely love it. It would be even better if they could add offline access so I didn't have to worry about having internet access all the time.

Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

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