
Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together - moses1400
https://trello.com
======
MartinCron
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.

~~~
spolsky
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.

~~~
kurin
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.

~~~
MartinCron
_As someone who can't draw a thing_

Practical suggestion that has worked for me is to use graph paper. Having the
grid to align and separate things makes a huge difference. My non-graph-paper
sketches look like something from a lunatic's diary in comparison.

I would be eager to try a whiteboard with a consistent faint grid to it.

~~~
wjgilmore
+1. I can't draw a smiley face. Plain old graph paper has had a huge impact on
my ability to put together satisfactory mockups. I have a pile of it sitting
right next to me in fact. :-)

------
jashkenas
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.

~~~
tghw
Node, Backbone, CoffeeScript and MongoDB

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

~~~
ianthehenry
Trello does use Socket.io. If your browser supports websockets it will use
them, but it will transparently fall back to polling if necessary.

~~~
juliennakache
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 ?

~~~
ianthehenry
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.

------
icefox
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?

~~~
Vitaly
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
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.

------
milep
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.

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

~~~
uriel
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.

~~~
beagle3
I thought Python3 sort-of did fix it, by forcing strings to be (abstractly)
unicode and force you to explicit convert them to bytes with whichever codec
you want (e.g. utf-8) when you need to.

What are you missing?

------
mkopinsky
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.

~~~
mkopinsky
What do the colored squares over my avatar mean?

~~~
jjg
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.

~~~
LearnYouALisp
Thanks for explaining that. I would have expected mouseover text for those
like there is for the blue square.

------
mvkel
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"

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

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

~~~
gbhn
Wow. So your pitch is "Your app sucks. Give me $1k and I'll tell you why"?
Does this ever actually work?

~~~
mvkel
Wow, tough crowd. It was a joke. No more bad jokes on HN. Got it.

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

------
AndyKelley
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?

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

------
jamiemill
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>

~~~
jrmg
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.

~~~
jamiemill
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.

------
mattmanser
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.

~~~
spolsky
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.

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

~~~
akavlie
or latest Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera

------
joeyespo
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.

~~~
tzury
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!

~~~
joeyespo
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.

------
100k
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.

------
Adaptive
"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.

~~~
spolsky
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

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

~~~
tghw
_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.

------
foxylad
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.

------
smosher
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.

~~~
thedufer
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.

~~~
smosher
Oh, very cool.

------
Joakal
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
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.

~~~
Joakal
"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.

~~~
Vitaly
yeah. and people will ignore the warning, continue to use the app and then
complain that it doesn't work wasting everybody's time.

------
tptacek
So this is Basecamp + Backpack, modernized and combined?

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

~~~
barmstrong
I thought Pivotal Tracker, but more general.

~~~
MortenK
I only saw a lot of facebook-like streams, avatar pictures and a lot of other
bling making it hard to see what's actually going on.

------
draebek
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!

------
andrewflnr
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.

------
tseabrooks
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?

~~~
tseabrooks
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.

------
twakefield
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.

------
marcamillion
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.

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

------
wenbert
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.

------
mehi
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.

------
michaelchisari
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.

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

~~~
akkartik
Upvoted for presumed satire.

------
ares2012
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.

~~~
JayInt
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

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

~~~
LearnYouALisp
Hopefully they will pay for it with Stackoverflow ad revenue.

------
nyrulez
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.

~~~
mhp
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)

------
asadullah
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.

------
avolcano
Seems very similar to AgileZen, but more basic: <http://agilezen.com/>

Seems interesting anyways. Really love the interface.

------
TomGullen
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
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.

------
IanDrake
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.

------
beagledude
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!

------
subbu
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.

------
phzbOx
_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!

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

------
imrehg
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.

------
dfischer
I'll just leave this here: <http://www.kanbanpad.com>

~~~
jrmg
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/>.

~~~
dfischer
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.

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

[https://trello.com/board/trello-
development/4d5ea62fd76aa113...](https://trello.com/board/trello-
development/4d5ea62fd76aa1136000000c)

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

~~~
city41
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.

~~~
thedufer
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.

------
apaprocki
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?

~~~
prawn
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.

~~~
apaprocki
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.

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

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

~~~
sgentle
Thanks. Back up now and looks great.

~~~
mey
Down again, from the youtube video I saw and the blogpost, it looks fantastic.

~~~
dodger
Load balancer config issue, should be all set now.

------
dongsheng
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.

------
chrisaycock
Joel's presentation at TechCrunch Distrupt:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/joel-spolskys-trello-is-
a-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/joel-spolskys-trello-is-a-simple-
workflow-and-list-manager-for-groups/)

------
ayanb
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.

------
rexreed
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!

------
wunluv
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.

------
Mike_mike
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?

------
rednaught
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?

------
thedjpetersen
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.

------
prawn
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.

------
Jach
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.

------
danso
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?

------
gurraman
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.

------
jvandenbroeck
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.

------
ryanisinallofus
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.

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

------
ibisum
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 ..

------
betageek
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

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

------
minikomi
Thought it might be fun to have an open board for this thread..
[https://trello.com/board/hacker-news-
board/4e70123412dcf45f5...](https://trello.com/board/hacker-news-
board/4e70123412dcf45f5f05cb80) I hope this works for sharing.

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

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

------
kvirani
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>

------
ayanb
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!

------
swanson
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
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.

~~~
swanson
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
erichmond
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.

~~~
buzzcut
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.

~~~
erichmond
thanks!

------
bugsbunnyak
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++!

------
bane
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.

------
mindblink
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!

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

------
yhager
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.

------
gitsetgo
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.

------
padobson
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.

------
shawndrost
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.

~~~
spolsky
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.

------
rpwilcox
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)

------
smussman
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. :-)

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

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

------
latch
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).

~~~
parallel
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.

------
pragmatic
Does this integrate with fogbugz and/or kiln?

~~~
pragmatic
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."

------
8ig8
I found this glossary helpful: <https://trello.com/glossary>

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

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

------
DodgyEggplant
Beautiful product. Who is the designer?

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

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

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

It would be nice if it was mentioned somewhere.

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

------
SonicSoul
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!

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

------
newman314
No delete card functionality

~~~
PostOnce
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.

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

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

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

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

Almost like Workflowy on steroids.

------
zv
Did anyone notice "Artist Exploitation Inc" in video?

------
epo
Another vote to be able to import and export data.

------
pknerd
Would give a tough competition to 37Signals guys.

------
thedangler
How did you make those scroll bars within the divs?

Thanks

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

------
anon_d
Too complicated; just use etherpad.

------
JayInt
Joel,

Is there a place we can make feature requests?

------
deleo
Going for Basecamp's jugular :)

------
tathagatadg
Ultimate GTD tool ...

~~~
mkopinsky
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.

------
skeptical
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.

