
Splendid Bacon: Simple Project Management for Hackers, built in 48 hours - ljuti
http://splendidbacon.com
======
lionhearted
Looks very clean and beautiful.

Feedback on your branding - maybe everyone in your social circle eats bacon
and it's cool and loves it, but the name will probably be an emotional level
turnoff to vegetarians, Jews who eat kosher, and Muslims who eat halal, or
people who otherwise don't eat pork. Something to think about before you
really get rolling, because you might potentially have an unnecessarily hard
time breaking through to those groups of people.

Disclaimer: I've got kind of a weird diet - I don't eat mammals (chicken,
poultry, fish okay - beef, pork, venison, no). The name kind of has a mild
yuck factor to me, which I'd get over if the tools were valuable enough, but
I'd hesitate at least a half-second to recommend it to, say, my Jewish
friends.

~~~
Udo
I disagree about the branding. It's simple, it's awesome, it's a somewhat of a
hacker cliche (in a post-Why The Lucky Stiff world). If anyone is "offended"
by this, those are probably not the kind of religious nutjobs you want hanging
around on your site anyway. People, stop it with the appeasement and stand for
something!

Disclaimer: on a moral level, I can totally understand why you don't eat
mammals. That's an awesome personal choice I can sympathize with. However, the
name is still great.

~~~
frr149
Couldn't say it better myself: <http://xkcd.com/137/>

------
sp4rki
This looks really cool, and is designed beautifully. The only thing is that it
id kind of featureless to be really useful for managing projects (read: even
though I love the concept and execution, I wouldn't pay to use it yet). I do
think that the design is beautiful and will probably make an excellent company
dashboard on a big screen in the office. Add more project management tools, if
you guys can merge help desk ticketing, bug ticketing, and to-do lists in a
easy to use package I'm sold.

~~~
ljuti
Thanks for the feedback!

First, this app is 48 hours old so we didn't have too much time to build
features. We'll likely introduce new stuff later on.

Second, this tool is actually more for project portfolio management than
project management per se. The goal is to let teams use the tools that they
like for ticketing, bug reports, etc. and focus more on scheduling, resourcing
and overview of the projects in an organization.

Currently we have GitHub integration with commit messages updating the project
activity stream. We have plans to introduce other integrations like this.

~~~
sp4rki
Yeah I figured as much, I just wanted to tell you what I thought it was
missing, not complain about the lack of features.

Anyways it seems as if you guys want to only focus on the overview of the
project management side and not on the task management side or collaboration
side, which in my book is OK because most products make a mess of those things
when done in tandem.

If you want to focus on only that for now my advice is to implement milestones
first (you said you wanted to focus on scheduling and this is the cornerstone
of scheduling IMO) and change the timeline to have less thick bars and
emphasize milestones instead of project beginnings and endings (though this
should be shown also off course), and figure out which direction you plan to
take... collaboration angle, the task based angle, the "I only need a Gantt
chart" oldschool project management angle, etc.

Overall I feel you guys have gotten the design idea quite nicely of what the
needs in simple project management are, you just need to decide which type of
project manager you're going to market to.

~~~
ljuti
Excellent insights, thanks! These points will definitely be discussed in the
future.

------
bdclimber14
Yet another project management service? I'm amazed out how often these pop-up
promising that they are the now "simplest" project management solution.
Where's the differentiation? Other than the UI and a couple custom fields,
these are no different than Basecamp, Producteev, GoPlan, etc. etc...

With that said, I think it looks and functions great. Very user-friendly.
Would I use it? Probably not. My team seems to hate every simple project
management website service. The ultimate project management service is to
integrate something within the current workflow, which does not involve a
separate website nor does it involve creating tasks, etc. I'm just stating the
problem, but unfortunately I don't have a solution. I just find it fascinating
that there are SO many project management services, but none work for our
team.

The ideal solution would HAVE to have smartphone apps for major platforms, and
gmail integration. Heck, it doesn't even need to have a website frontend.

~~~
slantyyz
_I just find it fascinating that there are SO many project management
services, but none work for our team._

That's why there are so many. I bet that is what each developer was thinking
when they came up with their product.

~~~
bdclimber14
Completely agree, but we aren't about to develop our own. I just find it
interesting that there isn't a solution to fits even most people's needs.

------
DanielRibeiro
Acunote (<http://www.acunote.com/promo>) is still better (which I'll admit is
kinda an unfair comparison, given this was made in only 48 hours). Managing an
agile backlog is possible in acunote. And it is free for up to 7 users
(startups will be able to go a long way before having to pay).

Also acunote makes sure you don't have to reload the page most of the time
(even though Splendid's reload is very fast). I'd really recommend competitors
to borrow from it.

~~~
holman

        > Acunote is still better.
    

To be fair, I suspect Acunote may be just a _little_ bit older than 48 hours
old. ;) Splendid Bacon looks pretty awesome considering.

~~~
points
The first 95% of any app is always the easy bit. It's that last 5% that takes
years.

------
gridspy
I also loved the demo. I particularly liked the fresh database every time.

I suggest that you run a background process that always ensures you have say 5
demo databases 'ready to go' so you can dish them out with no delay when a
user clicks on the evaluate link. The speed of that first click really is
essential.

Also, you could come up with some clever hacks to share the caching for the
default dashboards. Until a user makes a modification, they are essentially on
a static site which has huge advantages for you under load. If you could
automatically bake the site into pure HTML and switch over to a real version
on the first modification that might be a big speed win when you get dug or
slashdotted.

Then again, it could be a premature optimisation. Well done. Very slick.

Consider making your login page (<http://splendidbacon.com/users/sign_in>)
expand into a sign up page rather than making them separate.

Finally, there should be an easy way to convert the demo account into a real
trial account. There could be a big button to do it in the header, or the
account button could be re-labeled TRIAL or FREE ACCOUNT and could lead to a
form that allowed conversion from demo to real. Right now I can't do this
conversion because I don't know the password for the demo account.

Keep the prices low, you have a naturally viral product here (people pulling
other people in). You might want to engineer in features that draw in the dev
shop's clients too (bug tracker, public project dashboards, etc)

~~~
akonan
Excellent points! We didn't have that much time to do the demo data creation
so we're going to do it on background when we get back our code ownership from
Rails Rumble :)

Also we didn't have time to do any caching, but it's a good way to learn the
bottle necks :D

Thanks for the great feedback! Much appreciated!

------
enra
I'm the designer for this app, it's great the people find it interesting and
pleasing. I try write some more detailed post about the process but here are
few pointers:

* We've been talking about this kind of project portfolio / dashboard app for our company quite a while.

* I worked on the concept and the first sketches to my notebook like week before while attending some rather boring keynote presentation. Took photos with my iPhone and send it to the team.

* We had couple of 30min planning sessions on Tue and Fri where we scoped app and what features it should have.

* On Friday afternoon I sketched couple of iterations of the views to paper, so everyone would know what to expect. Also I had the style of the design pretty imagined in my head (I wanted it dark and fancy, and definitely there's inspiration from Cultured Code). Like previously linked, if you like to know I work, I gave a lecture on the subject last week: [http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-ap...](http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-approach-to-web-app-design))

* On Saturday I started about 8 hours late(since I didn't want to wake up too early :-) and I had Photoshop comps of all the main views ready after 7 hours(including couple of iterations each). Key to this was to reuse elements and use layer styles as much as possible

* Before and right after that we started implementing the UI. We choose JQuery, 960.gs, Haml, SASS and Pictos icon-font the frontend. I tried to do as much I could with css so I could reuse it, and SASS was really helpful because you could define and include complex styles elements with a oneliner.

* The app backend was mostly ready Saturday evening as we planned, so when others left on 11pm, I stayed for other 3 hours and implemented the dashboard and some other views.

* We used most the Sunday to polishing the views and the app, and I designed and implement the frontpage on the afternoon.

* On like 10-11pm while other guys where fiddling with the deployment I made a iOS icon and some other small tweaks.

* Sunday 11pm the first deployment went through, we had some problems with Pictos, Firefox and emails but those were solved pretty quickly.

* Then We opened the champange bottle <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8355/deployed.jpg> and it's was done which was really good feeling. After 16 hours the whole team is still really stoked about the app and the feedback. BIG THANKS TO YOU ALL :)

~~~
jasonlotito
I just wanted to say thanks. It seems like you tested the app out on the iPad.
If you didn't, it sure seemed like it. I first visited the app on mine, and
was happy to see it fit like a native app. Highly encouraging. Good work.

~~~
akonan
Thank you! We didn't have time to actually test it on iPad, but we were happy
to see it somewhat working on it :)

------
chad_oliver
Firstly: I think you've done a great job for 48 hours. That's an awesome
inspiration.

Secondly: what is the purpose of the random characters (e.g. %, 2) on the
front page and elsewhere? I found the characters on the front page to be
somewhat unbalanced, especially the comma. Once I tried the demo, I thought
they might be indicating keyboard shortcuts, but nothing happened (firefox
3.0, crunchbang linux). I'm not sure if they're not working, or if I just
don't understand the joke or something, but that was my biggest issue. It
seemed a bit unprofessional -- not that it _is_ (seriously, 48 hours?
awesome!), but that's what I saw.

I hope this helps you, and thanks for sharing this with us!

~~~
jcxplorer
Glad you like it!

I'm sorry to hear that the site doesn't render properly on Firefox 3.0. We are
using @font-face and the Pictos icon set for the icons, and only newer
browsers support it.

Here's what it actually looks like:
<http://skitch.com/jcxplorer/d5hdh/splendid-bacon>

~~~
chad_oliver
Ah, that's much better. Cool!

------
ceejayoz
Very nice. Looks heavily inspired by Cultured Code's dashboard
(<http://culturedcode.com/status/>).

~~~
gizmomagico
Indeed it does. Almost _too_ heavily..

~~~
akonan
It's certainly inspired by them. We love Cultured Code and their products!

------
duck
Personally I don't see much value in it, but it looks awesome and I guess if
you add more features it might be useful to give clients updates.

Best part - the automatic demo account, great job on that. That is by far the
easiest way to understand how something is going work and I wish all apps had
that feature.

~~~
ljuti
Glad to hear you liked it, especially the demo account. We wanted to try
making the discovery part very easy with it.

------
kmfrk
I really dig the simplicity of it. It's the first time I managed to fully
understand a presumably minimalistic project management service in under a
minute. I feel comfortable sharing this with friends and fellow students
without fearing that I have to explain everything.

I would love to be able to embed images and code, though. A service like
present.ly stands out better in this regard. At the moment, I don't know how
well I would use it in a CS study group without at least a <code> tag.

~~~
akonan
Embedding and especially code formatting are excellent ideas! Thanks for
pointing those out! I'll push them forward myself

------
dabeeeenster
This is great - we've been looking for a scheduling app to replace an Excel
sheet that we've been using, and this is close to what I had in my head.

One thing we'd happily pay for would be the ability to have finer grained
resourcing. So instead of just saying who is working on what project, say
precisely when they are working on it.

The goal would be for every person in my team to look at this in the morning
to see what they need to work on that day or week.

Is this something you had planned?

Great start for 2 days work though!

~~~
akonan
Thanks for the feedback! I'm not sure how fine grained it'll be, but I promise
we'll think hard how to do resourcing "properly".

------
russell_h
Nice! It seems easy enough to use and the design is downright gorgeous.

What are your plans for this? I could definitely see myself paying for this.

~~~
ljuti
Thanks for the compliments!

Due to the excellent feedback we've received, we are planning on
commercializing this soon.

~~~
swah
So, can you teach us something about the design process? I too found it very
pleasing.

~~~
ljuti
Our designer @karrisaarinen gave a lecture about web app design just last week
and his slides of that talk are up at
[http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-
ap...](http://www.slideshare.net/karrisaarinen/just-design-it-an-approach-to-
web-app-design)

~~~
swah
This was very helpful, thanks a lot!

------
k33l0r
Full disclosure: I was on the team who built this.

I really love how this turned out.

~~~
pacomerh
Man, i'm already using it. I love the simplicity

~~~
k33l0r
Glad to hear it!

------
ianbishop
Textmate 2 joke was a nice touch : )

~~~
akonan
Great to hear you liked it! :)

------
zaidf
Incredible for a freelancer like me!

I just hope all this positive feedback doesn't result in crazy-ass pricing :)

~~~
mathiasx
I'm liking it a lot, as well. We'll see if my other team members want to use
it tomorrow at the office. We actually use an intranet tool that we build for
clients for project management at work, but I'm not convinced that it manages
a software development project well.

~~~
ljuti
Great to hear you like it! We'd love to hear your team's thoughts on the
application.

------
tansey
Seems cool. I like the dashboard design. Mind telling us what technology stack
you chose to use?

~~~
k33l0r
It's a pretty basic Rails stack. We did for this year's Rails Rumble, so we've
listed all the gems and libraries on our team page:
[http://r10.railsrumble.com/teams/kiskonians-dancing-in-
lab-c...](http://r10.railsrumble.com/teams/kiskonians-dancing-in-lab-coats)

------
maguay
Looks very beautiful. Almost like Yammer that's centered around projects only.
Do you plan to add more features, or just want it to be a project status
updater? For what it's worth, I find many project management tools confusing;
always seems like they take too many steps to just get your tasks in there and
updated. Still, at least a to-do list under each project would be useful.

What are your pricing plans? An installable, roll-your-own-server option would
be cool...

~~~
akonan
Thanks for the kind words! We do have some plans, but we really need to gather
feedback and then decide what's the roadmap.

Firewall version has been planned, but we had no time to think about the
pricing yet. I'm sure we need some sleep before that :)

~~~
maguay
I'm sure! :) Still, amazing work for 48 hours. How large was your team?

~~~
jcxplorer
It was developed by a team of 4. Happy to know you like it!

------
nagrom
Lovely app - very pretty. As someone who writes only mathematical code, I
cannot imagine the effort I would have to put in to get something so shiny!

I started with a few projects and I have a couple of feature requests: show
the latest status update in the project dashboard and maybe consider an RSS
feed for each project?

I also couldn't figure out what the little person silhouette at the bottom of
each project in the dashboard was for?

~~~
akonan
Thank you!

We've have thought about RSS feeds, but we pretty much run out of time with
that :)

Little person silhouette is just a marker. We'll have person filters for
projects at some point. Also if you see "-" next to the silhouette there are
no people in the project (you can add them by opening the project and clicking
"Edit").

~~~
nagrom
Using ff 3.6.10 on a mac, I always get the (-) marker next to the silhouette
without any names associated there. However, there are people attached to the
project when I click on the project itself...that's why I was confused - I
expected to see the people, but didn't!

I guess that'll get ironed out in testing.

------
jasongullickson
Beautiful app.

It would be cool if you could assign an arbitrary numeric value to a "post"
and display a running total. For example, set the value of a post to 4 and ask
the team members to check in twice a day.

This gives you a rough idea of the time spent so far (and perhaps time
remaining) without any additional effort on the part of the team and lets you
dial-in the granularity on the human side of things.

~~~
akonan
That's an interesting idea! We'll think about it! Thank you!

------
AlexBlom
Everybody else has given the feedback I would. But I can't help but re-give
the praise, amazing achievement for 48 hours.

~~~
ljuti
Thank you! We're humbled by the very positive response.

------
cak
Great looking app. I'm having trouble adding users to a project after it has
been created, using chrome 6.0. Later, it would also be useful to add users
without an account via email invites from within a project to people that
don't have an account yet.

~~~
akonan
Thank you for your feedback! I'm running Chrome 6.0 too and adding users seems
to work for me. I'll try to investigate this!

------
thibaut_barrere
I assume I missed something obvious: how can I add a task and an estimate
duration ?

Or isn't it possible ?

~~~
akonan
We don't have tasks at the moment :(

~~~
thibaut_barrere
No worries - I'm just asking :)

So does the app allow to share status between people working on a project and
see a timeline of projects ?

~~~
akonan
Yes and also some details about the project. We also have Github integration
so you can see recent commits.

------
theboos
"And it uses dark colors."

Much prefer white on black to vice versa. Great design and very usable!

~~~
ljuti
Thanks for your feedback! Glad you like the dark theme.

------
nailer
Great work! Only thing is I'd have something on the top left to go back to the
front page. It took me a little while to find the home icon on the top right.

Is the gantt chart from a UI library, or created from scratch?

~~~
akonan
Thanks! It's true that the dropdown menu is not really optimal at the moment.
We'll work on that!

The timeline was created from scratch since there wasn't any solution out
there that was good enough for us.

------
mhansen
I can't sign up from the 'try the demo' link. I tried changing my demo
account, but it wouldn't let me (the existing password was blank, it
complained).

After a while I figured out I needed to logout and sign up again.

~~~
akonan
Sorry about that. We didn't have enough time to polish the demo -> real
account switch.

~~~
mhansen
Cheers! Just a heads up :)

------
esonica
Just testing it out on Android, everything I tried seemed to work perfectly.
Great design and CSS work :)

Perhaps some sorting & filtering options on the dashboard? An 'overdue,
current and complete tabs?

~~~
akonan
Thank you for your comments and feedback! We're glad that it works on Android
too :) Didn't really have time to test it on it.

Yes there needs to be some kind of sorting/filtering if you many projects.

------
kevintwohy
Really great job for a weekend project - visual design is very slick. Look
forward to seeing it a bit more feature-complete. Would love to use something
like this with my team.

~~~
k33l0r
Great to hear that you like it. We certainly have plans to add some features
to it, especially better integration with more external services (bug
trackers, etc.)

------
mattdawson
Is there a way to "complete" a project? Am I missing something?

~~~
k33l0r
Currently no, in the future we'll probably add the "completed" state, or
something similar...

~~~
nischalshetty
Which is what I love about smart development. People worry so much about
features, scalability et al that they end up never building anything!

------
mathiasx
I immediately converted the Why the Lucky Stiff chunky bacon melody to your
app's name after seeing that it was part of the Rails Rumble.

------
twod
This a pretty awesome project for 48 hours! And reading through the comments,
I love that you're replying to so many. Keep it up :)

~~~
jcxplorer
I've been up for about 24 hours now, and even though I was exhausted from all
the coding, I'm feeling great now!

------
nnash
Saw this on Forrst earlier today and I'm still loving it. Great to see your
project is getting so much attention. It deserves it.

~~~
akonan
Thanks! We're really glad you like it! :)

------
jadedoto
Nice, but still not as feature rich as <http://www.timetableapp.com/>

~~~
akonan
Thanks for the feedback! Will take a closer look, but it seems to solve a
different problem.

------
Raisin
This is perfect. With my team of 3 there couldn't be an easier way to do this.
Thanks for this. Also killer design.

~~~
ljuti
Thanks! We have small teams ourselves and we created this based on what we
need. Great to hear that it'll be useful for others, too.

------
nischalshetty
Splendid Bacon in simple words is "Splendid". Keep up the good work and make
it awesomer! Totally loving it!

~~~
akonan
Thanks! :D Also bacon is splendid!

------
sfaruque
Played around with it for a bit. Are you considering any to do list functions?

~~~
ljuti
Maybe not right now. Lot of people, us included, want manage their todos in
Things or similar todo app.

However, we need to think this through.

------
daystar
nice application. however, i did not get a 'welcome to splendidbacon' email.

As trivial as it might be, i think the welcome email does what 'thanks for
coming' does in offline stores

~~~
akonan
Good point! We'll add that when the Rails Rumble lockout is over! Thanks!

------
chrisbroadfoot
Amazing, for something built in 48 hours. Very slick!

~~~
akonan
Thanks!! We're glad you liked it!

------
9ec4c12949a4f3
I cannot easily find a portal on your website to submit feedback and support
tickets.

You may wish to add a CSV export feature for me, and some nice metrics/graphic
reporting in other charts.

Besides that, I'm switching to this from toggl.com right now.

~~~
akonan
Thanks for your feedback! We can be contacted at contact@splendidbacon.com

