
Waffle.io - Lazare
https://waffle.io/
======
holyjaw
I would urge you to take another look at the flow of your landing page. I have
literally no clue what your product does even after reading the infographic at
the top of the page a few times.

\- GitHub users want a way to help out on open source projects

\- waffle.io places a dynamic badge in your GitHub README file for all to see
where they can help

\- Clicking that badge takes anyone to your public waffle.io board where users
can view and edit tasks.

What?

~~~
scrollaway
I strongly dislike everything about waffle.io. I feel bad about it, because
these are good people who more than likely love their product and it's getting
a lot of hate here despite them coming here to respond to feedback... but.

1\. Most people here are confused about what this is for. After understanding
what it's for, I find that it's not even a solution looking for a problem...
it's a _force-fed_ solution to a non-existant problem for most people. This
solves something maybe 1% of us have encountered, but makes the assumption
that everyone on Github would benefit from this.

2\. "waffle.io" seriously? Is this the result of an internal "I need a random
english word that is available on .io" poll, or is there a deeper more
disturbing connotation with the pronounced blue theme on the site? I'm sure
naming your service like this doesn't help the "I have no idea what this is
about" crowd. I can't be the only one tired of those completely meaningless
names... I mean specifically the hyper-generic names of services targeted at
specifically the github/bitbucket crowd. I cannot quite put my finger on it,
but some of these names are trying too hard to be cutesy and random. Maybe I'm
seeing something that's not there though.

~~~
arethuza
I think that's being rather harsh - to me it's trying to link a Trello style
community/team tool on top of Github. And as someone who has tried to get a
largish team, including non developers, to collaborate using existing Github
features this might well be a good idea.

Also the name - very few domain names seem to have much connection with the
domain anymore, picking on this crowd for having a weird domain name hardly
seems fair when _everyone_ pretty much has weird domain names these days
(unless they have boat loads of cash).

Edit: If anyone from waffle.io is here, first of all well done - looks like an
interesting tool, secondly I'm not sure your "Why don't you open source your
workflow?" is doing your product justice - I was _slightly_ confused when
trying to understand that first diagram, but maybe that's just me. When I
scrolled further down the page and saw the example it all seemed clear - but
not everyone might scroll down.

~~~
ashumz
Thanks. :) I posted this below, but in case you missed it, we agree. We have a
new landing page getting ready to launch. Here's a preview of what we're
working towards:

[http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ](http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ)

~~~
rickhanlonii
We love Github Issues at our company, but it's missing one thing we really
need: metrics. We need to track when a milestone was started, who completed
how many issues in a milestone, what was the issue estimated at and what was
to actual time to complete. We need data on what there is to be done and what
will be done.

That being said, I don't think this is a feature set _for_ Github issues. This
is not an open source concern; it's a business concern and I don't think
business should drive Github.

So a third party integration is perfect for this. Is this something on the
roadmap of waffle.io?

~~~
ashumz
Yep. We're definitely looking at adding more planning functionality and
metrics around milestones in the near future.

------
misframer
I like how they set the price:

    
    
      $(function() {
        var price = localStorage.getItem('price');
        if(!price) {
          price = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 3);
          localStorage.setItem('price', price);
        }
        $('#price').html(price);
      });

~~~
paukiatwee
This is interesting. Any one know what is the reason to use "random" pricing?
Especially only diff 1-2 dollars.

~~~
chadkruse
Waffle user here...they're just doing some market/price testing. They don't
actually charge a fee yet.

------
benwerd
I get this. Yes, you could use the GitHub issues board; no problem. But the
issues there are not inviting, and it's non-obvious to newcomers if they
should pick up a task.

Here you're inviting people - literally, "please, come help us with this" \-
and making it super-clear that they should jump in. I think there's more to do
to make open source projects friendly (better, happier documentation, for a
start), but I don't think this is a bad addition at all.

Also, waffles are tasty.

------
simonsarris
This is wonderful.

The main page doesn't mention the term, but the easiest way to describe this
is that it is adding a Kanban board to Github.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board)

The simplicity to effectiveness ratio of Kanban boards really impress me.

~~~
matthewarkin
Huboard [http://huboard.com](http://huboard.com) is the Kanban board my
employer uses for github and its pretty nice. It'll autoupdate if any team
member changes the board.

~~~
davej
There's also TaskTub: [http://www.tasktub.com/](http://www.tasktub.com/)

------
geuis
Come on people. I'm so tired of most of my comments being reminders to check
your UX!

[http://imgur.com/82DqYXl](http://imgur.com/82DqYXl)

I'll short out most, if not all, of your responses here.

I'm on mobile. I don't care if you designed for the desktop web or not, most
visitors will be mobile web. Just test it. And for Cthulu's sake rotate your
phone 90 degrees to make sure it works.

~~~
greggman
Or use the iOS Simulator if you're on Mac. It's simple, it launches in
seconds, you can point it to localhost on your machine if you're serving
locally for testing, and you can check old versions of the OS with older
versions of Safari (like 7.0 where you couldn't minimize the UI).

In their defense users who actually want to contribute will likely be on
desktop but I get your point. You're reading HN on mobile and want to be able
to see the site.

~~~
chrismorgan
Start by just using basic viewport size testing, resizing your browser or
using a tool like Firefox’s responsive design mode (Ctrl+Shift+M, not sure
about the shortcut on Mac OS X).

~~~
zo1
Nice, I never knew about that feature, thanks! Just tried it out on some of my
work, and it's a breeze to use. However, seems that scrollbars behave slightly
differently in it. In my case they aren't appearing in certain sub-containers.
Have you had any such issues with it?

------
pvnick
I like the idea, it seems really helpful, but just as a warning if you call
your site Waffle and blue is the prominent color, especially on the logo,
you're going to cause people to make connections that shouldn't be made...

~~~
BryanB55
If its any consolation for the OP I have absolutely no idea what this is
referring to and haven't made any connections even after reading this and
trying to... blue waffles?

~~~
pvnick
Sorry, I should have included more information:
[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blue-
waffle](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blue-waffle)

I recommend against just googling it. It's used as one of those "gotcha"
images for unsuspecting internet users.

------
TheBiv
I tried to view on mobile and the page is unreadable. OP, if you are the
creator of the site, please consider having some sort of mobile optimized
page! (Even if it is just an info page)

~~~
prawn
Even a site that I could read on mobile would be good. Resizing doesn't help
with this one so some text and images can't be viewed.

~~~
giles
Rally Software, the parent behind this product, doesn't even have a mobile
optimized version of their core agile product [1]. It's outrageously
frustrating when I need to update my tasks or add stories on the go.

[1] [http://www.rallydev.com/](http://www.rallydev.com/)

~~~
markmsmith
Experimental mobile support for the core product, ALM:
[https://github.com/RallySoftwareLabs/alm-
mobile](https://github.com/RallySoftwareLabs/alm-mobile)

------
rpedela
I am also confused what this is. I think it is a dashboard of tasks for a
GitHub project. If so, why not just use GitHub issues directly for the task
list?

~~~
michaelmior
I believe the idea is that Waffle makes it easier to prioritize and organize
issues, e.g. GitHub issues + kanban

------
dangoor
We use kanban for the Brackets[1] project, so I've been looking into tools
like this recently. The most promising one I've seen so far is Octokan[2].
What I like about Octokan is that it:

1\. uses GitHub Issue labels to represent the columns (unlike Waffle) 2\.
doesn't require all of our open issues to be "on the board" 3\. is faster than
Huboard 4\. uses horizontal scrolling with fixed width columns like Trello
rather than trying to pack all of the columns into the width of the window
(also in contrast to Huboard)

We currently use Trello for our backlog and kanban[3] but it is kind of
painful to synchronize this with GitHub (and so we don't... there's a lot of
"small item" work that happens only in GitHub and is not tracked through our
kanban flow).

None of the tools I've seen provide us with cycle time and throughput metrics,
which is a drag. We're likely to write a script to pull the data out of GitHub
and calculate those values. (GitHub, alas, does not track when labels are
added or removed... so we have to start there in our custom work.)

I think it's great that there are people building better visualizations on top
of GitHub Issues and I'm looking forward to seeing how tools like Waffle,
Octokan, Huboard, etc. evolve.

[1]: [http://brackets.io](http://brackets.io) [2]:
[http://octokan.com/](http://octokan.com/) [3]:
[https://trello.com/b/LCDud1Nd/brackets](https://trello.com/b/LCDud1Nd/brackets)

------
pessimism
Communicating the progress of a project or feature is something really
important I think open-source people need to realize, when they have a fairly
non-technical audience.

I think GitHub milestones are central to productivity and communicating
progress to a base of interested parties, so I would recommend focusing on
milestones specifically—also to encourage their use—rather than showing one
huge list of issues by default. It’s fairly disorienting, even to me as a
regular GitHub user and contributor.

Those cards take up an awful lot of vertical space, which I don’t think is
going to scale well with a large project. Look at project like Bootstrap:
[https://waffle.io/twbs/bootstrap](https://waffle.io/twbs/bootstrap). Because
you load the issue on scroll, I can’t even get an idea of how many issues
there are from the size of my scroll bar. Milestones are the main way for repo
owners to manage a large number of issues.

From what I could tell, you can sort by milestones using a filter, but for
some reason, the list of milestones wouldn’t load?

A while back, I created a small never-to-be-finished project called
milestones.js to involve a general audience in the progress of upcoming
features—taking advantage of milestones:
[https://github.com/ndarville/milestones.js](https://github.com/ndarville/milestones.js).
At the bottom of the README are some related projects that might be of
interest to you as well.

In other words:

1\. Find out who you want your users to be.

2\. Find out what they should be shown.

3\. Focus on milestones, GitHub’s killer productivity feature.

4\. Fit more issues vertically; the card metaphor isn’t that important.

5\. Know that the dynamic loading of issues on scroll is working against you
from a UX perspective.

------
NateDad
You need to clean up the wording some. When I first read

    
    
      Clicking that badge takes anyone to your public
      waffle.io board where users can view and edit tasks.
    

It sounds like random github users can decide what tasks get worked on.
"Users" is vague here.

Also "opensource your workflow" isn't clear. I had no idea that meant "make
your kanban board public".

Why not "Waffle.io is a public kanban board that deeply integrates with github
issues"? Clear, to the point, no one complains that they can't tell what the
product does.

------
catshirt
the benefit of open sourcing my code is that other people can use it or
contribute to it. why would i ever want to open source my task queue?

if this is a valid use case, how does this really differ from something like
Github issues or a public Trello board?

comparing
[https://waffle.io/waffleio/waffle.io](https://waffle.io/waffleio/waffle.io)
to [https://trello.com/b/nC8QJJoZ/trello-
development](https://trello.com/b/nC8QJJoZ/trello-development) i'm having
trouble differentiating.

~~~
xiaq
As a recent comment suggests it's a "kanban board".

~~~
jmickey
From the Trello wiki page - "Trello uses a paradigm for managing projects
known as kanban"

------
rcruzeiro
I think something good might come out of this and I actually loved the name (I
clicked on this because waffle.io souded cool). What I really think , in terms
of design, is that you should get rid of that 3d rendered waffle.io image with
that shadow. Not only it makes the website look like something of 5+ years ago
but you can also see that the image is heavily compressed and is not looking
good at all.

------
diestl
I have a rule, if I can't understand what your start-up is about from your
home page then it won't work.

------
mikegioia
I think this is a fantastic idea. I've often felt that the Github issues page
is too uninviting for non-developers (and that may be okay for lots of
projects) but it's obvious to me how beneficial it is to provide a kanban
interface for end-users that ties directly to the github issues.

------
thinkersilver
Great idea. Obscure landing page.

It's practically impossible to know what this does,unless you click on the
[our board] link. Even after scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page
where you are asked to part with money.

It would be a shame for such a great idea to be passed by due to lack of
clarity.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Like the old (now left to rot by Atlassian) Bitbucket Cards. This kind of
scrum/kanban board with issues integration is really useful, I'm developing my
version as well.

[1] [http://www.bitbucketcards.com](http://www.bitbucketcards.com)

------
kgreene2
This seems fairly similar to HuBoard. Anyone know of a reason to use this over
that?

------
pekk
Other than taking the nominal appearance of a Kanban board, I can't figure out
what is possible to do with this that isn't possible to do with Github issues,
in a non-vertical format.

------
sejordan
Notice that this app was created by a group of interns at Rally, which is a
larger, publicly traded company. This isn't just someone's side project...

------
erewh0n
My favourite part about their front page is the quote at the bottom:

"A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap." \- Mitch Hedberg

------
reinier_s4g
Awesome!! It remains me the UI of Trello boards which is pretty cool IMHO

