

Trello for iPad is Here - df07
http://blog.trello.com/trello-for-ipad-is-here/

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encoderer
I love Trello, and I their iPhone app is fantastic. My wife and I share a
"Household" board that is indispensable to our life now. It has lists: To Do,
Scheduled, Doing, Done. I swear it actually makes my marriage happier. Way to
go Trello.

One gripe, though, with the iPhone app. A lot of times I'll use my time on the
BART or stuck in traffic to prepare for different tasks. So for example, I had
a card on To Do for a 401k rollover. So on the train one morning I did the
research for it. I added comments to the card with account numbers, phone
numbers, etc, so that way when I had a moment i could make the calls and
everything was in one place. So with all that preamble: Telephone numbers in
comments aren't clickable. They look like they are. They turn underlined blue.
But clicking them doesn't start the Phone app.

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tomrod
How is Trello used, exactly? I've not seen it before.

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orta
Think a broader version of pivotal tracker et al

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manmal
Actually I'd say (and I think Joel, the inventor, said the same thing) that
it's a meta tool which is much more versatile than a bug tracker. It's like
Excel - people are starting to use it in ways nobody has ever imagined it. I
admit that I never imagined it to be used as a household management tool. Of
course, one can do Kanban on it, too. Oh that reminds me I have to check out
their API, I'm quite sure it's going to morph into some kind of authoritative
meta list store.

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natch
Look cool, I think this is going to get me to finally try trello out.

Aside: As a silicon valley person, when viewing videos of people on the east
coast I always feel like I'm watching people in another country. Such an odd,
overly formal look.

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namityadav
Maybe this is a good place to ask this question: We are considering using
Trello for our startup. But we are concerned that when we have a lot of items
in a board or list, then the card representation of tasks will make it harder
to scan them (compared to the lists that Asana uses). Also, traversing through
a lot of tasks in a list is easy in Asana: You just keep pressing the down
arrow in the list, and the right side will keep showing you more details about
each task. How do we do the same thing in Trello?

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mhp
I'm assuming you are thinking of using Trello as a bug tracking app? We
purposefully did not design Trello to be used that way, even though a lot of
people do, so it might fall down when you go that route. It is not a
replacement for a bug tracking application. There are plenty of those out
there (FogBugz, Jira, Pivotal) and there are even kanban type programs like
Trello for software development (AgileZen, LeanKit, Sprintly).

Trello is designed for a high level overview of a project. So if you start to
get too many items on your board, either it's not the right tool for what you
are trying to do, or you need to think more about what you are adding to
Trello. For example, you could use Excel to take notes, or make a todo list,
but it's not the right tool for that. Trello really shines when you are using
it for group collaboration and either focusing on a high level (and leaving
the details to something else) or only focusing on the very top level
important details.

I know a lot of companies that use Trello in tandem with tracking apps.
There's even a nice bookmarklet that integrates with a bunch of them (FogBugz,
Jira, Github, Saleforce) so you can hit one button and turn your case into a
card in Trello. See <https://github.com/danlec/Trello-Bookmarklet> But don't
make the mistake of trying to duplicate what those programs do in Trello.

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emehrkay
Nice I love Trello. Im curious as to what decisions were made while
programming the desktop version that prevents it from bing a simple cross-
platform web app. I know there are custom scrollbars etc, but it has to be
more than that

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stuartmemo
All this development when a great web app already exists makes me sad. This
just seems like development for development's sake. Rather than using that
engineering effort to make one amazing product, complexity is increased, and
bugs are fixed more slowly than if their attention was focussed toward the web
app.

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veidr
Wow, as an end user, I think you are so wrong.

I think multi-platform development is more important than it has ever been.
Since these days the data lives in the cloud anyway, I want to pick up
whichever of my various devices fits the situation and get the absolute best
user experience that the company can design.

Web apps still don't (and still won't in 2023) provide the very best software
user experience on _any_ platform, even the desktop. Certainly not on mobile.

When choosing among competing cloud-based services, I always award bonus
points in my evaluation to services with good iOS and Android native apps.
Even though I don't currently use very many apps on Android, if there is a
native app for it in addition to iOS, I feel more confident that the company
behind the product gets it that users need native interfaces on the platforms
they care about.

I think this is a key reason, perhaps not well-understood, why services like
Evernote, Trello, and others are doing so well.

E.g. my wife uses Evernote all the time on Mac and iPad, but there is no way
she would use the web interface on either one. She just wouldn't use Evernote.

She may not consciously think 'I prefer services with good native apps in
addition to their web interfaces', but she does. (And I suspect so do many
people.)

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foz
Love this app, and it's wonderfully to finally have it on the iPad. I think
they did some really smart things with the UI, for instance, being able to
adjust the space used for comments/description, the navigation at the top of
the card, etc. They really put a lot of thought into it.

However, two things that bothered me as a heavy Trello user:

1) I could not figure out how to move a card from one board to another. Just
does not seem to be possible (yet)?

2) The drop-down in the upper right corner of a card is where I expected the
close button to be, as it is for the web app. I keep tapping it over and over,
expecting the card to close, but instead it shows a drop-down menu with one
option: "archive"! This feels like a big UI mistake to me.

Other than that, a fantastic first release. I can't wait to walk around the
office tomorrow with my iPad, tending to projects, instead of always popping
open my laptop!

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ianthehenry
Developer here. Thanks! Moving cards between boards is coming in a later
release; it's not yet possible. As for closing the card, if you're in
landscape mode you can tap the faded out background -- bit of a larger hit
target. We'll be making it less annoying to close cards in portrait mode soon
too.

~~~
_frog
The iOS convention is to put close / back buttons on the upper left, primarily
since most apps have new screens enter from the right. I guess that trumped
the precedent set on the web.

~~~
foz
I see what you are saying, but the cards as presented don't really reference
the iOS UI. Maybe I'm just too used to the web app.

~~~
_frog
I'd argue they still do, it's just a modal view with a different animation,
thus it makes sense to follow those conventions.

Also in the web app I tend to just click on the background to close a card.

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willy1234x1
Awesome, but when is the Android app updating to accommodate for tablets? I've
seen it in this board (<https://trello.com/board/trello-for-android-
development/>) for a while as a missing feature, but it hasn't seemed to move
forward. Any ETA?

~~~
hamidpalo
Trello Android dev here.

A tablet Android version is planned, but no specific date to announce.

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tomtom101
I think Trello is vastly overrated. We have been using AgileZen
<http://www.agilezen.com/> and find it much more effective. Trello has some
nice features, but I think that the cards get too busy very quickly. It
becomes hard to scan the tasks and details get lost on the back of the card.

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ChuckMcM
Yay, didn't show up on the App store but by going to Safari->Trello->link I
found it.

I'm very much looking forward to a more native implementation of this stuff.
It's a natural use case for the iPad. Now to see if I can attach Notable
documents to my boards ...

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rayiner
It's awesome and Fog Creek is awesome. Just reading this makes me a happy
panda: <http://www.fogcreek.com/about>.

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sktrdie
Nice. From a technical point of view, I wonder, is this written using the same
HTML/CSS/JavaScript code used in the browser, say using something like
PhoneGap? Or did they they rewrite the entire app all-over again for iOS,
Android and Windows Phone?

Seems like a pretty daunting task to keep their site, their iOS, their Android
and their Windows Phone app all in sync with functionality and UI.

Any Trello developers care to share the secret?

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hamidpalo
The iPad app is fully native, just like all our other apps. Hacking together a
WebView app that is the same across platforms would have taken less effort but
the end result would have been mediocre at best.

I think actually that at this point Trello has much more Obj-C, Java and C#
than CoffeeScript.

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kayoone
why dont you use something like Xamarin to build everything in C# ? Is it
because its mostly View specific code that has to be different for every
platform anyway ?

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kingnight
Very excited to see the images on cards being prominently displayed. I hope
that feature is brought back to the iPhone.

There are certain visual projects that I use Trello for on my iPhone that I
wish could to see the attached images for each card. Describing items that are
going through a flow is difficult when they're all the same item but look
different.

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Roedou
I'm playing with this now, and it's enough to make me want an iPad/iPad mini.

However: it seems that when you're offline (eg: away from wifi / on a plane,
etc) the app becomes Read Only. This means no adding to cards, creating new
cards, etc.

Is there a technical limitation which means that changes made offline couldn't
just be sync'ed back later on?

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gecko
If it were single-user, that'd be one thing, but given that the whole shtick
with Trello is that it's collaborative, you find really fast that there are
almost zero real-world situations where you can actually do something sane
when actions diverge. You'd end up building a DVCS into Trello just for cards,
and then having a hilarious conflict-resolution process. That goes pretty
strongly against Trello's KOSS ethic.

(I don't speak for the Trello team, but I remember trying to reason out
whether we could do something similar on FogBugz, and rapidly concluding that
the real answer was "absolutely not.")

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Roedou
Are you telling me that enterprise grade version control, powered by machine
learning about my organization's workflow is out of scope for a small, simple,
free service? ;-)

You're absolutely correct though - yes - this quickly becomes a way bigger
issue than I originally gave it credit for in my HN-esque knee-jerk comment.
I'd still love to be able to leave comments on a card though.

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thedufer
I've always liked the idea of allowing offline commenting (and card adding,
for that matter), but I would be worried that 1) users would be confused why
some things can be written offline, but not others, and 2) since so much of
Trello is about the synchronization, it might be weird to have that kind of
de-sync while the user is offline.

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pla3rhat3r
LOVE Trello! Awesome stuff. Easy, intuitive, stable! Great example of making
something simple in a great way!

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ihaveajob
Trello is beautiful, I'll give you that, but I miss having access to my data
while offline. For that, I prefer Priority Matrix, which is as straightforward
to use, and it allows me to work on a plane and sync when I get online.

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thedufer
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the collaborative aspect means that
allowing offline write access would end in non-trivial merge conflicts. It
might be solvable, but due to the difficulty, it's definitely not a priority.

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pacomerh
This is good news. I've been using Trello for a while now, my main use is to
keep track of my clients/projects/tasks, I really hope it stays free forever
(like they say)

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archon
I just signed up for a trial, and I haven't actually used it yet, but I have
to say, the happy little dog that's everywhere on the web interface is
adorable.

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brc
That is a caricature of Joel Spolsky's dog, Taco. He/She is a Husky I believe.

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jthomp
Glad to see this. I use Trello every day with the company I work for. A great
tool for managing day to day tasks and projects.

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desireco42
I see a lot of constructive criticism here, I want to say that this is exactly
what I needed, how I needed. It works for me.

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mneumegen
Perfect! You guys really nailed this one.

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whoisstan
This promo video makes me instantly uncomfortable.

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pgrote
Why? The music?

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knes
Wow that video production quality is pretty poor.

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mhp
Which part of the quality did you find to be poor? We are a small software
development company without a budget or timeline for hiring a production
company to create our videos. Given the constraints, I thought it was an
awesome video.

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nevster
I think it was fine. Maybe it's because of the music - it's a bit daggy.

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mrgold
I know there's an app for Windows 8 RT, but I hope a Windows Phone 8 app is
being considered.

