
How Trello is different - joshuacc
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html
======
king_magic
Trello is one of those products I've come to love with an almost insane
passion. You'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It has become
indispensable for me.

Personally, I'd happily pay for it. I find it incredible easy to use and super
user-friendly.

Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning.
She claims it makes no sense :) - so I'm not entirely sure it's ready for all
walks of life, at least not quite yet. I can't even convince her to let me
show her around it. Oh well :)

 __edit: __wow, seriously? downvotes? That's pretty harsh for a thoughtful
comment about a useful piece of software that has helped me professionally and
personally. Pretty lame, if you ask me.

~~~
dylanmcd
I agree with being at the point where I'd happily pay for it (I'd actually pay
for a mobile and faster desktop version that sync, as it's a bit sluggish on
my netbook). What Joel said about it being a list of lists (a very simple
idea), is what I like so much about it. Currently I'm using it for standard
simple use cases (keeping track of stuff I need to do), non-standard use cases
(tracking my weightlifting progress, between each set), and collaboration (my
landlord and I keep a list of things to do). Oddly enough, I don't use it for
software at all (what I investigated it for in the first place).

I introduced my (non-technical) girlfriend to it, and after a short
explanation of how I used it, she took to it immediately, and uses it daily to
keep track of her to-do list.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Can I ask, was your girlfriend already an organized person?

~~~
dylanmcd
Nope, but she's trying to be one. She's like me, organization is something we
both don't do naturally, but are trying to improve at.

------
DanielBMarkham
I picked up Trello a month ago, swombat recommended it to me, and I'm already
a huge fan. Just keep it simple, Joel. The horizontal and simple part of this
app -- along with it being totally web-based -- is what's made me a fan. I can
use it on my own, with my clients, with the family, etc. This is the app I
wanted to write two years ago but never got the magic to work. Kudos!

I just did that e-book on Scrum (shameless plug:
<http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/scrummaster/18803035>), and I used Trello
for all the task tracking. In fact, I plugged it in the book as the best
online Agile/Scrum tool I've seen so far, even providing instructions on how
to use it working remotely with Scrum or Agile. I'm using it to prioritize
vacation spots for our family this year, my vitamin list, some tasks I'm
farming out offshore, and another book project. I also have another website
idea that I'm getting ready to load up.

Things I'd like to see? 1) Linked boards. Have the same column appear as the
end of one board and the beginning of another. This could allow you to have
several boards with different audiences but they would all work together. 2)
downloadable data. I know you guys say you want to do this, but closed data is
a deal-killer for me. 3) Make it work on my iPad. Seriously. Being able to
update using finger gestures on a extremely portable device would be sweet.

If you guys haven't tried it, you should. I am not a big fan of online Agile-
like tools, but this rocks. Just a simple list of stuff and customizable
columns to move the items around. I think the Fog Creek guys are really on to
something here.

~~~
alabut
No offense, but your comment is a perfect example of how listening to customer
feedback is more of an art than science. You ask Joel to keep the product
simple in the first paragraph and then ask for some non-trivial features in
the third. I'm having trouble visualizing both the linked boards idea and what
problem it really solves.

The problem with simple products is that everyone has a different idea of what
simple means and think their core feature set is what everyone else would want
as well.

~~~
tosh
Further, if you have a horizontal product it gets even harder to decide what
to add and what to change or to make a certain persona really happy.

------
joebadmo
Joel talking about what people used Excel for seems very similar to Clay
Christensen's concept of hiring products for specific jobs.[0] I wonder if
this was a conscious thing on Joel's part or it's a case of convergent
evolution.

[0]: <http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html> [edit: here's a fanastic,
transcendent presentation by Christensen:
[http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e0...](http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595)]

~~~
josh33
That was transcendent. That's going in my bookmark bar as something I watch
regularly. Thanks!

------
tosh
As a user of trello I fear 'being a general purpose data structure for
everyone' is the wrong direction to go :(

# Target Audience?

When you look at who is using trello right now you will find mostly agile
teams, startups, freelancers, engineers, designers who do software
development.

IIRC this is also the reason it originally got built. The team wanted to
scratch their own itch and I think they did a good job.

I like trello a lot. I dig Joel and joelonsoftware and am curious what the
future holds. I hope it won't end up as a misunderstood tool by trying to be
everything to everyone.

# Niche vs Horizontal

If you are interested in the trade offs related to going niche vs going
horizontal I think 'Crossing the Chasm' and 'Inside the Tornado' are great
books to read.

# Disclaimer

I'm working on <https://www.blossom.io> which has a feature set similar to
trello but is aimed at people who deeply care about product development.

~~~
vlokshin
Just dropped my email. Love what you're doing so far.

1) Who did your design for the public page / sign-on process? </br> 2) What's
your long term goal with the product itself compared to where it stands now?

~~~
tosh
We did it ourselves but we should improve the onboarding process - e.g. we are
generating temporary passwords at the moment which will be replaced with
traditional activation links in the next iterations.

Long term vision of the product: be the best team coordination solution for
product development.

Since I used the word 'best', here's the context:

* cross functional teams

* lean/agile methodology

* care about what they create

* care about their customer

* care about UX

Long term vision for us ourselves (company): serve the above as good as we can
by providing tools that help people to focus on delivering value and getting
great products out of the door :) which btw is really really exciting

------
arctangent
I've been itching to introduce Trello at work but this sentence made my heart
sink:

> It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an "installed software" version of
> Trello.

We already use the installed version of FogBugz at work and I had hoped that
Trello might some day be provided in this form too. Ideally, we'd have wanted
FogBugz and Trello to work together in some way.

Unfortunately, using a hosted version of Trello is not an option due to
insurmountable problems with the procurement and information governance
processes within my company.

~~~
chrislomax
I'll be honest, if our customers were not as stubborn as they are about
hosting their own software then I would never do anything else but host it
myself either!

We host a lot of sites on our custom CMS and it makes life so much easier to
role bug fixes and db updates when there is only 1 code base to update. Also
you don't have issues where people are on older version and need to update
through versions

We try push all our customers into this model with those exact reasons.

~~~
maaku
It's a dangerous road when you value your own operations over customer needs.
I'd say invest in the infrastructure needed to one-click deploy outside your
data center as well.

~~~
chrislomax
This may be a solution further down the road but our code at the minute
changes literally daily and it would be counter productive to have to test
every deployment against previous versions

We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our
product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards
a version 1, if you will.

We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take
to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh
the benefits.

Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues
as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would
need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug
fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can
deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if
they have everything needed installed etc etc.

Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge
a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and
functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the
customer.

We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on
their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we
needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the
customer more.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
So there's a lot of extra work to do for self hosting customers. But isn't the
question really whether your customers are ready to pay for that extra work?

~~~
arctangent
I can attest that we are.

In the specific case of my current employer I can say that we have enough
budget to pay a few dollars per seat per day without blinking, and we'd choose
this option even if a hosted Trello option was ten times cheaper.

There are two main constraints that need to be taken into account where I work
when it comes to buying things:

Firstly, variable pricing models are a no-go. We'll happily pay well over the
odds to secure abundant capacity but we need to know in advance with absolute
certainty exactly how much it will cost for a full year of service.

Secondly, we deal with potentially sensitive information that could be
damaging to our organisation and our government if it were in any way
compromised. Because of this we need to retain control of the data we'd store
in any kind of issue tracking or collaboration system.

Trello is clearly a great tool and I hope Joel et al do well with it. It's a
great tool for agile teams to use, and I can only blame the bureaucracy of my
organisation for preventing my small team's ability to use it.

~~~
ams6110
I tried to pitch Trello to a company I know that I think could have really
made good use of it, but their objection was the same, uncomfortable with not
having their development tasking and customer issues stored "in house."

------
gruseom
_Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a
table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc._

Joel is exaggerating for effect. Yes, many spreadsheets are static lists. But
how far would a spreadsheet product get without formulas? As soon as you
wanted to add prices to your grocery list, you'd be stuck.

His critique of Improv is interesting. (Steve Jobs adored Improv for years
btw.) He's saying that by imposing more structure on the free-form grid,
Improv lost the ad hoc users.

The free-form grid is the most important thing about spreadsheets. But
interactivity (formulas/recalc) is part of that, even when you're not using
it.

~~~
tptacek
I thought the same thing as I read this. I understand the point Spolsky was
making and wouldn't want to argue with it, but my dad used Excel formulas,
every salesperson I've ever worked with used basic formulas, the marketing
teams I worked with made basic formulas...

Also, surely one of the reasons so many people used it to make lists was that
it was the tool Office shipped with that _had_ gridlines (Word has them too,
but they're clunky). If you bundle a spreadsheet along with the world's most
popular word processor, it's no wonder it gets used for pedestrian tasks in
addition to the ones Bricklin thought about.

This is a point Spolsky danced around in a much earlier blog post: 80% of
users want just 20% of the features of a program, but they're not the same
20%.

------
mythz
Trello is awesome, it's one of the few products that we use at work, but
doesn't feel like work to use :)

I'm not a process guy, because I usually can't justify the time it takes to
'maintain the process' except with trello since it's effortless to use, it's
almost always a win to jot thoughts down whenever something remember-worthy
appears in your head :)

~~~
watty
Thanks for the info - can someone please explain why these comments are being
downvoted? Is it because they could be fake or that people just dislike Joel's
company?

~~~
king_magic
I have no idea. My comment is being downvoted. I just really like Trello. Look
at my comment history on HN - I'm definitely not faking.

~~~
gbog
Saying you like it adds close to nothing to the discussion.

~~~
fady
he gives his feedback and says that he would pay for it. the article talks
about not charging for trello until you have a large user base. it seems like
good feedback from a user, so i'm not sure that i agree with you.

------
Jach
I tried Trello when it launched, I kind of stopped using it midway through
last semester but I'll probably pick it up again for this coming semester.
I've never been a Planner kind of guy so I'm not really the target market
anyway, but it is a decent minimalist interface that makes the grunt work that
is planning less annoying. I haven't tried collaborating with other people
using it yet.

My main UX complaint is the fact that to do any real planning stuff that makes
it better than a text file requires opening up the Menu of Everything for an
item after creation time. There's a lot of whitespace next to the "Add" and
"X" buttons when creating a new item, something as simple as offering a
shortlist of the most commonly used labels or something would be nice.

~~~
thedufer
When you mouse-over a card, there's a circle with a triangle in it. From there
you can easily add labels, people, or a due date.

------
creativeembassy
I tried Trello a few weeks ago, and although I love its interface, I just
can't find a use for it. I already use Omnifocus for keeping track of lists of
things that I have to get done. I use Google Docs for spreadsheets, and
SimpleNote w/ Notational Velocity for simple text documents. How is everyone
else using Trello?

~~~
r00fus
I used it for an open-ended project/event where soemtimes the tasks became
mini-projects in their own right. That's it's power - you can make a task a
checklist of sub-tasks very easily without "promoting" it or dealing with a
tree interface.

Also the uploads and notes are very easy to absorb and view. Delegation also
looks great... though I haven't had a need to use or see how it integrates
with email.

I used it for trip planning, meeting planning and personal checklists. However
since it's hosted and it's unclear what the data security is like, I don't use
it for work related stuff.

Mostly, it's just very very easy to start using and easy on the eyes. I'm
drawn to finding uses for it, though I keep wanting calendar/scheduling
support (which would make it more of a full-on process/group ware)

------
alanmeaney
There is a race going on at the moment for the collaboration space. The likes
of Asana.com & Do.com are attempting to solve similar problems. The rules look
like this:

\- make your product web based & free \- get users, worry about revenue later
\- keep it horizontal as much as possible

Maybe this is all part of the new long term bottom up strategy for getting
into Enterprises?

Get Enterprise users using your product, get them to bring it in the
Enterprise door and further down the line find a way to monetize.

It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. I see a lot more
innovation to come in this space.

~~~
ahelwer
There is also &!, which was featured on HN a while back:

<https://andbang.com/>

~~~
alanmeaney
They are similar but their pricing will prevent the kind of adoption rates
Trello are looking for - 100 million+

~~~
michokest
There's also <http://teambox.com> with freemium approach. The new beta has a
kanban-style view, too.

------
th0ma5
I think Joel makes great points in this article about horizontal software. If
your product has wide uses, then how do you market it? It will seem generic,
and people will ultimately have to adapt it to what they want to do. This is a
challenge I've had with Edgy, my minimalistic diagram app for Android, is that
experts will see it as an over simplification of a very powerful tool, and
general users will not see the potential of just a little bit of that power.

~~~
fish2000
w/r/t horizontal -- I thought what Mr. Spolsky described was actually vertical
adoption: where you and your putative organization use Trello throughout, from
the execs to the trench programmers to the marketers to some segment of the
public. isn't that vertical?

horizontal use, on the other hand, would be something like FogBugz: pitched to
one or two organizational segments in the company silo and developed in a way
that takes advantage of the knowledge gained by an in-depth understanding of
those few segments.

maybe I just have my axes wrong; i'm not pedantic about it but that's what I
always thought.

maybe I just have my axes

~~~
markkanof
Usually the terms vertical and horizontal are used to refer to use among
different industries, not describing use within a single company. Think of
different industries (healthcare, banking, etc.) each as a silo filled with
many different companies.

A vertical product would target just one silo. It doesn't matter that not
everyone at each company in that silo would use the product, what is important
is that the product is only meant to be used by companies in that silo. An
example would be software to x-rays. This would be used by some people at the
companies in the healthcare silo, but would be of no use to anyone in the
banking silo. The product would be tailored to exactly the task that needs to
be completed.

A horizontal product would target many or all of the silos. The product would
have no specific focus, but would be intended to be generally useful. An
example of this would be Excel. Almost all companies in every silo would have
someone who uses Excel. They may also use it for vastly different purposes
requiring the software to be somewhat generic and the end user to figure out
how to use the software to complete the task at hand.

------
aycangulez
Joel claims that Trello can be used for kanban. This is not true because
Trello doesn't support WIP (Work-In-Progress) limits without which you don't
have kanban.

If you want to know your team's capacity, you have to limit the number of
tasks they work on at the same time. Once you limit WIP, several interesting
things will happen:

* A backlog of tasks will emerge.

* You will be able to measure how much time is spent on each task.

* Tasks will get finished faster.

The first two results are not very surprising because by introducing WIP
limits, you have effectively eliminated multitasking, but how on earth, do
tasks get finished faster?

Unlike computers with multiple processor cores, our brains have one or at best
two cores. Without WIP limits, when there are too many tasks to work on, we
spend more time on switching tasks than the tasks themselves.

Bottlenecks become visible. Since everyone is working on a limited number of
tasks, some finish theirs on time, some get overloaded, and some cannot finish
their work because they need input from those who are overloaded. Team members
with free capacity can help those who are overloaded. Better yet, they can
even come up with ideas on how to fix the newly discovered bottlenecks.

Disclaimer: I am the author of <http://flow.io> , a lean project management
application based on kanban.

~~~
lucisferre
Saying kanban is a task board with WIP limits is a bit like saying Lean
Startup is about releasing buggy first version MVPs. It's cargo culting at
best. Kanban is about keeping focus, creating quality gates, pull vs. push and
so much more than just WIP limits. You can always limit WIP manually. How hard
is it to simply choose to limit the WIP on a board column?

~~~
city41
I disagree. I think WIP really needs to be a built in concept of a kanban app.
The thing about WIP is it points out bottle necks and problems in your process
quickly and concisely. It's pretty common for teams to go over WIP, and do it
willingly, to allow the red flag the system produces to point out to the rest
of the team the problem.

If you have to mentally keep track of WIP, inside each team member's head, you
lose pretty much all of that.

~~~
tomjen3
Rigid rules means you can't adapt to reality. Adapting to reality is necessary
for good software development.

Sometimes you just can't let something else wait until you are done with what
you were doing. Sometimes you were doing something that can't meaningfully
progress until something else has been fixed. Rigid computer enforced rules
like that just mean that people will have to work around them, wasting energy
and producing the wrong things.

~~~
city41
WIP limits shouldn't be rigidly enforced. Instead a warning should show when
you are over WIP, and some stats gathered in the background. If your team goes
over WIP occasionally, it's usually fine. If you go over WIP a lot, your
process is broken somehow. How, when, who and where you went over WIP can give
you a lot of info on where your bottlenecks are and how to improve your
process.

I've been on a Kanban team for the past year now and I can say with confidence
that if our tool didn't track WIP, we would be less effective as a team.

------
pace
How does Trello compare to Pivotal Tracker? Any experiences?

~~~
keeptrying
Pivotal can handle much more data and is much more geared towards to agile. I
like it to handle my tech project management. Its brilliant for that.

I use Trello for "business project management" (marketing copy, emailing
people, customer development todos) and pivotal for "technical project
management".

------
hogu
The biggest take away for me from trello is that a two dimensional view of
data is extremely powerful. Personally, I love outlines even though Joel
thinks they are dead ends for UIs. I think workflowy is awesome and my love of
emacs org mode is why I created my own web version, yata.in(yet another task
application). I think one large drawback of outlines is that you have a linear
view of data, as you scroll up and down, it makes it hard to compare things
that are scattered all over the outline. I think if one can bring the power of
working with outline data vertically, as well as horizonatally, it would be
really effective. I think I know how and I'll post it on hn when I'm done.

------
hanskuder
Just signed up to give it a try, and after entering my email address and
password I was presented with a button _that took me straight to GMail_. Of
course I could have simply switched tabs, but this was an awesome little
detail that made me smile.

------
factorialboy
How Trello is _not_ different - <http://srirangan.net/2012-01-how-trello-is-
not-different>

~~~
andrewem
I read that link, which is apparently by the creator of Review19, on how
similar it is to Trello. One thing from that list really surprised me:
"Review19′s target audience — web, creative and software teams — are often
distributed around the world. Offering an in-browser, video conferencing
option is a critical feature for Review19."

Why does Review19 have to provide the in-browser video conferencing? Why can't
people just use Skype or GMail's video chat? It seems like an enormously
difficult-to-develop, bandwidth-intensive feature that people can already get
elsewhere for free. I'm genuinely curious what critical benefit this
integration provides for the users of Review19.

------
brador
Question: Backup.

What if they decide to shut down some day? You lose everything. Unlikely? yes.
Possible? Also yes.

Offer a backup function, and I'm yours.

~~~
dodger
Soon! So soon! Also, there's a neat project called node-trello that uses the
API, and one of their example scripts backs up all of the boards for an org:
[https://github.com/lmatteis/node-
trello/blob/master/example_...](https://github.com/lmatteis/node-
trello/blob/master/example_backup.js)

------
j45
After 10 years of building and scrapping my own web based project management
tools, I discovered Fogbugz was sufficient for handling detailed information
and dialogue back and forth. I typically do "1 issue/feature per case" and
keep my life really simple that way. The customer indirectly has a complete
record of the entire design/development/signoff process of each feature by
email.

Trello though, I find myself using more and more just for my overall
kanban/burn of what I need to be doing at any oen time -- something I've
struggled to get setup (my own initiative) in Fogbugz. I wish I could pull in
my FogBugz filters but I'm sure others are requesting such things.

Trello is a great shared to-do list, and dare I say maybe even more relevant
to getting things done than Basecamp, for me.

------
j_s
I would recommend linking 'try it' at the end of this; there is no link to the
actual product in the summary at the end of article or the learn more/about
footers!

Is this some type of SEO strategy avoiding too many links being penalized?

------
philipmorg
For me, Trello is a powerful alternative to the linear list. The linear list
has it's place (grocery shopping, planning certain things, etc.) but I love
the visual way that Trello groups lists of things.

When managing a project, having multiple buckets that contain lists, and being
able to quickly scan the buckets is highly effective. With linear lists, I
sometimes forget to check one of my lists, or the list gets stale, and things
fall into the cracks. Because it spreads all my lists out on a single board,
Trello (the HTML version, anyway) helps me avoid this.

I agree that linked boards would be a great enhancement.

------
tripzilch
This looks really nice and I'd be eager to give it a real try for whatever I
can up with ...

If only the UI wasn't so sluggish.

I tried both Opera and Firefox, so I guess it's just the fact that I'm on a
relatively low-powered machine (netbook, 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) but frankly I don't
see it doing much that should be so slow. Now GMail can be similarly sluggish,
but GMail doesn't require me to drag boxes around at 2-3 frames per second.

Even the highlight-on-mouseover effect has a delay before it happens, and
there is _no_ excuse for that since it should not take any time unless you're
doing all sorts of things between mouseover and setting the highlight.
Switching that around would already make the UI _feel_ so much more
responsive: Always indicate responsiveness feedback first before you make the
user wait for _anything_ else.

I can think of some things that might be causing this. Maybe there's zillions
of JS events that are listened for and being triggered even when they don't
effectively do anything in that particular app state.

Partially, it's because at some points the responsiveness feedback vs waiting
for something being done is the wrong way around for providing a snappy UI
feel.

And when I drag a card around, it gets CSS transform rotated, and a rather big
drop shadow. All sorts of other UI elements have subtle shadows and glows and
I bet they're all done in CSS. It definitely looks nice, no argument about
that, but if you're going for a really simple but super-useful tool, you
shouldn't be sacrificing usability for eyecandy.

Especially the card box dropshadow, if you're going to animate it, _don't do
it in CSS_ , use a semi-transparent PNG instead. Yes CSS3 is very nice, but
you do realize that the browser is (inefficiently) recalculating the gaussian
shadow blur every frame?

Maybe the easiest thing would be to have an option in the preferences to
switch off the "special effects" so that everything is just plain CSS boxes
with borders (that can increase in thickness on mouseover, instead of
increasing their box-shadow blur radius ...), that don't need to slightly
rotate when you drag them.

Or maybe you could consider what it means to build a really simple, powerful
web application that is an absolute pleasure to use, and whether that really
requires using the latest CPU-heavy special effects and animating them.

------
Valien
So question for the software devs here. I'm looking for a solution that I can
use to track internal projects with non-technical AE's (advertising world).
Right now we do everything via spreadsheet and email and it's horrendous. I've
looked at JIRA but the cost is a huge factor. For issue tracking we are using
JetBrains YouTrack and it's great but for overall project planning, etc I'm
wondering if Trello might be a fit?

~~~
reinhardt
Take a look at Podio, it does far more than nested lists and scales up or down
to fit your needs.

------
Ygor
"we think it’s much easier to figure out how to extract a small amount of
money out of a large number of users than to extract a large amount of money
out of a small number of users. Once you have 100 million users, it’s easy to
figure out which of those users are getting the most value out of the product
you built"

Hm. This sounds logical, but is it really true?

~~~
jackowayed
I think they're claiming that it's true _for Trello_ , not necessarily
overall. Their other products are a testament to the fact that they're happy
to go the other route (lots of money from few customers) with some products.

But since they think they've found a new form of "Data structure that anyone
can find helpful", they'd rather try to get everyone using it than try to
specialize it for a few verticals that might pay them a lot of money for a
form of it that is optimized for their business.

------
gcv
I use Emacs' org-mode to keep myself organized, and have generally disliked
all other task list applications — they usually lack flexibility or require
unhelpful and distracting self-adjustments to fit their worldview.

Trello feels like web-based org-mode. For simple use, it is almost as
flexible, and it has groups and sharing built in. Nicely done.

------
tamersalama
What is the underlying stack? Is it Ruby/Rails or am I just dreaming?
isitrails.com says it "might be"

~~~
bobbygrace
From the article: "Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets,
CoffeeScript and Node."

------
webwanderings
I started with the assumption that WorkFlowy is a To-Do list, but ended up
using it as my Bookmarks Manager. So Trello seems like a similar concept,
though there appears to be too much to maneuver around. I'd say it won't click
with the average user so easily.

------
earle
I'm still shocked these companies with online productivity tools dont provide
this as a standalone enterprise app -- there's certainly plenty of customers
who would pay for an internally hosted version of this that are unable to use
a cloud based service.

------
dangoor
It sounds like the Trello API is coming along. Has anyone made an Alfred
plugin or command line tool for adding cards? Quick keyboard-based capture of
thoughts is important for keeping focused on what I'm doing.

------
nazar
Offtopic: I like how he ends his post "I’m also the co-founder of Stack
Overflow." I didn't know the guy, and that line made a lot of sense to me.

------
ds206
Has anyone seen Teambox's beta? It looks very similar to Trello's UI. Who was
first though?

~~~
michokest
<http://trello.com> and <http://teambox.com> (beta at
<http://beta.teambox.com>) have a common ancestor:
<http://www.pivotaltracker.com>

That was the first widely adopted kanban tool for developers that I know about

------
pohungc
I'm really interested in seeing how FogCreek monetizes on Trello in the
future.

------
aristus
"The others don’t cost much to support."

BWAHAHHAHHAHHA. Ha. heh. whee! It's a good product but good luck on that part,
Joel. Support costs for massive free products are probably more expensive than
you imagine.

~~~
tomjen3
Facebook is expensive to operate but I am willing to bet that that is because
they host so many pictures (try to dig up the actually numbers -- it is
crazy).

Joel will only host a relatively small amount of text -- which should be a lot
less expensive.

~~~
polymatter
"Support costs" refers to the costs of supporting users, not the cost of
hosting content. This includes the cost of someone replying to the presumably
tens of thousands of emails requesting support and trawling through it
harvesting bug reports, feature requests, giving users fixes, telling users
politely to press the right button if they want it to work etc.

~~~
spolsky
We wouldn't provide that kind of support, nor would be it be expected, for a
free and easy-to-use product.

~~~
blake8086
I think you deeply underestimate the sense of entitlement people get about
products they enter lots of text into.

------
xxqs
this is the first site that I visited and it refuses to support Mozilla 3.6
browser, which is default on my ubuntu 10.10 notebook.

------
igorgue
I'm sorry Joel, but Trello, is still bitch work... I still use pen and paper,
and works great!

~~~
prateekdayal
My biggest issue with Trello has been that if you have two windows open, the
changes don't sync between them. Pivotal tracker does this extremely well
making it a team collaboration tool

~~~
spolsky
If you have two windows open in Trello, the changes _do_ sync between them. If
you're not seeing that it's a bug, but that particular feature has been pretty
solid since day one.

~~~
prateekdayal
I just tried it again and it does sync. Weird because many times it has not
happen before. May be flaky internet?

~~~
dodger
We had a connection bug 3 weeks ago that could have caused changes to not
sync. If you still have any windows that are not syncing, please email
support@trello.com as soon as you can.

------
ThaddeusQuay2
How Trello is different? More like: How Trello is the same.

"You agree that You will not:

(a) upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is
unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory,
vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy (up to, but not
excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information
without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or
racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

(j) intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state,
national or international law, including, but not limited to, regulations
promulgated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any rules of any
national or other securities exchange, including without limitation, the New
York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, and any
regulations having the force of law;

(l) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities,
promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote
any act of cruelty to animals. This may include, without limitation, providing
instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or
incendiary devices."

<https://trello.com/legal>

So, basically, my associates and I can't use Trello to make our plans for
world domination. Back to the index cards, guys.

SERIOUSLY: Content-restrictive ToS, which is now the norm, is killing the
Internet, possibly with even greater efficacy than DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, and their
ilk, combined, because it proactively chills speech. Congratulations on a nice
product, but no matter how nice it is, or how much nicer it becomes, the ToS
makes Trello unusable to me, as well as to many of the people who ignore the
fine print, and who will therefore end up losing their accounts over
trivialities.

"The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That
means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption.
Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found
and eliminated."

------
CubicleNinjas
After using it for a month our entire studio has switched over to Trello as
our main form of data organization. It replaces Basecamp for clients, plots
our marketing calendar, and gives an overview of every deliverable's stage of
completion.

Every single day people say out loud, "I'm so glad for Trello.". It is a
remarkable product that our team is madly in love with.

------
wulczer
Oh my, I can't believe my eyes:

    
    
      Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node.
      But at least they’re having fun. And in today’s tight job market,
      great programmers have a lot of sway on what they’re going to be working on.
    

So is the job market so bad you have to bribe engineers by letting them use
tools they're apparently not proficient or efficient with, just so they'll
come and work for you? I find it so insane it's not even funny anymore.

~~~
hello_moto
I think you'd have to view it from a different angle/point of view.

If the programmers chose some esoteric technology and not take ownership of
the project then yeah, it's bad. But if the programmers decided to stick with
it, live and breathe Node.js and do whatever it takes to fix all bugs
(including fix the internal of Node.js when needed) and work overtime then by
all means, why not?

I personally would not prefer to be in that situation as I have different
priority but I become to accept other people preferred methods given that
others agreed and willing to stick with it 110%.

PS: Beside, the choice wasn't too bad, it's not like they decided to use Lua
or Smalltalk. They're using CoffeeScript/JavaScript (maybe), Node, WebSockets,
Socket.io, etc. There are JavaScript programmers out there.

~~~
wulczer
I guess I'm looking from a startup founder perspective...

If you choose an unknown technology because you have solid reasons to believe
it will bring a substantial advantage to the product, which will offset the
loss in productivity, then sure. If you choose it just so that your team will
be motivated and you willingly take the productivity hit for that, I find it
difficult to understand.

It's not the technology choice, it's the reasons that seem weird to me. It's
probably because of the runway length they have that they can venture into
unknown territory for no reason other than trying things.

I'm reminded of Asana and Lunascript - a fun experiment you can afford when
you have lots of money in the bank, but not something I'd see as practical.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm not sure there is necessarily a productivity hit. The tradeoff is between
a smaller number of better programmers on a new technology stack and a larger
number of worse programmers on some boring old technology stack.

Also, don't forget that these people have to invent the product as well, not
just code it. Their productivity as inventors may be a lot higher on their
preferred platform.

Obviously, it's not the same for every kind of product, but Fog Creek doesn't
make medical devices.

~~~
hello_moto
It is not clear if there are better programmers on a very new cutting edge
technology stack.

I heard there are more works to clean up Rails codebases nowadays.

As of recently, I'm primarily using Java and I can say with confident that
while it is old and boring, there are plenty knowledge sharing out there that
elevates the brain of many developers (even by a small amount). Not to mention
that the libraries have evolved in a much greater pace to support recent best
practices (MVC, DB migration, unit-test, DI, mock, BDD, TDD, you name it, the
Java community have them).

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Maybe so, but it's not like Joel Spolsky chose some arbitrary new technology
and is now desperately looking for good people to use it. It seems to be
literally the other way around.

