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.
Trello is a free-form tool for making lists. The lists can be shared (for reading and writing). You make as many as you want. When this gets unwieldy, you can start a new "board" - a board is a collection of lists.
If you want, you can add notes to any item in a list, and other people can add comments. There are options for watching items, lists, and boards such that you can get alerts when something changes or is added.
It's very flexible. Spolsky has said the original idea traces back to when he was a program manager at Microsoft on Excel, and during customer visits he discovered the vast majority of users simply used Excel to lay out lists -- they didn't care about advanced features like formulae or macros.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I work at a medium sized business and we're having little trouble adopting Trello. It's been about 8 months since we started, and other departments have also adopted it for their own projects. Once introduced, they love it. It's a great way for everybody within the company to have visibility of what others are doing.
We meet regularly with other departments to triage their request queue (list) and move it forward. It's great for them to see the software process and see their request in context with the (many) other requests.
We often break out separate project boards and link to it from a master (planning) board. That really helps break down the larger tasks.
mhp noted that it's not designed for bugs, but we have no problem using it for that, in conjunction with some GitHub issue tracking.
I'm certain a startup would have no issues adopting it into a great workflow.
If you have that many tasks you probably want to use something like Fogbugz. What I like about Trello is it forces you to keep you task lists relatively short (The way I think it should be).
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
When you say desktop version, I am guessing you mean the web version? Trello is a cross-platform web app, so it works if you go to trello.com on your iPhone or iPad. Sometimes people just want a native experience though. Try the iPad app each way and you'll probably see why.
trello.com, a.k.a. the "desktop" version, is device-agnostic so that it will actually work on any just about any laptop, smartphone, or tablet. You're getting the same code on every device, so it's cross platform in that sense. The custom scrollbars on the web are just a webkit thing. See: http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/
That said, we want to create the best experience for your device, and nothing beats the experience of a native app. Try them side-by-side. Each native app is written in its native language (Obj-C, Java, etc.). It's more code, but they just turn out better that way.
I call it desktop version because full functionality seems to only work with a mouse pointer. I do believe that the things that do not work with a pointer could work with touch
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.
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.)
I have been using Trello daily for my own project management tracking. Saving the website as a 'webapp' on the iPad was OK... you could get by.
However many things were buggy - if you had a card with many records scrolling sometimes scrolled the background faded page rather than the card itself.
Entering text into comment fields was OK until you hit backspace, at which point the page scrolled somewhere else and you couldn't see the text anymore.
I love the app. Now I just need the ability to move cards between boards.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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?
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.")
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.
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.
I would assume that it's because conflict resolution is a difficult problem to solve. I think it would take a lot of work to craft an interface that allowed managing conflicts easy, especially for the non-technical members of the team.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.