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Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

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251–260 of 292 posts

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#251
post #104

It definitely has all the trappings of a Fog Creek app: - The overall UI: built by programmers who dabble in design - A seven(!) minute video about how _simple_ it is to use. It's easy! Instead of just raising your hand, you mark a light on the corresponding tote board, which informs your manager that you need more information. I hate to be contrarian, but there are many other apps out there that solve this problem m…

OK, but can you give us some specific improvements you'd make? Or parts of the design that you'd change?

Where is the delete/remove button?

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#253
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what framework(s) on the node side?

Express, Async, Mongoose, Redis, Socket.io, CoffeeScript, Less, and Underscore, off the top of my head. We also use Node Inspector during development; that's a great little tool.

I am a bit curious about it's performance characteristics (e.g. number of node.js instances launched, method of load balancing, etc). Do you experience any problems with GC?

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, I realize now this could be read sarcastically. I didn't meant it that way at all. I know from the blog post it took 9 months, but I'm also curious the composition of the team that built it.

There were two full-time devs, two designer-devs (they write code, for example the iPhone app, but also spent lot of time on UI, usability, and design), and two interns for 12 weeks over the summer.

thanks!

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#255
Joel - if you're still reading this thread (it's getting long) - I've been looking for a tool like this for a long time, but the lynchpin for me is the ability to track work hours so I can bill against it. I constantly run into tools that either let me track time or projects but rarely both in a way that works. This web app works well, but without time management, I'm forced to track the very same projects in another system for the sole purpose of billing. Oh what can we do here? At the very least, is there an API where we can add time tracking and billing to this?

I hope you'll see this comment!

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#256
post #66

Joel, serious question, if you're listening. In the blog post, you mention that these teams are adopting the Lean Startup philosophy of ship early and ship often. Does that mean that you've softened on the "never ever write any code without a spec" dogma from "the Joel Test"? I've personally found that when you're doing tight iterations and continuous deployment, writing old-school spec documents feels, well, old-sch…

It's more complicated than that, and it's hard to answer here. Basically -- if you're building something big and complicated and you should know exactly how it's going to work, a big written spec really helps. If you're building something brand new, a startup, or a crazy idea that you need to test quickly and iterate, you should use lots of little specs. It's ok if the specs aren't so fancy... a detailed map of what…

This actually sounds more like lean startup than unlike it. Yes lean startup encourages getting to testing your ideas quickly, but it also focuses on reducing process waste. If you have a mature product and enough data points suggesting major new feature, I think it'd be a waste to try and recollect those data points or build half of the features just for the sake of being lean even if in the past you have been mostly spot on with taking customer feedback and releasing successful major features based on them.

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#257

This looks really cool. I'm excited to try it out, individually and with others. Even better that you can immediately sign up and give it a try. As opposed to Asana, which has similar intentions, but is doing a private beta with larger companies only. Yes, Trello is much easier to get excited about. EDIT Some feedback: so far I really like it. It's intuitive. And it has some nice features out of the box that are lack…

The first thing I looked for when I picked up a card was a "recycle bin". Also, I cannot delete an organization I created.

I realize this is developing, but I would like to request some buttons for important actions. Some choices are not accessible enough, and thus require too many clicks to perform.

It would be nice to simply minimize the board and see a list of other boards I can open. For more complicated projects, as the user above noted, minimizing lists would be a helpful feature.

I would also like to be able to edit a card's text from the main screen without having to open it up and then click on the title again (e.g. to correct a mistake).

Thank you!

Re: Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together

#260
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do the colored squares over my avatar mean?

It indicates your online status. Green: Online and active, Yellow: Online, but inactive, Grey: Not online When someone is online it means that they're connected to Trello, but they're not necessarily looking at the same board as you.

Thanks for explaining that. I would have expected mouseover text for those like there is for the blue square.
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