![]() ![]() We all heard about node.js but have not seen a lot of live projects using it. Trello is running on node.js, which sparked my interest. This is great for most web applications, and time will come desktop applications will support opening JSON as a formatted file. Beyont printing, which I do not find very useful, there is JSON Export. This was important to me, because if I use a hosted service a lot, I never really trust them not to go offline tomorrow or simply lose your data in a server crash. There are not many export options, but they are there. One can look at the official marketing video, which shows a nice usecase of the tool (but also a lof of marketing babble) or other people showing how they use it. There are some Videos on Youtube that show Trello in action. A lot of other stuff like assigning users, uploading attachments are drag and drop which makes for a quite intuitive usability. Still with color coding and the recent addition of being able to show attached images in the card, there are quite some ways you can improve scannability. To keep the advantage of better scanning, I usually do not add too many lists and cards. When you have too many lists, a horizontal scroll-bar appears. This way you can quickly reorder stuff and do a clean-up in solved issues. What is really cool and quite unique is that you can move cards between lists by drag-and-drop. If you wanna get rid of a card generally you archive it (equivalent to closing issues) so you can re-activate it later instead of deleting a card. This is similar to issue states and can be used like that. You can give names to the colors and assign multiple colors. ![]() You can add colored labels to each card which makes scanning them much easier (say you use red for urgent bugs, green for fixed). A board is the biggest unit and lends itself well for a project or sub-project. You put all this into boards, of which you can create as many as you want. You can add checklists to cards, rate them and more. The cards themselves currently have quite some restrictions in formatting them, but offer everything that is important: You can add comments, upload attachments, assign cards to users (yes, it is a multi-user-system), schedule due dates, there are email notifications. You create cards, which behave pretty much like issues or single entries in other systems. Instead of just using vertical lists, it presents rows (lists) and items (cards). The main differentiator to me is that it makes consistent use of a grid structure. Well, it is a project management tool, which is little surpising after the introduction. Recently, I use it more and more and consider it an alternative even to Redmine for smaller projects and projects that just involve myself, though my shopping list I still run on Evernote. I tried it, did not use it much, and came back to it. So to make an impression on users beyond those that stumble upon your product and just stick with it, a project management tool / task list has to differentiate. It makes you feel like in a really big supermarket where they got 325 sorts of sausage: one feels overwhelmed and gives up. Digging through the sheer volume of new stuff has become quite a task. Wunderlist, Evernote, Catch, Producteev, Redmine, Basecamp, Unfuddle. Or least it feels like that at the moment. Project management tools, services, tasklists and everything in between pop up a dozen a week. ![]()
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