My biggest beef with Trello is lack of multiple account support. For example if you use it in your home life (as their blog greatly encourages), and also want it for work (as their business model greatly encourages) then you'll want distinct accounts. Without distinct accounts, you get a mixing of the data, permissions, where it is accessed from, notifications, email sent by them, makes board admin harder etc.
While you can try some hacky alternatives in a browser, they are a pain, confusing and a poor workaround. On mobile you are completely screwed, unless you want to log out and log back in each time you want to switch accounts. (You do have a long cryptic passphrase which makes this even worse?)
Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. Why does no one seem to learn? (Yes, Dropbox I am looking at you too.)
> Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right.
I really hope that was a joke on your part. If there is one thing that was irritating it was how google would mix up and connect various accounts at random for no particular reason.
My wording was poor, and Google certainly don't get them perfect. It does fundamentally work though - you can connect multiple users in web and mobile apps and switch between them as you see fit. Sometimes it does select the wrong account for whatever you were trying do (calendar used to do this a lot), but you can usually just switch to the correct account.
My main frustration is services that don't even get close to Google's implementation and user experience for multiple accounts, despite it serving as an example for many years. Like Trello, most seem to not even bother, while others like Dropbox seemed to do the worst combination of things possible.
I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor.
What it considers your primary account is apparently the first one you add, so if the order is wrong, you have to sign out of all of them and start over [1].
But it's not exactly like that. Recently someone added me to a new Google Apps for Work (or whatever it's called this month) account, and now this new account is, mysteriously, the default account, even though I've had a different one for ages.
If you open Google Calendar, it will embed the account number in the URL (https://calendar.google.com/calendar/b/3/render, for example), but this number obviously isn't static. If you have multiple devices and sign in elsewhere, the number might be wrong.
You also get this number as "?authuser=3" in every Google Hangout URL. But that number is yours — when people share a link like this, the recipient typically ends up opening GH for the wrong account. Google Hangouts is notoriously finicky about accounts, and the loading screen will often hang if you happen to be using the wrong one for a particular hangout ID. Sometimes GH shows the (tiny, dark gray) account switching link, sometimes not. (Hangouts is generally a disaster when it comes to actually starting one.)
I have many frustrations with Google's multiple accounts. I use multiple personal accounts, a personal Google Apps, a business Google Apps, and a self-hosted (university) Google Apps.
I've found the best solution is to create bookmarks for GMail and Calendar with the URL like you mentioned, except you can use your email address in place of the number (that is, in stead of/b/3/ you can do /b/user@gmail.com/).
> I would argue that Google's account system is extremely poor.
You are comparing them against what they could have done. Yes, there are pieces of friction. However when compared against services that do nothing at all about multiple accounts, it is a considerable improvement!
Sometimes. I find that ~90% (number from no where, I know..) links between apps usually work correctly. It's really really noticeable though when you open calendar from work gmail and I'm looking at my family calendar. Using the account switcher from that point is really easy, but it's very jarring when it doesn't do what you expect by default.
It has worked nearly flawless for me for at least 5 years (and I don't recall beyond that). I say "nearly," because a few niche products (maybe AdMob dashboards, or Analytics, I forget which) don't work with multiple accounts.
And still does daily. Try having multiple email accounts and trying to use the GoogleDrive Web UI from more than one at once ... not bad for a ~$400+ BN company !
Chrome profiles are the right tool for this. Just have a separate profile for work and for home. This has the added benefit of making it easy to stay logged out of time-wasting sites while at work.
Speaking of time-wasting sites, Google and Slack have managed to get an at least passable support of multiple accounts working.
I understand it's difficult to do, but if you're a service that encourages it's use across work and personal life, you eventually need a way to manage people separating that.
Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation? As apposed to Google's approach of having seperate, distinct accounts and you can 'easily' switch between them.
> Perhaps they can have the concept of you always have a personal account, and you get /invited/ into an organisation?
That sucks, and causes problems. Dropbox tried it. On the organisation side, they now have to remember that user redpuppy925 is actually an org member, rather than by the organisation identity. Then the user interface would have to show their personal and org content at the same time. You really don't want that happening on their home family computer, nor would the user likely appreciate their personal content always being available at work. It ends up far easier putting the wrong items in the wrong place.
As an org admin, it should be very clear who has access to org information. And when they leave it should be very easy to revoke that access. Backups and auditing should only cover org data, not personal content.
Ah, you don't have one of those mobile device thingies that are all the rage then? If you install the Trello app, then you can only have one user logged in at a time.
While people chastise Google's multiple account issues, I would say at least Google has such a thing up to some minimally viable level of quality.
I'd also add to the list of grievances that Trello has yet to have a multi-select / multi-edit feature, something I see has been asked for over 3 years ago.
It took Google years to get multiple accounts sorted out. For a long time I had to sign out of my personal Google account before I could sign in to my company Google account.
Google doesn't get multiple accounts exactly right across app boundaries. For example, the links to view a Google Groups discussion is completely broken when you're in gmail on a non-primary account (it attempts to load the link with your primary account, which won't have access, and switching to your secondary account drops the link to the group).
Dont try to separate your youtube and gmail account, I have created 6 google+ pages overall and I lost all my playlists and watch history for years, but now I can comment on a video on youtube!
I entirely lost access to a YouTube account with videos totalling several million views because I apparently pressed a wrong button during that transition.
I love Trello and use it all the time, but since we're beefing about it, I've got two main issues to share:
1. The search is awful. I won't really elaborate on this except to say it's often really hard to find stuff and if they did some UX research on this I think it could be much improved.
2. I intentionally avoid opening the notifications pane except in certain moments because opening it clears the "read" status of the notifications therein. This is an issue, because I haven't necessarily read or dealt with the notification. Therefore, I only open the notifications pane when I'm in a spot where I can feasibly deal with or record every single important notification that it's going to show me, otherwise, there's the risk that the notification will go unread (in the true, real-life sense) and thus be missed entirely.
All that said, bravo Trello, you're a great product.
My solution for point 2 is to refresh the page (assuming you're in the web version) before closing the notifications pane. It doesn't actually clear them until you close it, so this hackily works around the issue.
Chrome's multiple profile support can be a big help here if you're that determined to separate things. Set up a profile for personal stuff, and one for work stuff, and then you can have both accounts logged in at once.
I find the Google account switcher - whilst not perfect (not being able to change the "Default" account is annoying), better than many other web services.
However, one thing I've found helpful - Chrome's inbuilt account switcher.
You can access this by clicking on the button in the top-right - basically, you can be signed into multiple Google accounts, one per Chrome window - and they will each have their own cookies, tabs etc.
Can't you easily accomplish this using their teams feature? I just set up a team and add the appropriate users with the right permissions for the team's boards.
Lets say I am a personal user, and share some boards with family and friends. Now you want to add me to a team for work. You won't be able to find me using my work email address - instead you'll have to map in whatever random service I use for personal email. Let's hope my personal identity doesn't conflict with work.
Now I am team member and can also access boards. That also means that team boards are exposed whenever and wherever I login, even if I only want to login for personal information. Some family members and friends may know my personal login, so now team information is also accessible to them.
I'll now get notifications for personal and work related activity going to the same browsers and email accounts. Are you sure work's admin really wants work information going to my personal email account? Do I want to get distracted by personal notifications during a work day and vice versa?
Now that my personal and work are intermingled, I am also more likely to make a mistake such as creating new boards/lists/cards in the "wrong" place, and it will be harder to notice. Work can't be sure that they have everything backed up.
Then a year later I leave. Somehow the work admin is going to have to figure out which user I am (remember not related to work conventions and standards), and disentangle me. Providing I have been perfect and never intermingled anything, it will be fine. The odds of that are low.
Essentially the single account has just made everything worse, to the benefit of no-one.
That made me burst out in laughter. It has been longer than a year, and they made a huge mess of it. Essentially you can do a pseudo-merge of exactly one personal account into exactly one business account, that is then the beginning of all sorts of glitches and problems. That includes things like removing that personal user from the business account deleting all their personal content, being unable to separate the folders, logging into either account giving access to the other account, difficulty administering the accounts separately (a colleague had to call them up just to figure out how to update a credit card number and delete a user because he had both paid personal and business account psuedo-merged).
Glad to have made you laugh. I personally have never encountered any of the problems you mentioned. I used to work at a company that used Dropbox for Business and I just remember getting an email that I could connect that account with my personal one. I did connect the two and it worked fine for me. I had a simple use case so I didn't do anything out of the ordinary.
I don't really think it's hacky. For many years I would run 2 browsers side by side. Firefox for personal and Chrome for Business.
It makes a nice separation and you don't need to worry about whether some tool you like to use has fancy multiple account tech. If the big guys like Google and Facebook can't get it right, I think it's unreasonable to expect smaller players to do better.
You never need to think about who your are logged in as or who you are posting as.
What? That is so backwards from my experience that I'm tempted to think it's a troll, or I'm completely missing what you're trying to say.
I have two Trello accounts and have never had a problem switching between them. I have one for work and another for personal stuff, just like you suggest, and it works fantastic. If I'm logged in to one and want to check the other I just log out, enter the credentials for the other account and it works exactly like I would expect. There's no mixing at all, they're completely distinct, which is exactly how I want it, and exactly how it should be, IMO.
Google, on the other hand, is an absolute mess. At this point I've resigned myself to the fact that my work Gmail/Google+/Google/YouTube account and my personal Gmail are inextricably linked together and there's no way I can unlink them. It's such a disaster that it was a big factor in my decision to start moving my personal accounts away from Google.
> ... it works fantastic ... just log out, enter the credentials for the other account ...
So you just have to log out and re-enter credentials each time you want to view a different account? And that is fantastic? Doing it several times a day is a pain. Also you only get notifications for the currently logged in account, so you'd need multiple browsers running just to get notifications from both.
Then if you have a mobile device, it becomes even worse as entering reasonably complex passphrases is a long tedious pain. Doing that several times a day is a non-starter.
I think he is saying that it works for people who are either "at work" or "at home". Once you want to have your work notifactions during your leisure time, it gets complicated.
I wouldn't use Trello if they linked multiple accounts like that. TBH, I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to get work notifications at home or home notifications at work. Ditto for mobile devices. Work notifications go to the work device, home notifications to my personal device, and I don't want them mashed together.
If I'm currently logged into my work GMail account and want to check my personal email, I logout, and it brings me to a login page with my work GMail account displayed, and a password field. Below that is a "Sign in with a different account" link, and if I click it both my personal and work email accounts are shown.
I've also noticed small things like the avatar image I set at work becomes avatar image for my personal account.
Node, Redis, Mongo are all still in use (although Redis pub/sub no longer is). There are a lot more components, though, and some of the front-end libraries listed are no longer true.
Trello: if you'd let me buy you once, install you locally, and save my data locally and in an open format, like Day One, I'd be a lifer. Fantastic program otherwise, though I remain an Org man.
I had a similar concern with Trello. There are a few decent open source self-hosted alternatives. In the end I settled on Kanboard. It has a lot more features than Trello and a decent (although recently launched) plugin ecosystem.
LinkedIn says 54. That's 222k registered users per employee. If they have 10% active users (which I think is generous), then they're looking at 22.2k users per employee.
Basecamp currently has 50 employees on LinkedIn. I'd be interested if anyone has stats for how many users they have.
Business Class-only is a bit frustrating (if it needs to be paid, can it be on Trello Gold too?), but this is really exciting. Would love to see if people start to develop tools for productivity (like Pomodoro and that sort of thing) with it.
I think Trello is going to win the task management wars. It's better designed for mobile (card interfaces), simple to start with additional functionality bundled in, its interface is general purpose rather than specific to developers, and it's building a robust platform. I think this company has executed it very well. Bravo.
One thing that surprises me is that Trello's cards don't behave like cards, whether on iOS or Android. They simply look like cards. You don't swipe them to do anything. You don't multi-select the cards.
They're just card-looking buttons that open up a modal dialogue, and they've been this way since the beginning. I find it rather slow or bulky compared to Google's concept of cards.
It also has a head start over the competitors. This might sound like not a big deal, but it has already some very vocal supporters in the blogosphere who've been recommending it for ages.
The only way it can fuck up is if it goes the Evernote way
I've always wanted to like Trello, but i'm never sure quite how or what to use it for. It doesn't work well for me for project management, since you can't create tasks with due dates or assignees. I'm not sure how folks get around that.
Our vision is that it gives a group of people a shared perspective. It puts you on the same page. That could be your fiancé and your mother-in-law planning your wedding or it could be your HR team trying to structure your employee onboarding process.
It's not a project management tool anymore than it is a bug tracker or a crm or an applicant tracking system. People use Trello for all of those things but at its core, it is just a list of lists.
The power comes from understanding how that metaphor can help provide structure to some process that you have. (Trello comes from "trellis" - a structure to help plants grow).
Check out trello.com/inspiration for some examples. It's a bit like explaining to someone what a spreadsheet is before they have seen one and why they would use one. Once you grok it, it's very powerful.
The way I do it, if a checklist gets heavy enough that I need to start assigning ownership for each item with a due date, that means the checklist needs to be broken out into cards. There's a one click feature for this so it's very quick to accomplish.
I think of Trello these days like an orchard of ideas. I plant a few idea seeds by rapidly sketching out cards, and some will grow checklists as I copy paste bullets from notes etc. As the checklist items grow in complexity, they fall off the tree and are planted, and so on..
If you're a PMP used to Gantt charts and such, I'm sure that system sounds like some hippy dippy BS, but it works very well on a small scale with a small, mixed-discipline team.
Sorry, this was about a year ago when I was researching different options for project management, and I forgot that it was the checklist feature that I was thinking of.
It's more of a to-do list on steroids than a project management tool. I also tried to fit it in my workflow, because I like what they are doing, but ultimately decided it wasn't for me. I think it's okay if it doesn't work for you, not every tool is for everyone. Asana for example takes a different approach to the "to-do list on steroids" idea that may work better for some, but neither approach is better or worse than the other in my opinion, when it comes to services like these what works and what doesn't is a very subjective thing.
The functionality is there. You can label cards with people and set a due date. There are free plugins that allow to set a time estimate on the cards and compute the total for a column.
Still, I don't think I want to use Trello on my projects (I use it in some projects for customers). I can't articulate well the reasons but the general feeling is that if the project is not trivial you start having too many cards and the columns get too long and you start losing stuff. It's not for long living projects, where you need to store information that let you tell who decided what and why two years ago. It's better suited for short bursts of activity and to dispatch tasks to executors. Probably one project manager to assign tasks and developers to report on their accomplishment. It could be a good tool for that.
As an example of what it shouldn't be used for: bug tracking. We are creating cards for bugs on a project but Trello cards are not well suited for that, neither to input bug reports nor for managing them. To be fair, I bet that Trello didn't design for this use case. That someone is using it for this maybe means that it's appreciated beyond its limits.
Why do power-ups inconsistently change the markdown for Github links?
When you don't have power-ups enabled, it will shorten all Github links and add a nicer format to certain types but when you do have the power-ups, it no longer shortens Github links at all but adds the octocat to the beginning.
While having power-ups can be nice, the added inconsistency is a bit off-putting. It would be great to shorten and format all of the links in the same fashion across all boards regardless of whether or not you have power-ups enabled on that particular board.
What is nice about the Trello is that, they have never for once confined themselves to developer community. From the beginning Trello was given as tool to organize yourself, and it still appeals to my wife as it does appeal to me.
The new Power-Ups platform would definitely add more dimensions to trello.
While you can try some hacky alternatives in a browser, they are a pain, confusing and a poor workaround. On mobile you are completely screwed, unless you want to log out and log back in each time you want to switch accounts. (You do have a long cryptic passphrase which makes this even worse?)
Google has shown for years how to get multiple accounts right. Why does no one seem to learn? (Yes, Dropbox I am looking at you too.)