[HN Gopher] Swimlanes for Trello
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       Swimlanes for Trello
        
       Author : robinwarren
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2022-05-12 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bluecatreports.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bluecatreports.com)
        
       | nhance wrote:
       | Very curious what the path to revenue looks like for this
        
         | robinwarren wrote:
         | The plan at the moment is to use this as a lead magnet for our
         | main (paid) tool https://www.bluecatreports.com/
         | 
         | But, possibly we will discover some need for features we could
         | add to a paid version of this in future.
        
       | n8cpdx wrote:
       | People are complaining about Trello being old. I just set one up
       | yesterday, because I couldn't find a good casual/flexible
       | alternative. And no, I'm not going to set up a whole notion just
       | to put cards on a board.
       | 
       | Coming from a place of extreme prejudice against and resentment
       | towards Trello, I actually was pleasantly surprised. Not perfect
       | but it still works well enough and has enough features to feel
       | powerful. It seems like they're adding lots to it, which is maybe
       | a mixed bag.
       | 
       | I tried Microsoft Lists - it is broken in Safari (when I press
       | the add card button, it doesn't pop up until I interact with the
       | user feedback widget). I tried GitHub projects but it was being
       | weird and insists on all issues having the same columns. I tried
       | Todoist but the story for sharing projects isn't great for
       | anonymous users (I need to share in a public meeting for people
       | without accounts or desire to set them up). Microsoft Planner is
       | offensively bad, and this is coming from a heavily biased office
       | fanboy who secretly dreams of someday working on Outlook because
       | I'm actually that uncool.
       | 
       | So, what do the cool kids use for semi-structured cards these
       | days?
       | 
       | Edit: yes maybe Notion is the answer, trying it is on my to do
       | list.
        
         | zze wrote:
         | For semi-structured cards, try kanbantool.com - it does not
         | require you to follow kanban method, allows for great
         | customization of cards, and even has an extensive SDK
         | (https://kanbantool.com/developer/sdk) which you can use to
         | easily tinker with the board.
        
         | subpixel wrote:
         | I tried a bunch of alternatives and wound up paying for premium
         | Trello or whatever it's called for the family. Set it up
         | thusly:
         | 
         | - an iOS widget that makes capturing things super fast and easy
         | 
         | - an INBOX board where cards land, with lists that are auto-
         | populated by card label
         | 
         | - a button to move a card to a THIS WEEK board that has lists
         | for each day of the week
         | 
         | - a button to send a card back if it ain't happening this week
         | 
         | - a timeline view that is the reason we pay the insane price,
         | but which is indeed very useful
         | 
         | I think it's worth the single-person license. I don't think
         | it's worth that for every user, and may downgrade at the end of
         | my annual license.
         | 
         | I hope they don't muck it up with feature creep, but the polish
         | they have put on Trello is quite nice.
        
       | jonpurdy wrote:
       | I already posted below*, but I actually tried this out.
       | 
       | It doesn't add swimlanes to Trello the way you'd expect. It opens
       | up a new view which looks like Trello, but seems to be totally
       | custom. So you can only see the swimlanes in this view, but not
       | using Trello normally.
       | 
       | Not sure if I'm missing something but this is a non-starter for
       | me.
       | 
       | * - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31354174
        
       | Msw242 wrote:
       | Why this over like... Even notion?
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | Because it's old (over 10 years old), works well, battle tested
         | and practical.
         | 
         | Trello allows for great collaboration and informal planning,
         | even for daily life and for a single person. It allows
         | capturing great deal of information under a card and showing a
         | great deal of information without overloading your senses.
         | 
         | So, in short, "It works (TM)", and works well.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | If those are your pros for Trello then you probably would
           | love Notion. Cards are just pages which can capture anything.
        
             | bayindirh wrote:
             | Thanks for the offer. :)
             | 
             | Actually I have an integrated system which enables me to
             | collaborate with many people on Trello, and my knowledge
             | base is on Evernote for a very long time now.
             | 
             | I consider moving from working systems to other stuff just
             | because it's new and hip harmful.
        
         | ChildOfChaos wrote:
         | I hate notion, it's really for documents.
         | 
         | Trello is much better for lists and Kanban boards. The UI just
         | works a lot better than Notion which is just a mess and ugly
         | for such uses.
        
         | lukasb wrote:
         | UX feels better - Trello is faster and more lightweight than
         | Notion.
        
         | adwww wrote:
         | Isn't it the other way around - Trello has been around and used
         | for informal project planning for years before Notion became
         | trendy.
        
         | paul1664 wrote:
         | Not everyone Notions. For everyone else... Jira.
        
       | davidashe wrote:
       | I thought simplicity was Trello's differentiating feature?
       | 
       | I don't use Trello often, but this strikes me as the JIRA-
       | ification of Trello being underway.
       | 
       | Others don't seem to agree though.
        
         | ed wrote:
         | This is a 3rd-party add-on, not a native Trello feature.
        
           | davidashe wrote:
           | right, good call
        
         | Steltek wrote:
         | While I haven't tried these swim lanes (or Trello since
         | acquisition), I agree with you. Trello was about simplicity and
         | being the anti-Jira. I don't see swimlanes as an absolute must-
         | have that's in keeping with how Trello was built.
         | 
         | I think there will always be a group praising the addition of
         | features. That's how all Enterprise software gets to be the way
         | it is. Every "I won't buy it because I need $checkbox_feature"
         | begets a meeting between sales and engineering to see how fast
         | it could be implemented.
        
       | XCSme wrote:
       | Why does it require access to all my workspaces and access to
       | post comments as me?
        
         | dazbradbury wrote:
         | It does seem that the trade-off generally between handing a 3rd
         | party access to content vs. improved functionality provided by
         | plugins is rarely worth it. This not only applies to Trello but
         | many other work/productivity tooling where the content is
         | generally sensitive - eg. Slack, Trello, Gmail etc.
         | 
         | I'd be curious to know how many people work at companies that
         | allow 3rd party plug-ins for these kinds of tools.
        
         | robinwarren wrote:
         | Trello don't allow any more fine grained access than this.
         | Power-ups can request view and write access and that is about
         | it. No way to say we only want access to the current board or
         | etc. Or that we only want to be able to update labels/members
         | but not add comments.
         | 
         | They have been talking about changing that, but I understand it
         | is complex and never really becomes a priority
        
       | micheljansen wrote:
       | The lack of swimlanes was a reason for me to not use Trello
       | before. Very nice.
        
         | sieabahlpark wrote:
         | Now you can subject yourself to terrible billing from Atlassian
        
       | Ron1999 wrote:
       | One can only wonder why had it taken so long. it's not novel or
       | new, just a simple usability improvement that really makes you
       | question - Was it there from the day-1 roadmap and just wasn't
       | implemented? Are we starting to see the decline of the extremely-
       | poor-UX-friendly flat trend?
       | 
       | glad to see a step in the right direction, hopefully 90's cloths
       | comeback will go in the same path.
        
         | robinwarren wrote:
         | I think this was a deliberate move from the Trello team not to
         | implement this. They were very much focussed on the "not
         | developers" market and didn't want to implement features which
         | were mostly only of interest to a developer audience. It seemed
         | to work quite well for them commercially :)
        
           | jonpurdy wrote:
           | I think swimlanes is a feature that benefits everybody, not
           | just developers. At a most basic level, swimlanes by assignee
           | would be crucial for a family board (as opposed to coloured
           | cards by assignee, since colours could be used for category
           | of task, etc.).
           | 
           | So I used Trello at home, and Jira at work. I loved how fast
           | Trello was (despite being Electron); it's still probably the
           | fastest Electron/web app.
           | 
           | But the lack of swimlanes pushed me to Favro, which was too
           | slow to enjoy using. When Atlassian bought Trello I figured
           | that swimlanes would never arrive, since they wouldn't want
           | to eat into Jira features and market share (which i disagree
           | with, but I digress).
           | 
           | As a result I use Trello casually and for simple projects
           | with my wife, but didn't go all-in on it. I'll give this
           | Power Up a try though!
        
       | mab122 wrote:
       | So this adds swimlines like they were for a long time in
       | https://wekan.github.io/ ?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | Wekan is wild, it's a great project but it's downfall used to
         | be that it was a worse version of Trello. But now that
         | Atlassian has atlassianed all over it Wekan is now "Trello back
         | when it was still good." It's a joy to use.
        
         | KennyBlanken wrote:
         | Kanboard has had swim lanes for years, too.
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-12 23:02 UTC)