Back in September when Trello announced their launch, I immediately knew it was going to be amazing. Part of me just loved the interface for its simplicity and exceptional responsiveness. But more than that, the idea really was pretty simple and quite powerful; organize all your ideas into cards, and organize those cards in to lists. Think an online version of post-it notes with valuable communication tools on the back. Check out the introduction video below.
Most of the people I know missed the launch announcement and I’ve been bringing it up every chance I get. My friends over at Cards.ly just couldn’t find anything that worked well for them to keep all their ideas and tasks in order. I showed them Trello and they thought it looked great, and after using it for a while, now swear by it.
I myself hadn’t used it until this week when I needed to coordinate Jay’s visit down here. I wanted a place to keep track of what he wanted to do and what I needed to do to prepare for his visit. He also has a project that he’d like some help on so we wanted a place to coordinate on that as well. Trello has been great for all of these things, providing a responsive way for us to keep each other accountable and keep track of what needs to be done.
Joel Spolsky recently did a post on his blog about how Trello is different (for those that don’t know, his company wrote Trello). In it, he explains that the reason Excel became so popular is that despite it’s intended use as a spreadsheet tool for doing a bunch of math, it’s really just a data structure. That is, it’s a simple way to make tables. Hell, I’ve used Excel to do website mockups before, so I get that. Joel claims that Trello is also just a simple data structure, a simple way to make lists. I think he’s spot on with that, but it’s the tools that you get with those lists that makes Trello in particular really valuable. Click on a card and you get access to a broader description, checklists, notes, due dates, activity lists and even votes.
Since signing up three days ago, I’ve built 4 boards (collections of lists) and I intend to build a lot more. I’ve also gotten another developer friend of mine to start using it to manage his community project and he too really seems to enjoy it.
tl;dr If you want to manage tasks and anything else that could be a list, go sign up for Trello right now!