TaskMail – Fresh way to manage projects and issues | Hacker News Reader

TaskMail – Fresh way to manage projects and issues

taskmail.io

50 pointspbprabhuram16 comments

Uh, the comparison with Jira is really odd. Especially that the stuff that it lists as the negatives of Jira are actually the _strengths_ of Jira. Jira is unopinionated, you can basically do everything what you want with it.

I'll respectfully disagree. I find Jira to be slow, bulky, unintuitive, and a general pain to use.

> Jira is unopinionated, you can basically do everything what you want with it.

Except make a simple workflow, IME.

Designing workflows isn't the easiest thing in the world but it's not THAT hard.

If your complaining about the fact that the workflow in your system sucks, then blame that on your administrators/implementors. The out of the box work flows are pretty darn simple- especially if your using the Agile boards. You have To Do, In Progress, and Done.

Pretty harsh on the Jira comparison. Bashing a competitor kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

To me it sounds like it's coming from someone who has had to use JIRA in the past. Harsh, but personally I can relate to all of it.

i just started using JIRA and I have loads of complaints about it. I have no doubts I can get used to it but a lot of the pain points on the page are pretty obvious, especially with the UI.

I have some issues with the current UI, though some of them may be because I've used JIRA on and off for the last 6 or 7 years and came to have a mental model of how things USED to work with previous generations of UI that the lack of it in this UI irks me.

However, I don't know how anyone could strongly dislike the UI. It's kind of dated, some things are not great for how I want to use it, but in general it's not bad, simply just not good in all places.

As for the workflows- if you don't like it blame your implementors. You can have pretty much any type of workflow that you want. It's kind of like complaining you didn't like your plate at a Mongolian Grill- you've got no one to blame but yourself.

Speed is also generally not a problem. If your company is using a ton of extras the plugins could cause performance issues with each other. Indexing your data on a regular basis is pretty key- but a properly configured/provisioned server should be able to handle plenty. Cloud hosted JIRA definitely has speed issues if you don't have a super active user base, as your data will get cold pretty quickly and it'll be a few minutes until your back in the warm cache.

I've used a lot of other bug trackers/work planners and there isn't one that has given me the combination of flexibility, performance, and UI acceptability. Plus the integration with other Atlassian products makes it pretty easy to just buy all in.

Atlassian products can definitely get spendy, especially when you're self hosting. The Cloud hosted when you're small-ish is very reasonable.

Finally, as a company I feel like Atlassian does many things right by their customers. Maybe because I'm in Seattle, but there seems to be something being hosted by Atlassian for their user groups at least every quarter, their support has never left me frustrated, and every technical resource I've fired off random deeply technical questions to has been extremely knowledgeable about their product and threw ideas back and forth on a path to a hypothetical solution.

The main arguments it presents against JIRA seems to be:

* Its slow - well maybe, although IME its adequate. Our current project has just over 5000 tickets and I rarely have speed issues when filtering, searching etc. Other teams in the company have projects with many times more tickets than ours.

* It doesn't look great - I guess its not the prettiest thing, there are certainly areas that could use some work but its not terrible. It gets the job done.

* Its expensive - I don't know how much we pay for JIRA, but I know it integrates well with the other Atlassian products we use, Confluence, Fisheye, Bamboo etc. That integration is worth a premium in my opinion.

I completely agree.

...and just because it's a single page app does not mean its fast. This is a very invalid comparison point to begin with.

Harsh? Seems pretty true to me.

The page really needs a video explaining the app, or a link to a demo. I don't want to sign up just to find out why it's worth investigating.

Suggestions:

Have one or two sentences in larger type making the case for why TaskMail fresh instead of just listing the features and relying on visitors to put the pieces together.

The screenshot is also pretty plain and looks similar to many applications. You may want to consider zooming in a bit so visitors don't glaze over it as just a multi-panel view.

If the main pitch is that it's just like using email for users, maybe show gifs/images of Outlook/Google email workflow alongside TaskMail equivalents to demonstrate it.

How do you differentiate from asana [1]? The products seem very similar.

[1] http://asana.com/

From my review, it looks like Asana tries to "replace" your email, whereas TaskMail punts the problem of trying to get folks to move away from email and just works within the confines of your email inbox.

As a user of Asana at my old company, I think the this paradigm of working within email will ultimately be the way forward for enterprise + medium sized companies, as getting larger companies to move away from email is probably not happening anytime soon. Whether or not this move happens with TaskMail, or some other tool, remains to be seen.

As an asana user, I too would like a response to this.

I honestly can't tell if this is an elaborate prank or if it's a legitimate service. I feel as if it's just saying to just use email instead of $SASS_PRODUCTS{A..Z} since they are all trying to replicate basic email features: "To Share, Just Enter Email!".

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