Show HN: Offline-First Personal Kanban | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Offline-First Personal Kanban

personalkanban.js.org

108 pointsamitmerchant54 comments

Nice! This is actually exactly what Portabella (https://portabella.io) started out as around 7 months ago.

I found that LocalStorage isn't reliable enough to keep all your important stuff, so my thought was to encrypt everything client side and store in LocalStorage + a database. On session startup you just check the lastEdited date of the LocalStorage version vs. the database version and take the data with the latest.

That way it's still offline first but you can also access your data on different machines.

Not trying to plug Portabella too much but I followed this logic and thought, how can I now allow people to share data? What if I give them different views? How about notifications? Pretty quickly I had fleshed out a full product.

You could have a look at EteBase [1], which was recently featured on HN. I haven't tried it myself, but I'm looking to build my applications in a similiar style.

[1] https://www.etebase.com/

Yeah I chatted with Tom (primary guy behind Etebase) the other day, definitely passionate about this space and knows what he's doing.

Etebase didn't exist earlier this year when I wanted to build Portabella, but I think it's a great option for many platforms.

How many Alex's are building Portabella? ;-)

Haha my bad, responding off mobile vs. desktop

Userbase seems to be a similar solution https://userbase.com/

Or RxDB https://rxdb.info/ which also supports edits on multiple tabs.

IMO RxDB isn't a competitor here, we're talking about end-to-end encrypted solutions, RxDB is just a way of syncing JSON documents.

In that sense Firebase, Parse, deepstream.io all handle that problem as well.

What you want though is to operate without seeing your customers data, much more ethical in that you'll never be tempted to sell your users data

I found that if you open it in 2 separate browser windows, you can edit both representations as independent documents, then after refresh the last edit wins. Is this intended behavior?

Kind of unavoidable unless you're doing something magical with localStorage, and this looks like it's been made to be simple.

This looks like something I've wanted for a while: "like Trello, but offline".

Localstorage has its drawbacks, but wrap it in Electron and you've got an app :)

> Localstorage has its drawbacks

Could you share any anecdotes?

It's mostly what other commenters have already said - various browsers have various ways of emptying it, some user-triggred, some not. Like cookies, you can't rely on it being the same level of "persistent" as a file saved on disk.

Is there seriously no way to make a kanban app without running it in JS in a sandbox in a JIT in a browser packaged to look like an app?

-> it turns out, yes, there is: Kanboard, Wekan, Restyaboard, TaskBoard, to name the best.

Offline, open source, and (afaik) no bloated chrome browser bundled with them. (not affiliated)

This is great, but I'm wondering how reliable it is to use browser storage for persistence

Hazards are (1) user accidentally removing data they want when doing "clear browsing data", (2) Mobile Safari deleting data if you don't visit the site frequently enough and (3) unanticipated future changes to browsers that make more problems like (2).

Other than that, IME it works well.

I've been using your tool since you posted it here. So far I like it, its simplicity really kind of opened my brain to using it, if that makes sense. I've been finding it really nice to be limited to just "content in, content out".

A couple notes: I find the title length a little limiting. I want to be able to see my tasks at a glance.

The cards are at full size no matter the description length. I often don't have a description and it's just empty space. I'd find it more useful if the cards adapted better to the content the user chooses to put in them.

Thanks for the tool! Goodluck in the future!

I’ve made one for myself as well, built as a Chrome extension loaded locally. This way no domain is needed and I did not have to worry about security.

It worked well for a while when I was multitasking a lot. My manager was very happy with me taking care of things without missing any details.

The problem is that Kanban makes more sense for a team than an individual. If nobody else is using it, it has few advantages compared to simpler solutions, like post-it notes. So I stopped using it eventually.

This could be great to integrate in git-bug[1] if/when kanban get supported. This would be the fronted and git-bug would be the storage/collaboration layer.

[1] https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/

What I use personally:

URL: https://trello-clone-nextjs.herokuapp.com/

Repo: https://github.com/amir734jj/trello-clone-nextjs

Looks really amazing. Simple to use. Fast. Clean. Beautiful.

I just think the storage should be something less volatile than LocalStorage. Maybe the application could provide other options as SQLite or JSON, keeping LocalStorage to people that doesn't need or do not want setup a server.

Could drop the JSON data as application/octet-stream and bind it to a save icon. Looks so neat :)

Can you explain what this means? Binding to a save icon?

You can construct a file payload and cause a browser download in an onclick handler.

I did something similar, opting for the simplicity of the terminal and CLI with https://github.com/kitplummer/clikan - specifically for personal tracking.

I think the OP used machine translation for the language names, hence rendering Japanese into 日本人 (Japanese people) instead of 日本語 (Japanese language) ...

I tried it in Firefox mobile, it looks good but sadly isn't responsive yet. I don't know if it's one of your goal. Keep it up.

The correct translation for German Language is "Deutsch" instead of "Deutsche"

This is nice, but what I really want is a native kanban app. Not Electron, and not web - native.

I would honestly like to know what’s the point of these comments. This person offers a free, open-source and cross-platform offline app in the most cost-effective way as a single developer not willing to make money and then one person comes and says “yeah cool but not native”.

No single person I know is going to work alone to deliver a native app with such features. Let this person have his/her minute of glory because it’s well deserved.

My comment was not meant to denigrate the creator of this app.

After posting my comment, I went out and did some searching and found exactly what I was looking for. As it happens, it's produced by a single individual.

What solution did you find?

It's called Boards, by Kitestack Software.

So, as I understand it, you're fine with a native app which only works on a single OS, rather than one which is cross-platform and doesn't require any installation?

I honestly don't see the advantage here.

Your requirements are different from mine.

I AM fine with a native app that only works on a single OS. Cross-platform is not necessary, or even desired.

"Doesn't require any installation" doesn't even enter into my evaluation. The last time I cared about that was when my computer didn't have a hard drive.

The UI/UX of Boards is to my liking. Several design choices resonate with how my brain works.

That it stores its data in iCloud is to my liking.

That it doesn't require a browser is to my liking.

That's a cool looking app. But it's 15 USD.

Yeah, that's ridiculously cheap.

Well I don't know about ridiculously cheap, but I do think it's reasonable. That's not the point.

The point is that GP posted a free, offline first, cross-platform, good looking tool and OP commented saying 'well, this isn't what I'm looking for' like HN is their own personal wishlist, and then eventually finds what they're looking for, and it's not free, it's not cross-platform.

HN is not my own personal wishlist. However, it is often how I discover new and interesting things. As a result, whenever someone posts a link to a new tool or service, I tend to react to it with a personal evaluation. I rarely post a comment with my reaction; usually, it's to make a critique about a particular feature, design element, or bug that I notice.

In this case, my original comment was too succinct to be useful to anyone else, which I believe is your point. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Fair summary - I think perhaps a few of us just felt that the comment was a bit abrasive given the time and effort that's clearly gone into this which is being offered for free.

It looks like you see and acknowledge that opinion, which is nice, and fairly uncommon on the Internet still :)

Hope you have a good weekend and a wonderful Christmas - and it's good you found a tool that does fit your needs in the end!

Seems reasonable to me for a useful tool.

Affordable, but Mac only.

Boards dev here, thanks for mentioning the app! I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Not immediately obvious, but nice to know: the *.boards file format is simply a .zip file. It contains all resources/images and an HTML file with the contents of the board so that you can access your data even without the app (I'm strong on data accessibility after getting locked out of binary data formats once too many).

That's good to know.

Is there a public roadmap anywhere? I'd love to be able to add colored tags/labels to individual items.

So I'm not trying to sound rude but your original comment would've been much better if you included an alternative.

Also my point was that you'd not find a single person offering a free cross-platform app like this one, not that you'd find a single person offering a native app for a single OS as you've happened to find (edit: and just realized your alternative is $15 so hardly comparable to what OP offers).

Native to Mac, Windows, or Linux? People use Electron because cross-platform desktop is not a solved problem unless you're willing to pay for QT. (I can name a dozen alternatives but they're frankly not as good as Electron, at least if you want Mac, Windows, And Linux.)

The other option for a developer-targeted, cross-platform app is TUI/curses. I did a recent search to see if something like that exists and the closest I could find were command line todo apps.

I’ve wanted something Kanban-ish that could be project-specific and store its data locally within the project’s directory, ideally with git integration on a dedicated branch so that existing cloud options for git could be used for simple synching.

wxWidgets is pretty good, and beats the alternatives because it actually uses native widgets where possible. Lots of language bindings too.

For windows:

choco install kamban

When you mean without electron, would you still consider using your own web browser as being native?

Syncthing has this. If you open the GUI, it opens up in your browser.

What do you think about it ?

Kanboard, Wekan, Restyaboard, TaskBoard

Nice. Will look whether I can implement a connection somehow to my GitLab issues/MRs.

A personal Kanban which needs a cloud backend! E.g. Jupyter Notebook -> Google Colab

Really nicely done

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