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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

I love Trello, and I their iPhone app is fantastic. My wife and I share a "Household" board that is indispensable to our life now. It has lists: To Do, Scheduled, Doing, Done. I swear it actually makes my marriage happier. Way to go Trello.

One gripe, though, with the iPhone app. A lot of times I'll use my time on the BART or stuck in traffic to prepare for different tasks. So for example, I had a card on To Do for a 401k rollover. So on the train one morning I did the research for it. I added comments to the card with account numbers, phone numbers, etc, so that way when I had a moment i could make the calls and everything was in one place. So with all that preamble: Telephone numbers in comments aren't clickable. They look like they are. They turn underlined blue. But clicking them doesn't start the Phone app.

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How is Trello used, exactly? I've not seen it before.

Think a broader version of pivotal tracker et al

Actually I'd say (and I think Joel, the inventor, said the same thing) that it's a meta tool which is much more versatile than a bug tracker. It's like Excel - people are starting to use it in ways nobody has ever imagined it. I admit that I never imagined it to be used as a household management tool. Of course, one can do Kanban on it, too. Oh that reminds me I have to check out their API, I'm quite sure it's going to morph into some kind of authoritative meta list store.

Watch the Trello introductory video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDf1RqeLfo

Trello is a free-form tool for making lists. The lists can be shared (for reading and writing). You make as many as you want. When this gets unwieldy, you can start a new "board" - a board is a collection of lists.

If you want, you can add notes to any item in a list, and other people can add comments. There are options for watching items, lists, and boards such that you can get alerts when something changes or is added.

It's very flexible. Spolsky has said the original idea traces back to when he was a program manager at Microsoft on Excel, and during customer visits he discovered the vast majority of users simply used Excel to lay out lists -- they didn't care about advanced features like formulae or macros.

it's a kanban[1] board. Very free form. Multiuser with private/public groups. Free.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

As far as I have worked out, however, there is no way to set a WIP limit on any one list. I would be very happy to be told I am wrong.

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