ActiveState launches 'Basecamp for developers' | Hacker News Reader

ActiveState launches 'Basecamp for developers'

workspace.activestate.com

16 pointsdbarefoot12 comments

Couple of UI tips: Center-align the layout. It's way too busy, I have no idea what I should read first or even click on. Cut out 90% of that text and assume your user has never been your site before. Show me pics and tell me why I should switch from Basecamp. It's also loaded with colors; I feel like I should be wearing a hard hat on this site.

Summary: another hosted trac site.

I think I'll stick with Assembla. It's the same concept but not as mature. Nothing against it, but it's not really all that unique.

Definitely a far cry from Basecamp's intuitive design. Although, this may evolve into something worthwhile in it's own respect, as ActiveState's Komodo Edit is my editor of choice: it's fast, free, extensible and open source. In it's current state 'ActiveState Workspace' doesn't seem like much, but I'm interested to see how it evolves.

I'm not sure how this differs from Unfuddle.com, except that it's not out of beta yet. Unfuddle is pretty great by the way; I was part of a distributed team of about 20 on a large project last year, and that company used Unfuddle for that and about 40 other projects.

Nevertheless, here's to more choices and good competitive pressure for all the developer project infrastructure companies out there.

How is this particularly different from a paid GitHub account? Now that they have issue tracking, it's pretty much a one-stop shop.

The issue tracking on github is very basic and just about useless in my experience for managing any private development environment. Hopefully they continue to improve it like the rest of their services so I won't have to use other systems in the future but it's really not there yet.

How would you like us to improve it so it isn't useless to you?

Just a few things I can think of off the top of my head

- Alternative priority system. Putting them in order is cool and I like it but I need a way to say "This isn't important" vs "This needs to be done yesterday" without using labels and to have them be sortable

- Dependent issues. Ticket 4 can't be completed until 5 and 7 have been done.

- Custom status folders on the left hand side. Open and closed aren't really enough for a lot of work flows. New, In progress, ready for review, ready for deploy, closed are ones I like but everyone is different here so maybe make them customizable? You could use labels for this I guess but it just doesn't feel as right as I folders on the side would.

Those are the main ones for now.

I don't understand how this is a basecamp for developers. More like hosted svn and trac. Might do better if marketed that way.

I was thinking that the project blogs, wikis, forums and the fact that it's hosted (plus the developer-specific stuff) make it like Basecamp.

not as smooth, elegant, or intuitive as basecamp. It could just be that I'm biased because I've been using basecamp for the past 2 years.

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