Show HN: Pintask, the hackable task tracker

It looks interesting, but not enough for me to login, yet.

You need to add a few screen shots, demos, etc., to show me why I should consider this instead of Huboard or Trello (you don't need to compare yourself to these, just have some simple workflows with the free tool to make it clear why pintask is better).

Also, while it is "free for life" you should "respect" current conventions for sites like this: You need a pricing link, a page on which you reinforce that basic functionality is free, and that extensions are what people buy. People are used to those conventions, it makes it easier for them to absorb your message without forcing them to think too much, without violating their expectations in a current website.

Speaking of this, I should be able to browse the extension store without logging in. Also, pricing needs to tell me if the extension price is per user per month, per project per month, per enterprise per month, etc. If those prices are per enterprise, they seem like good deals, but if they are per user, they start adding up so fast that free seems more like a playground gateway drug than anything else.

Finally, enterprise customers WANT to pay for your basic service: They want to give you their money to guarantee uptime, have a number to call, etc.

(Personal irritant: You may require cookies to get something done, but not to browse - the page loads blank when cookies are disabled (I used a cookie manager; I'm in the minority there, but I'm the kind of user you want early on :->). Require cookies only when they are actually required - and be sure to indicate that your site uses them, so that you remain on the good side of the law in various jurisdictions).

tl;dr: Looks good, too little there to incite me to actually take the action. Don't go overboard, though, you're almost there.

Interesting price hack: $1/mo (1 left), $3/mo (5 left). Are these escalating, à la Pinboard? Useful for price discovery, though up-from-the-bottom nudges artificial asymptotes (see pricing discontinuities).

The mode could be a bit more obvious, ie whether you're using the Move or Embed tools is signified only by a subtle border line, so it took me a while to figure out how to embed cards and I can't really tell what mode I'm n from a casual glance. This will become more important as more tools are added, I'd imagine.

Color coding seems pretty arbitrary as the labels aren't descriptive, and there's no filtering. But I guess these can be hacked into being :)

Code editor look spretty bare, although I appreciate the Wiki link and again it's early days. Maybe have a little 'Hello World' code by default, or even a few lines of advice as a comment so the window doesn't look so empty? Casual hackers such as myself have a phobia of blank pages because it's not obvious where to begin.

One small annoyance: Initials. I have a double-barreled name (Firstname Surname-Surname) but it rendered my initials as FS, which was quite confusing because I'm not used to seeing that letter combination at all, and it wasn't until I added an avatar that I realized it was my initials.

That little nitpick aside, I like it a lot!

Is there any way to share a board via URL, without requiring users to sign in? I don't want to make it public or have it show up in search results, I just want to be able to share it with people who just need to view it but wont want to mess with creating an account.

If that's available (and I just can't find it), then this would be a great solution for me!

Looks interesting, but many Trello users have tons of loyalty to Trello. Getting them to switch is going to be difficult. There are plenty of Trello clones, and you don't offer any screenshots or examples.

How is this different than Trello? It looks almost identical at first glance.

Great interface, and I can definitely see the advantage of being able to add extensions so that it is customized to the specific workflow I am looking for without the junk I don't want.

I think this is one of the first commercial quality meteor applications I have seen, which says a lot of the dev team but also shows meteor is a platform capable of at least getting the job done if not doing it well.

Question: Do you anticipate allowing people to write their own extensions / having some sort of API?

Seems I am wrong somewhere. Reached this discussion as part of google search and found accidently I have used the same name and similar concept :(. Anyway this is just my hobby program and no plans to commercialize it. Let me check the name if I start getting users - http://www.secfor.net/

Again, it is also may be hackable as I was not so serious about coding and was concentrating just about making it a reality.

Out of curiosity, why do you have this as one of the first things people read on your site:

"Pintask promise: we will always keep the service running. And if anybody tries to shut it down, we will open-source it."

wow the ui is really nice - i built my own tool exactly like this but the ui didnt end up as beautiful. i know other tools have some accessibility problems and built my ui similar to yours to solve them. this looks really cool.

i couldnt figure out how to monetize my app - i have to say the plugin store is a good idea. gj!

How exactly is this hackable? Where do I find the documentation to look into whether I can do interesting stuff with it?

I'd say extendable not hackable.

I instantly got a headache, viewing this on a mobile device

great example of a production meteor app!! Beautiful work!