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Waffle.io

waffle.io

174 pointsLazare62 comments

I would urge you to take another look at the flow of your landing page. I have literally no clue what your product does even after reading the infographic at the top of the page a few times.

- GitHub users want a way to help out on open source projects

- waffle.io places a dynamic badge in your GitHub README file for all to see where they can help

- Clicking that badge takes anyone to your public waffle.io board where users can view and edit tasks.

What?

I think it's Trello for GitHub, correct me if I'm wrong.

I strongly dislike everything about waffle.io. I feel bad about it, because these are good people who more than likely love their product and it's getting a lot of hate here despite them coming here to respond to feedback... but.

1. Most people here are confused about what this is for. After understanding what it's for, I find that it's not even a solution looking for a problem... it's a force-fed solution to a non-existant problem for most people. This solves something maybe 1% of us have encountered, but makes the assumption that everyone on Github would benefit from this.

2. "waffle.io" seriously? Is this the result of an internal "I need a random english word that is available on .io" poll, or is there a deeper more disturbing connotation with the pronounced blue theme on the site? I'm sure naming your service like this doesn't help the "I have no idea what this is about" crowd. I can't be the only one tired of those completely meaningless names... I mean specifically the hyper-generic names of services targeted at specifically the github/bitbucket crowd. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but some of these names are trying too hard to be cutesy and random. Maybe I'm seeing something that's not there though.

I think that's being rather harsh - to me it's trying to link a Trello style community/team tool on top of Github. And as someone who has tried to get a largish team, including non developers, to collaborate using existing Github features this might well be a good idea.

Also the name - very few domain names seem to have much connection with the domain anymore, picking on this crowd for having a weird domain name hardly seems fair when everyone pretty much has weird domain names these days (unless they have boat loads of cash).

Edit: If anyone from waffle.io is here, first of all well done - looks like an interesting tool, secondly I'm not sure your "Why don't you open source your workflow?" is doing your product justice - I was slightly confused when trying to understand that first diagram, but maybe that's just me. When I scrolled further down the page and saw the example it all seemed clear - but not everyone might scroll down.

Thanks. :) I posted this below, but in case you missed it, we agree. We have a new landing page getting ready to launch. Here's a preview of what we're working towards:

http://screencast.com/t/IZnoWChXyQ

We love Github Issues at our company, but it's missing one thing we really need: metrics. We need to track when a milestone was started, who completed how many issues in a milestone, what was the issue estimated at and what was to actual time to complete. We need data on what there is to be done and what will be done.

That being said, I don't think this is a feature set for Github issues. This is not an open source concern; it's a business concern and I don't think business should drive Github.

So a third party integration is perfect for this. Is this something on the roadmap of waffle.io?

Yep. We're definitely looking at adding more planning functionality and metrics around milestones in the near future.

I think the name is because you end up with a grid of cards. It's a pretty tenuous link though.

Yes, because Apple or Trello are much better names.

Honestly, I clicked the link solely because I thought "damn, waffle.io is an awesome name".

Also, I think hooking a kanban board up to github issues is great. Not mind blowing, but definitely nice to automate coordination between the two.

I'm not so sure managing issues is a non-existent problem for large projects. For example, Canonical have Launchpad (also used by Mozilla, MySQL, a bunch of other distros etc.), Django have a custom issues tracker, etc. I don't know if waffle.io is it, but these examples suggest that perhaps there is a point where something is needed beyond Github issues. On the other hand Rails seem to use Github issues alone so maybe you're right.

I agree the landing page is confusing though I believe it's called waffle.io because kanban cards create a grid pattern & waffles also have a grid pattern.

It's an interesting choice as in British Vernacular

Waffle - speak or write at length in a vague or trivial manner.

As a verb waffle has the same meaning in American English but the images of waffles on their landing page make it clear they are going for the food. For me at least it's easy to not jump back and forth between meanings of waffle once I understand the intent is to refer to the food.

Homonyms can be confusing but it helps when such a stark difference in meaning makes it easy to distinguish what meaning is appropriate in a given context.

I like how they set the price:

  $(function() {
    var price = localStorage.getItem('price');
    if(!price) {
      price = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 3);
      localStorage.setItem('price', price);
    }
    $('#price').html(price);
  });

And there seems to be no validation of the localStorage. I could set it to 0.000001 for example and it would work.

This is interesting. Any one know what is the reason to use "random" pricing? Especially only diff 1-2 dollars.

Waffle user here...they're just doing some market/price testing. They don't actually charge a fee yet.

I get this. Yes, you could use the GitHub issues board; no problem. But the issues there are not inviting, and it's non-obvious to newcomers if they should pick up a task.

Here you're inviting people - literally, "please, come help us with this" - and making it super-clear that they should jump in. I think there's more to do to make open source projects friendly (better, happier documentation, for a start), but I don't think this is a bad addition at all.

Also, waffles are tasty.

This is wonderful.

The main page doesn't mention the term, but the easiest way to describe this is that it is adding a Kanban board to Github.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board

The simplicity to effectiveness ratio of Kanban boards really impress me.

Huboard http://huboard.com is the Kanban board my employer uses for github and its pretty nice. It'll autoupdate if any team member changes the board.

There's also TaskTub: http://www.tasktub.com/

This does sound like a fantastic idea. Github issues are "things that are broken", so something that's "things people can work on" is great to have. Bonus points if you can sort issues by difficulty, so newcomers know what the easy pickings are.

Compare this page to libressl.org

Reading it three times and I still dont get it what its for for whom and what it does. But at least it looks fancy.

Come on people. I'm so tired of most of my comments being reminders to check your UX!

http://imgur.com/82DqYXl

I'll short out most, if not all, of your responses here.

I'm on mobile. I don't care if you designed for the desktop web or not, most visitors will be mobile web. Just test it. And for Cthulu's sake rotate your phone 90 degrees to make sure it works.

Or use the iOS Simulator if you're on Mac. It's simple, it launches in seconds, you can point it to localhost on your machine if you're serving locally for testing, and you can check old versions of the OS with older versions of Safari (like 7.0 where you couldn't minimize the UI).

In their defense users who actually want to contribute will likely be on desktop but I get your point. You're reading HN on mobile and want to be able to see the site.

Start by just using basic viewport size testing, resizing your browser or using a tool like Firefox’s responsive design mode (Ctrl+Shift+M, not sure about the shortcut on Mac OS X).

Nice, I never knew about that feature, thanks! Just tried it out on some of my work, and it's a breeze to use. However, seems that scrollbars behave slightly differently in it. In my case they aren't appearing in certain sub-containers. Have you had any such issues with it?

You can also use Safari web inspector for both the simulator and iOS devices, which is really nice.

This is the problem of responsive‐viewport‐by‐default in CSS frameworks: when people are lazy, the last state of that site is worse than the first.

You're so right. I'm not even able to read descriptions on my iPhone. I prefer to have a regular desktop site that I can zoom on, than a bugged responsive one which crop content...

Easier said than done.

I like the idea, it seems really helpful, but just as a warning if you call your site Waffle and blue is the prominent color, especially on the logo, you're going to cause people to make connections that shouldn't be made...

If its any consolation for the OP I have absolutely no idea what this is referring to and haven't made any connections even after reading this and trying to... blue waffles?

Sorry, I should have included more information: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blue-waffle

I recommend against just googling it. It's used as one of those "gotcha" images for unsuspecting internet users.

I agree. I immediately closed the site down and came and checked the comments as I assumed it some sort of trap.

I tried to view on mobile and the page is unreadable. OP, if you are the creator of the site, please consider having some sort of mobile optimized page! (Even if it is just an info page)

Even a site that I could read on mobile would be good. Resizing doesn't help with this one so some text and images can't be viewed.

Rally Software, the parent behind this product, doesn't even have a mobile optimized version of their core agile product [1]. It's outrageously frustrating when I need to update my tasks or add stories on the go.

[1] http://www.rallydev.com/

Experimental mobile support for the core product, ALM: https://github.com/RallySoftwareLabs/alm-mobile

I am also confused what this is. I think it is a dashboard of tasks for a GitHub project. If so, why not just use GitHub issues directly for the task list?

I believe the idea is that Waffle makes it easier to prioritize and organize issues, e.g. GitHub issues + kanban

We use kanban for the Brackets[1] project, so I've been looking into tools like this recently. The most promising one I've seen so far is Octokan[2]. What I like about Octokan is that it:

1. uses GitHub Issue labels to represent the columns (unlike Waffle) 2. doesn't require all of our open issues to be "on the board" 3. is faster than Huboard 4. uses horizontal scrolling with fixed width columns like Trello rather than trying to pack all of the columns into the width of the window (also in contrast to Huboard)

We currently use Trello for our backlog and kanban[3] but it is kind of painful to synchronize this with GitHub (and so we don't... there's a lot of "small item" work that happens only in GitHub and is not tracked through our kanban flow).

None of the tools I've seen provide us with cycle time and throughput metrics, which is a drag. We're likely to write a script to pull the data out of GitHub and calculate those values. (GitHub, alas, does not track when labels are added or removed... so we have to start there in our custom work.)

I think it's great that there are people building better visualizations on top of GitHub Issues and I'm looking forward to seeing how tools like Waffle, Octokan, Huboard, etc. evolve.

[1]: http://brackets.io [2]: http://octokan.com/ [3]: https://trello.com/b/LCDud1Nd/brackets

Communicating the progress of a project or feature is something really important I think open-source people need to realize, when they have a fairly non-technical audience.

I think GitHub milestones are central to productivity and communicating progress to a base of interested parties, so I would recommend focusing on milestones specifically—also to encourage their use—rather than showing one huge list of issues by default. It’s fairly disorienting, even to me as a regular GitHub user and contributor.

Those cards take up an awful lot of vertical space, which I don’t think is going to scale well with a large project. Look at project like Bootstrap: https://waffle.io/twbs/bootstrap. Because you load the issue on scroll, I can’t even get an idea of how many issues there are from the size of my scroll bar. Milestones are the main way for repo owners to manage a large number of issues.

From what I could tell, you can sort by milestones using a filter, but for some reason, the list of milestones wouldn’t load?

A while back, I created a small never-to-be-finished project called milestones.js to involve a general audience in the progress of upcoming features—taking advantage of milestones: https://github.com/ndarville/milestones.js. At the bottom of the README are some related projects that might be of interest to you as well.

In other words:

1. Find out who you want your users to be.

2. Find out what they should be shown.

3. Focus on milestones, GitHub’s killer productivity feature.

4. Fit more issues vertically; the card metaphor isn’t that important.

5. Know that the dynamic loading of issues on scroll is working against you from a UX perspective.

You need to clean up the wording some. When I first read

  Clicking that badge takes anyone to your public
  waffle.io board where users can view and edit tasks.

It sounds like random github users can decide what tasks get worked on. "Users" is vague here.

Also "opensource your workflow" isn't clear. I had no idea that meant "make your kanban board public".

Why not "Waffle.io is a public kanban board that deeply integrates with github issues"? Clear, to the point, no one complains that they can't tell what the product does.

the benefit of open sourcing my code is that other people can use it or contribute to it. why would i ever want to open source my task queue?

if this is a valid use case, how does this really differ from something like Github issues or a public Trello board?

comparing https://waffle.io/waffleio/waffle.io to https://trello.com/b/nC8QJJoZ/trello-development i'm having trouble differentiating.

As a recent comment suggests it's a "kanban board".

From the Trello wiki page - "Trello uses a paradigm for managing projects known as kanban"

To give you a real example, I recently talked with the founder of Neovim who chose Waffle to manage their large open source project (https://waffle.io/blog/2014/04/17/open-source-spotlight-neov...). The main reason they used Waffle over Trello was the integration with GitHub Issues (the Trello-Github integration options aren't great, and there's difficulty around trying to get people to update the status of work in a tool that doesn't tightly integrate with all of GitHub's Issues, commits, PR's, etc.)

I think something good might come out of this and I actually loved the name (I clicked on this because waffle.io souded cool). What I really think , in terms of design, is that you should get rid of that 3d rendered waffle.io image with that shadow. Not only it makes the website look like something of 5+ years ago but you can also see that the image is heavily compressed and is not looking good at all.

I have a rule, if I can't understand what your start-up is about from your home page then it won't work.

I think this is a fantastic idea. I've often felt that the Github issues page is too uninviting for non-developers (and that may be okay for lots of projects) but it's obvious to me how beneficial it is to provide a kanban interface for end-users that ties directly to the github issues.

Great idea. Obscure landing page.

It's practically impossible to know what this does,unless you click on the [our board] link. Even after scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page where you are asked to part with money.

It would be a shame for such a great idea to be passed by due to lack of clarity.

Like the old (now left to rot by Atlassian) Bitbucket Cards. This kind of scrum/kanban board with issues integration is really useful, I'm developing my version as well.

[1] http://www.bitbucketcards.com

This seems fairly similar to HuBoard. Anyone know of a reason to use this over that?

Other than taking the nominal appearance of a Kanban board, I can't figure out what is possible to do with this that isn't possible to do with Github issues, in a non-vertical format.

Notice that this app was created by a group of interns at Rally, which is a larger, publicly traded company. This isn't just someone's side project...

My favourite part about their front page is the quote at the bottom:

"A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap." - Mitch Hedberg

Awesome!! It remains me the UI of Trello boards which is pretty cool IMHO

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