Dashcube – Communicate In Context | Hacker News Reader

Dashcube – Communicate In Context

dashcube.com

Our company uses Trello and Slack. This is basically Trello + real time updates on the comments + separate user-to-user private chat. This could almost replace Trello for us but won't replace Slack.

Slack also has:

- very good mobile/desktop apps

- integrations

- fast search

- group chat rooms

The project replay feature is also cool but I'm discounting it because I can't think of a use for it as long as everything is timestamped.

Thanks for your feedback!

Specific notes:

- We have native mobile apps on iOS and Android. The links to both app stores are on the homepage. The apps are a bit rough around the edges, but we're working really hard on them.

- Integrations will come, as will importing.

- We do have fast search, in a drawer from the left.

- Every single task and project ("cube") functions like a group chat room. And there's rollup, meaning that if you are talking in a task, the discussion is visible on tasks above it in the hierarchy, all the way up to cube level.

The project replay feature is designed for things like project retrospectives, getting up to speed when joining a new project (aka "onboarding" which is usually painful), getting caught up when coming back from a vacation, etc.

By the way, I buried the lede: our point is that Trello (tasks, kanban) and Slack (chat) need to be first class citizens in the same app. Having two separate apps for this is the mistake of the industry -- e.g. Basecamp and Campfire being separate, etc.

This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN. (We also reverted to the HTML doc title because "Dashcube: the love child of Trello and Slack" seems a little feverish.)

All: it's not in your interests to ring-vote posts (i.e. to solicit upvotes for it). It's against the rules, incites the ring detector into demoting your story, and eventually will get your account penalized.

I was actually quoting a journalist (David Coleman, CMSWire) whose article was quoted at the top of the Dashcube homepage. I have no idea why a voting ring detection got triggered, but it's probably because everyone who has been working on Dashcube was excited and sharing with their friends. I've been on HN for years and am not a bad actor...

Yes, it's clear from the home page that you were quoting a journalist. That's not the problem; the problem is that that title violated the HN guidelines by being linkbait. We want titles that are accurate and neutral. Happy to change it again if you want to suggest a better one.

This is fine; thanks. Sorry about that...

Maybe it's just Safari in OS X Yosemite, but that animation that progresses as you scroll looks terrible. Jerky, not fluid, etc. These scrolling animations look really, really bad if you don't nail the execution, and they can actively hurt you if they work this poorly.

Yeah, we tried making it smoother in Safari by using CSS to enable hardware acceleration. However, doing this overrode the stacking context of the page.... which made it look worse.

I visited the landing page on Yosemite Safari and all looked smooth. Could it be an extension of yours botched by the update?

Eh, it doesn't look that bad. Not enough to make me question the product.

This is very interesting. We've been bounced through Trello/Asana/HipChat/Slack quite a bit, and definitely experience this problem.

Curious - how well does it support chat contexts not associated with tasks? Like general or subject-based group chat?

Also - one of Slack's major advantages is it works great everywhere (web/desktop/mobile). Attaching task tracking to a mobile chat app seems like an incredibly difficult UI/UX problem.

Right now chats are either private messages or else they are on a task. We probably need to generalize this though, since not everything is a task.

Our mobile apps are interesting. We are experimenting with both the iOS and Android apps and still working out some of the UX kinks. (Right now, for example, we have hamburger menus, etc.)

This seems like an awesome project. I have two issues. One people get tired of moving between systems, it's an easy sell for me to move to something better, but a hard sell for my team. Two, how does this product ensure security for intellectual property?

Thanks!

In terms of convincing your team, we need to build importers to import popular tools (e.g. Trello, Pivotal, Slack, Asana). What do you use?

In terms of security and IP: the security model is at the cube level. Anyone you add to a cube can see the tasks and conversation inside it. Private conversations are between you and the other person, and are not attached to cubes.

In terms of hosting, we're on AWS. Eventually we may offer a hosted option for companies that this is a deal-breaker for, but that would be priced at Enterprise levels. If you're interested, please let me know...

The killer app in messaging will continue to be presence awareness. I have yet to find an app that effectively communicates that I'm away from my desk after 5 minutes but still available through my mobile device.

We've been debating whether to differentiate between "online" and "mobile". The obvious answer is to do so, but it might be that with phones being better etc some people prefer to just use the mobile app for much of the day, especially if they only have one monitor...

A friend of mine tried to do something a bit like this; it's all MIT licensed on GitHub now.

https://github.com/Founden

I really like this. I find a lot of communication and task tracking apps offer more than I need.

My only gripe is that the UI needs a little more colour. :P

The UI is intended to be something that is pleasant to look at for hours, since ideally we want it to be left open all day on a second monitor. So we didn't make it bright and shiny...

"Chris and Robert Carkhuff currently own the majority of Dashcube."

That's a pretty weird thing to put on your homepage, right?

They're more active than typical investors, but it does sound weird. Fixing.

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