Show HN: A beautiful, elegant and simple task manager | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A beautiful, elegant and simple task manager

gennubi.com

28 pointskkalra42 comments

Straight flow of thought:

Try it for free - cool. What's happened? I'm at a login screen. This isn't sign up. There is no sign up link here. Let's go back. Back isn't working! Oh, new tab opened (why do that?)

Back to main page, let's look for signup again. Nope. Back to 'Try it for free'. Oh, there is a 'signup', but it's in a really pale font and doesn't look like a link. Make account (sigh)

Learn to use NubiDo - double click me. Double clicking makes a box slide in from the side. Am I supposed to just play around with this?

Maybe I have to double-click on the yellow box at the left hand side? Nope, single clicked, and it is gone. How do I learn how to use nubido now? Click around a bit trying to find 'bring back finished tasks', nothing. I can't find out how to use nubido. I'm leaving. (End of session)

There are quite a lot of pain points there. I genuinely at the end don't know how I'm suppose to learn how to use nubido.. is the assumption I'll just click around and pick it up?

Bonus comment about me using your product:

I know you aren't going to want to hear this, but I suspect too many people have got burnt by task managers disappearing on short notice. You (in my opinion) have to be clear up front about how I'm not going to lose all my data when you pack up.

At the very least you need a way of me getting all my data out.

I just use a Trello board for my personal todo lists, it's simple and I know it won't be going away anytime soon. You can add attachments, due dates and all sorts of nice little things in a card. I use it to manage projects with collaborators too so everything is in one place which is nice for me.

When apps describe themselves as "beautiful" and "elegant," it rubs me the wrong way. Those are subjective things that I decide, not the developer(s). It's like a mother telling everyone how handsome her son is. If he's handsome, people will probably know it already.

I disagree. Someone describing their app as "beautiful" or "elegant" tells me that they really care about the beauty and elegance of the app and have spent time to make it so to the point where they are confident in attaching those adjectives to it. In my opinion, this is a good thing, because we need more people who actually care about what they build. I think that the audience being the ultimate judge, while true, is besides the point.

At the bottom there may be an element of advertising. There's so much code out there, and labels such as 'beautiful' and 'elegant' make an app stand out - in a similar way that a shampoo bottle having 'extreme pro plus' slapped onto it might. That and hipster prestige.

Mostly true - labels like "beautiful" and "elegant" make an app stand out when those labels are applied by other people, and not the developer of the app.

True, but this style of advertising is straight from Apple's playbook, and it didn't seem to rub many people the wrong way when they did it.

老王卖瓜，自卖自夸

Google Translate sez... Pharaoh praises puff. Thanks, I guess!

> Someone describing their app as "beautiful" or "elegant" tells me that they really care about the beauty and elegance of the app

When I see an app described as beautiful or elegant, I assume that it lacks important features. I assume the same when an app is described as lightweight. When I see an app described by critics as bloated or having a steep learning curve, I assume it might be useful.

Yikes, I think people missed your point.

From the beginning of the internet until maybe 3 or so years ago - in a majority of cases, design was an afterthought. Only functionality mattered.

More recently this has changed. Is calling your app beautiful and elegant overdone and maybe even a little cocky? Probably. However I personally really like applications that look beautiful.

For whatever psychological reason it may be, I simply enjoy the experience more. Take the chrome extension Momentum [0] for example. The only thing I get out of it is when I open a new tab, I see a pretty picture. However I _like_ that pretty picture and it enhances my experience. Logically, I can't come up with a solid argument - it might even be complete bullshit - but as soon as I'm on a computer that doesn't have it, I feel like I'm missing something.

[0]: http://momentumdash.com/

To clarify, I'm definitely, 100% not saying that you should never work on the appearance and interactions of your app. I'm a firm believer that this will totally make or break an app's success. I'm just saying that calling your app pretty isn't necessary.

You're website is not user friendly and I cannot try a way to actually test this on my number one object of task management: my phone. The movie isn't playing either so I'm asking my questions here in hope someone can share some details.

How is this app different from others? Personally I use Todoist as a paid user. It has projects, tags, nesting, task sharing with other users, integration with all platforms including mobile and common applications as chrome and Outlook. In addition it has a load of other minor useful functions as email reminders, adding tasks via email and much more. What would this task manager bring me? Why should I switch?

A quick list of their key selling points: - beautiful design (top just for fun)

- access to tasks everywhere.

- filters, searches, tagging

- collaborate on shared tasks

- projects, tasks, subproject, subtasks

- recurring tasks

- notifications

- human due dates for quick entering (tomorrow, next week, today, or pick a date)

- priorities assignable to tasks (also searchable and filterable)

- notes attachable to tasks, a bit like Evernote has.

- realtime syncing (actually really important)

And they have an API that can be quite handy.

Couple of quick comments on the landing page.

  * The content in the video is too small to see what's going on without going full screen and then it's blurry
  * The color choices need to be redone

The grey text on grey background in the sidebar and the calendar are nearly impossible for me to read and I don't have an issue with color blindness or anything. There's just not enough contrast and the typeface is very thin/fine.

The red text on the sidebar is glaring and also hard to read. The red chosen is also used in the calendar and makes it difficult to read the date or anything else that might be in the calendar square.

I couldn't get past this to give it a longer look it was just too off putting.

The page itself isn't yet optimized for mobile. That's coming soon. If you view the video in full screen mode, it's a lot clearer. There'll be an option to select the color scheme in a future release.

I'm looking at it on a macbook pro 17". I can't see what's happening in the video because the recorded area is too big and the video plays by default too small. This isn't a mobile issue, and on desktop when going fullscreen the video is blurry.

For me there won't be a "future" release because the landing page itself (the looks of the app) turned me off. The color scheme is garish, at best.

I'm not trying to be rude just give very honest feedback.

No, this is not "beautiful, elegant, and simple". It's ugly, the login page makes me think of 2003, and it's completely unintuitive. I hate it when people call their program "beautiful", but usually they at least have put a modicum of design work into it.

There are loads of spelling mistakes - I'd start by fixing "Managment"!

Thanks. I'm surprised the web authoring tool didn't catch that.

Perhaps this is really mean or unfair, but to use your words, "We're surprised you didn't catch that."

Some opinions on the app:

1) Signup is annoying, but at least you let me use it right away without clicking on some verification link that is now in my inbox

2) Something about the login/signup form design says this app is not very good or perfectly sculpted. Maybe it's the padding between the text fields or how little space you use of the giant browser window there is. Take a look at Google's or the modal form on AirBnb. There's space, sensible padding and layout.

3) When I first log into the app and see "Double Click Me" and I double click it, the right-slide-in modal is fine, but it blocks out rest of the UI. What I would prefer to do (and would expect it to do) is just slide in without dimming rest of the interface. That right-pane should remain in place when I click on another item. It should repopulate with that item's details. Dimming and drawing attention to the right-pane is fine for the "Learn to use NubiDo" but for everything else, it feels pedantic

4) Is there a better name than NubiDo? This comment feels shallow, but I am not sure anyone would take an app with the name "NubiDo" seriously. Sounds like (and maybe it is) "Newbie Do" which doesn't sit right in the mouth and just sounds funny. There's gotta be a better noun or a verb you can use. Even Any.do, Evernote, OmniFocus, or Wunderlist is better. Even better are simple and grounded names like Things. Yes, a good domain is probably hard to find these days, but I think you need a better name than NubiDo. You can get creative with .ly or .io domain extensions and pre/suffix like "get" or "app" in your domain names...

Not a bad effort by any stretch. Just not up to snuff to be converting users from their faithful and already-established gtd tools.

The pricing should be clear up-front. How does one delete an account?

If you happen to be working with Django you can use django-todo. It works well for simple project management for small teams.

https://github.com/shacker/django-todo

I expected the "Try it for free" button to redirect me to a web app. Not a login page.

I think end users should be able to demo the app - even a simplified, I'm-not-going-to-remember-any-of-your-stuff version before even signing up.

The big reason why I clicked this link in the first place is to answer this question: is this app worth my time?

The todo app market is heavily saturated, so answering that question up front will be key to your success. And if you're forcing me to sign up (putting a wall in my face) just to get a glimpse of it, I'm inclined to think this app is not worth my time.

As everyone else has already said, the design needs some work - the landing page, the sign up process, and the actual app. You should definitely check out some of the landing page templates and app templates at themeforest.net. At a minimum you can use these for inspiration/examples of attractive landing pages and apps.

I only played with the actual app for a couple of minutes, but it feels pretty solid...and fast. What did you use to build it?

Yes, the landing page and sign up process are a work in progress at the moment. The client app was built using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) but with significant custom development. The backend is Java/MongoDB/AWS and some other services.

Please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131650 That website is very smooth in how it handles the demo and signup process. Yours ends it abruptly with the sign up page that opens up a new page.

It looks like a lot of work went into it so nice job on that.

But there's something about the design that feels very "off". It's very unconventional but in a very bad way that both looks ugly and feels confusing. "Beautiful, elegant and simple" don't cross my mind at all.

Wow a lot of comments about the landing page and login screen. Did anyone even bother to look at the app itself? It actually seems pretty cool. Don't know if I'd switch from my listing app just yet, but it's a good start and an interesting direction.

But yes, fix the login screen...

If you don't want to have your data sitting in the cloud somewhere, try this:

http://goryachev.com/products/taskmaster/index.html

I'm going to guess this is Apple only? The only giveaway on that is the picture of the Mac on the front page, but it never explicitly states what platform it's for.

It's web based although it does follow an Apple like look and feel.

Looking at the screen shots, there's nothing to clue me in on the idea that it's running in a browser.

Your demo video is too small to read any of the words and there is no sound. So, I couldn't learn anything from it.

The video doesn't play on my Chrome (loads though).

Version 36.0.1985.125 m (Windows 8.1 Enterprise OS)

>beautiful

lol

that's what i thought too. A lot of people probably won't even sign up to test it after seeing the screenshots. It looks more like a functional prototype "designed" by a programmer...

To be fair the overall look and feel is not that bad, it's just a regular case of programmer colors, which is easy to fix.

There will be an option for color schemes in a future release. This is just phase 1 of many.

I'm afraid that you should have waited a phase or two before posting this on HN. I wonder if users will ever see your next phase. A tip for the future would be to better consider your moment of first introduction. All of the comments in this thread could easily be made by no more than 10 people outside your everyday test environment. Think about family, friends, neighbouring companies who haven't seen the product yet, etc. Just 10 and you might have altered your first introduction from not so much (except info) into a success.

Beauty is subjective. Though, I wouldn't consider this elegant as it feels more styleless than stylish.

this is exactly what I have needed. well done and can't wait to start using

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