Luckily for me, Joel Spolsky isn’t a prolific blogger – so I can read most of what he writes during occasional visits of his blog. And when he writes, it pays to read his words. You may not always agree with his points of view, but he will have you thinking – and that’s a good thing.
Another good thing is his announcement of Trello. Trello is a web-based applications, that essentially allows you to juggle with lists of “cards” on a “board” – you can think of it a tool to play with small, adhesive note slips on a virtual wall. Sounds simple, and it is simple, actually. Trello is smart enough to help you organize the cards and lists and boards in a more sophisticated way, by providing the possibility to add dates and “organisations” of users. That’s why some call it a Kanban tool: one of the possible applications is indeed a Kanban board.
But Trello can do more than that. Use it to manage your personal to-do list, or to organize projects, or to gather ideas around a specific subject. I can see how it can help you structure and write articles or even a book. And that’s where Trello differs from more project-specifc tools like Basecamp. Basecamp has projects, customers, to-do’s, calendars and a dashboard – a practical approach. But if you want to organize your projects other than by calendar, then it gets harder. And that’s where Trello could help you, with its more unstructured concepts of lists and cards. No, Trello isn’t “better” than Basecamp, it’s different.
I could help but think of Wikis, when I found that Trello allows you to use Markdown markup in your cards. Simple markup for texts in combination with a lot of freedom in how you organize your content: two essential features of a Wiki. But Trello isn’t a Wiki: it has more structure than a Wiki (which only has “pages”), and it does not use a Wikilink mechanism to connect bits and pieces of the content. Still…
You can use Trello for free, and if Joel can be trusted that will be the case for a long time – so why not give it a try?
