Is the great accessibility intentional? If not, you should know you're on the right track. The app is basically usable with a screen reader, and that's something you can't say about most task trackers. If you want to keep it that way, my hn username at gmail.
The homepage is a white screen with JavaScript disabled.
If requiring JS to render the homepage is a conscious decision made considering the various tradeoffs, please at least add a message saying so in a noscript tag.
Would love to know the tradeoffs. The main page at least is a static marketing page. Surely a canonical case where the page should render under almost any circumstances.
I imagine the only problem here is the maximum-scale parameter. Is that so, or are there other ones?
I haven't touched a frontend for a few years. It was the case that this tag was needed to display anything on mobile (and Google would all but delist you if you omitted it or used it incorrectly). I imagine things have improved. The optimist in me would like to think that the tag isn't even necessary anymore, but I can't trust that guy.
I never notice this. On Firefox mobile there is an option to always allow zooming and it works well. I agree with you though. Using such an option should not be needed.
There are limited situations where I as a user really do want pinch-to-zoom disabled. Primary example would be browser-based games. Depending on what gestures the game uses, I sometimes end up zooming accidentally on mobile, which is super annoying.
Id prefer a "lock zoom" button in the browser, but I understand that may not benefit someone who never opens a browser menu and just wants a website to work.
The problem with adding buttons is that you end up with a lot of buttons. Which is then a cause of people not opening browser menus.
Separately, it makes more sense to me for websites to set the default they think is best, and then let users override it. This can be done today in any browser with a bookmarklet.
(None of this is to excuse websites which abuse their power. I just don't think removing that power is the right solution, at least not here.)
Wow. That landing page is bad. I learned that some successful people and businesses use Workflowy, but I didn’t learn what Workflowy is or why I might need it. Is the desktop page better than the mobile one?
Nope, there's nothing on the desktop page either. I have no idea what Workflowy is after visiting the site. There's an email list signup, a login button, and some blurbs about how Twitter and the NYT use the software. But nowhere that explains or shows what the software is.
Edit: Wait! Click on the tiny barely-readable links in the bottom corner of the page (at least on desktop) that say "List Maker" or "Online Notepad" (they both are different URLs, but link to the same page). Then you get an interactive demo.
After looking at that demo, I think Disco is ahead feature- and presentation-wise. I don't see any way to do the status tracking/people pictures/coloring showcased on Disco's landing page in Workflowy.
> Wait! Click on the tiny barely-readable links in the bottom corner of the page (at least on desktop) that say "List Maker" or "Online Notepad" (they both are different URLs, but link to the same page). Then you get an interactive demo.
I saw those links and clicked on one. I thought that it was for a different product!
I like Workflowy but the core feature of this app (infinite progress rollups) is not present in Workflowy. I find that Workflowy barely works as a task progress tracker because it doesn't have any real native support for that workflow other than marking items as completed. So besides both apps being outline editors, I feel like you're really overstating this.
I'd call it ironic, although I'd find it difficult to define what sort of irony is used. Something to do with it having a dramatic self-referential twist. Maybe this is a US/UK difference in meaning? (I'm from the UK)
It doesn't really seem like a clone. It looks like it is expanding on the core idea but adding deeper project management states. At least, I can't find out how to have the orange green etc. in Workflowey.
WorkFlowy is an awesome app that I would recommend to anyone as an idea/note organizer. DiscoTask is very similar in so far as it is based around nested lists. However, DiscoTask is not a competitor to WorkFlowy; it’s made specifically for bigger teams with many projects and is really meant to (eventually) compete with apps like Trello and Jira.
I built something like this as well called TVSK (ios only): check it out here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tvsk. My app allows you to estimate time of subtasks and see it bubble up through parent projects.
If you're developing on OSX, I recommend turning on scrollbars to make this more obvious.
It looks like there's the beginnings of keyboard shortcuts? (like tab and shift tab) I think for this to really appeal to power users, there should be very good keyboard shortcuts. And for an app like this, I'd think most users would be more on the power side.
When clicking on a task to drill into it, I wish it had a focused input ready for my to type right away.
So far this looks pretty cool. I think it's a good idea, and it looks pretty promising.
I love Trello so I checked it out..
Seems like a really good idea.
I would use it, but I would worry about losing all my shit if it moved to a payed model.. Maybe keep the existing features free always, and only charge for future features?
Also visually, its white with lots of almost white / grey stuff.. Its really hard to see anything!
I will probably keep it free for teams with one member, and charge monthly for additional members. I’ll be adding an import / export feature that will hopefully make people more comfortable using such an early stage product.
100% this. I'm wary of getting too invested in this with no guarantee that I'll be able to keep my stuff if I choose to not pay on whatever arbitrary date that is pushed.
I’d be weary too, that’s why I’ll be adding import export soon, and I’m leaning towards never charging for single users. No promises though since I don’t know what kind of expense that will be for me. This is a bootstrapped product.
I like the concept and would absolutely try it out, but it requires too much clicking.
There is no keyboard navigation at all, not even closing modals or selecting items in the dropdowns. Being able to navigate through the tasks and expand with the arrow keys would be awesome.
Is this really doing something complicated enough that I need an account for it? And why would I ever want to make an account with no demo or any idea of what this thing does and is about aside from two vague sentences?
1. Adding an item - when pressing Enter to create it, the resulting (static) text moves 1px down and left relative to where the edit field was. It's a smaller thing but annoying.
2. It's possible to add empty items, so holding Enter down will create a long list of nothing.
3. There's no easy way to delete items, e.g. erroneously created ones.
4. There's no easy way to edit items either. This appears to require 3 left-clicks at least - 2 too many.
5. Text size and spacing is too large and non-adjustable. The thing with ToDo lists is that you'll definitely want to cram as much items on the screen as possible.
6. Adding a brand new label is somewhat confusing, because, apparently, the label first needs to be created and then, separately, assigned. This is not obvious, nor expected.
All in all though (and ghost scrollbars notwithstanding) it looks nice and simple, but the UX needs a bit of polish.
PS. The name is not very memorable. Perhaps consider changing it while you are not too far in with the current choice?
It does, because it's an outliner with a progress bar and some tagging bolted on top. It does look nice though, in a way non-Emacs users might appreciate. I can entirely imagine myself - from the alternate reality where I didn't know about Org Mode - using this for personal projects.
But enough with the criticism. I like how this looks like a nice, self-contained product. And I love that the author understands that tasks are subdivisible to more than one level. I'm really, really fed up with the usual issue trackers and project management tools we use in this industry - all of them limit your tasks to one, at best two levels.
(I wish someone one day would recognize that tasks don't form trees, but directed graphs; Org Mode, being an outliner, doesn't handle this, but I'm surprised no other tool seems to handle it either.)
> And I love that the author understands that tasks are subdivisible to more than one level.
Absolutely! This is the first thing I check for trying out a new app. It's amazing that people think one level can be enough for anyone ("oh, but you can add a level by putting these tasks into a list and another one by putting that into a project ..." dude, why?).
> I wish someone one day would recognize that tasks don't form trees, but directed graphs
It's not that nobody realized, project management is not a new field, there are already MS Project and Project Libre.
What seems to be missing is a personal version that's really easy enough to be used for personal projects.
A note about the graph representation:
You're right, it's really not always a tree, which is why I think there should be cross connections. For about 95% of cases however I'd consider a tree sufficient.
A general note about tree based thought management:
I currently use Dynalist (similar to Workflowy) to manage my ideas. I generally love it (though it could also profit from a feature to branch out into a graph).
A part of that is task management as well, with the best motivation to use it being the nesting, but it's lacking a bunch of festures on that front, so I imagine it being petty cool being able to replace it. Eventually though I'd like to be able to keep my tree of thought in a single application. Do you think your app could be extended a bit to support that (it's probably not much, since the general management is almost the same)? If I'm going to pay 5€/month (or what price are you thinking of?) I'd probably want that, as well as very easy complete export in an open format.
> (I wish someone one day would recognize that tasks don't form trees, but directed graphs; Org Mode, being an outliner, doesn't handle this, but I'm surprised no other tool seems to handle it either.)
Does org-edna help any? Although it doesn't help with viewing them as graphs, it may help with making TODOs act like graphs.
Haven't used it yet, but skimming the documentation, it does seem to look like half of the picture. The other half would be a way to get a critical path analysis out of it, and somehow visualize everything together in a way that makes it easy to notice where you have slack or underutilization.
Tasks could have more logical structure than a dependency graph. You can imagine a kind of programming language for tasks with conditional logic, loops, exceptions, blocking I/O, etc. I don’t know if this has been explored?
I don't know. But thinking about it, writing code with complex structure usually makes sense only when it's executed more than once. Which leads me to think that the best place to look for insights on representing tasks are code isn't task management, where everything is unique and one-off, but process management, where a whole graph of tasks is executed repeatedly.
Similarly to a regular one - except you could subdivide tasks as much as needed and specify dependency relationships between them. You wouldn't have problems representing all too common situations where one task is a subtask of two other tasks, or where one task has a hard dependency of another task's subtask. You could view tasks to be done as a network, using critical path analysis to get a better picture of how long things are going to take, and how much slack you have in the project.
I think Phabricator has implemented this behavior with parent/sub tasks. Tasks in manifest[0] are a node in a network, where a task can refer to multiple parents and sub tasks.
I didn't know that. I've heard mixed things about Phabricator before, so I've never really bothered to play with it. I guess this is a good time to check it out. Thanks!
Frankly the core applications (code & projects) are not that bad, I've deployed it at $work. There's a too wide functionalities spread to my taste (lots of half-started applications), and no real support for managing deadlines in tasks/project (with ideally resource management).
I really love this as it might obviate Trello - I have two details that might add to the experience.
Drag and drop functionality to move bullets and lists up and down so that points aren’t locked into the order you input them in (exactly how Trello works)
Support for link recognition (any link will auto underline and become a working web link)
Drag and drop exists in the current version, just click and drag the bullet point of the task you want to move. Also should work on mobile.
Link recognition exists for task descriptions and comments (select a task and click "Details & comments"). There is no link recognition for titles because clicking a title already has an action associated with it, this would lead to a UI problem if a task title is just a link with no other text.
Thanks for the feedback!
Me too, I will probably add this in the future.
In the meantime, you can kind of get around this by creating subtasks of the task that is blocked by more than one thing, and each subtask can be blocked by a different task. The benefit of this is that you end up being more explicit about what is causing a task to be blocked.
I actually like the candide talk, commonly you have two options. 1. Invest a good amount of time researching and making sure to write a privacy policy that match the your goals for the site short term and long term. 2. Copy one and hope for the best.
This third option is nice, is honest, it's not a lie, and makes clear to the end user who is responsible.
Really nice! I would love to add all my notes here, but I sometimes needs to include images, and this is a blocking feature for me. Any plan to include that?
A really nice to have would be to have inline Latex mathematical formula, but it may be too specific for your app.
I generally like the idea but I'm not sure why you need the full name at sign up? There's no need within the product to have my full name. Also, it requires at least two words which is not necessarily the case for all names worldwide.
Full name is just for a better autocomplete experience when writing comments and assigning tasks.
Also interesting that some people have one word names, I’ll keep that in mind!
One piece of feedback: please don't require unique usernames. You already have a unique email address, and it's a pain to have to remember another unique username for another site when the first thing I try isn't available.
you don’t really need to remember your username. Log in with email password and you can see your username from the profile screen. I added usernames as the method for team organizers to invite you to their team. Had I gone with email I’d be collecting the email addresses of people who didn’t sign up for DiscoTask, which I don’t really want to do.
Another site that shows a completely blank page when first-party cookies are disabled.
It seems like an epidemic lately. So much JS in the wild just stops cold when some cookie or LocalStorage permission isn't available, and that failure prevents some other JS from running that unhides the page or runs a CSS transition. It doesn't seem like long ago when most sites at least showed some content when cookies were disabled, but that's beginning to feel like the exception.
Expecting first-party cookies to work is a reasonable assumption on site's developers part. Blocking these is rarely well-justified, so supporting this case is largely pointless.
Session cookies is a perfectly fine option that eliminates the need to pass the session id in each every URL. Sticky cookies are also something that most people will actually want because it helps improving the UX on the site on return visits. If you don't want either, in principle, clear them. This can be trivially automated in a wide variety of ways.
* That said, I agree that the site rendering shouldn't depend on the cookie access. But it's almost certainly an oversight of not testing for a marginal case that vanishingly few people have. So loudly moaning about it looks very odd - you are complaining about something that nobody needs. Just like a website not rendering well in Lynx.
Not all browsers, on all devices, make it trivial to set cookie permissions so flexibly. And, as I said, it's not just about cookies, but also about LocalStorage and such APIs--which, historically, if not presently, do not always behave as desired with regard to clearing data. Forgive me for not wanting to grant all sites the permission to use them automatically.
I'm sure that, to many such webmasters (may I use that term?), I am indeed a nobody. Still, the Web is worse for it--a significant regression in usability and compatibility. Feel free to ignore my "loud moaning"--maybe the OP will appreciate the bug report.
I dont think a hierarchical structure is the best way to handle something like this, as deeply nested items might also be depended on by elements from other branches.
