It’s only taken six years, but the popular project management tool Trello — which was recently acquired by Atlassian — today launched its desktop apps for Mac, with the Windows app launching tomorrow. Until now, Trello only lived in the browser and while it worked really well, it also meant that it never quite felt integrated into any workflow that wasn’t browser-based.
Now, Trello users will get all of the usual features they know from the browser, with the added ability to get native desktop notifications and add cards from anywhere thanks to support for plenty of keyboard shortcuts, for example — and you can do all of that without being tempted to surf over to Facebook when you’re done. If you’re using an Apple laptop with the Touch Bar, then will also be able to use that to create new cards and open boards in a new window with just a tap.
Why did it take the company so long to launch these desktop apps? “The desktop app has been on our roadmap and something we’ve wanted to do, but as a scrappy startup we couldn’t do everything at once so we decided to focus on making our mobile and web experiences great for our users,” Trello co-founder and CEO Michael Pryor told me. “Now under Atlassian, we have the resources to bring things to market faster and can deliver some of our most exciting features yet, like the desktop app.”
The desktop apps are today’s flagship announcement, but it’s actually part of a larger update to the service. There’s now a new visual representation of the boards and cards that you attach to a Trello card, for example, that clearly shows that the attachment is indeed a card or board (and not just some link). That’ll make it easier to track cards from across multiple boards on a personal to-do list board, for example.
Given that Atlassian launched its Stride Slack-competitor last week, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Trello is getting some integrations with Stride now, too. Specifically, this means that you can now start Stride audio and video conferences right from within Trello so you can instantly start a conference call with all Trello board members without having to shift between different applications.
Trello is also making it easier to embed cards in apps like Bitbucket, Dropbox Paper, appear.in, Confluence Cloud and other applications.
Comment