7 ms·

&! (and bang), project management for teams

189 points by bpierre 15y ago

Soliah 15y ago
I've registered but after clicking the "and bang!" button I get nothing. I also noticed that tabbing between the username field causes a delay. Probably to do with the username availability check.
- adambrault 15y ago
  What browser?
tommi 15y ago
Yet another IRC copy?
viraptor 15y ago
> "What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done. So true. I don't believe this solves the problem though. I rarely got asked those questions. But when I did, the person just wanted more and more information: so how long is it going to take, when did you start, at what stage are you, does anyone else need to get involved, is there something to be prepared, etc. This is crazy and tools could not help. Everyone else knew that, yes, everyone is busy with something and that they can just look at what's "in progress" on the bug tracker... Technology won't always solve personality problems. Also - Teambox seems to be similar and also provide the facebook/twitter-like status updates.
FreshCode 15y ago
Looks great, but less caps.
zobzu 15y ago
Someone went to far with the web-design-marketing ;-) Pink, contrasts too much caps makes the site difficult to read.
- pjscott 15y ago
  I like the pink, in principle; it really draws your eye. The problem is that it draws your eye to disjointed phrases that don't make sense unless you read some of the surrounding non-pink context, creating a confusing effect to readers who are skimming the page.
noinput 15y ago
just signed up and so far it's working great. really appreciate the teams of 2 are always free mentality. didn't realize how many tag-team ventures i had that actually make sense with this model. looking forward to giving this a good run.
adambrault 15y ago
Hi, Adam Brault, &yet CEO here. Thanks for trying &bang. Our team has worked hard on it and we have a lot more work in store for it. We've gotten some incredibly useful feedback so far (lots of "Well, duh!" moments). We certainly would be grateful for any feedback you have and would be glad to answer any questions.
- ephermata 15y ago
  It's wonderful that you have "give us feedback" as one of the initial tasks in the first team created. It's less wonderful that there is no obvious way to give you that feedback. Five minutes in and already I'm falling behind on shipping! On a different note: I actually need to recruit people I don't previously know to my team. Would it be possible to add a landing page for a team that signs up the person and then auto-ads them to that team. This would have a hard-to-guess URL, so I would have confidence that only people I recruited (or their friends) would show up. Finally, I just need to ask, are you fans of http://www.mspaintadventures.com http://www.mspaintadventures.com ?
  - adambrault 15y ago
    Good point and cool idea about the custom invite URL. I've seen mspaintadventures.com and was entertained... why? :)
  - ephermata 15y ago
    I can't seem to reply directly to adambrault. Just to expand on why I asked about MS Paint adventures. The aesthetic is similar -- although of course &! is about productivity instead of kids playing a most dangerous game, the emphasis on awesomeness, the suspense, etc. are shared.
- rwhitman 15y ago
  Things we use at work that I wished this plugged into: Jira, Github, Basecamp, Google apps
  - adambrault 15y ago
ramanujan 15y ago
This is really very awesome. The keyboard shortcuts [1] are particularly well done and worth trying out. Just a really great version 1. Down the line, it'd be amazing to have some sort of Github/Github Enterprise integration and/or Salesforce integration. [1] Too few people focus on these, but they are absolutely key to get power users for webapps or apps in general. This is why Gmail is irreplaceable if you need a webmail ui and can't use gnus for some reason. The funny thing is that it's not that hard to build an app around keyboard shortcuts if you design it that way from the beginning. Hopefully we'll see more of this.
- HenrikJoreteg 15y ago
  Thanks! We've got lots of interesting integration ideas in the pipeline. Stay tuned :)
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  Keyboard shortcuts are awesome[1], though they do tend to interfere with keyboard-based browsers. Right now I use Conkeror, which is Emacs-inspired Mozilla-based browser, and encountered some problems with webpage and browser shortcuts interfering witch each other. Sometimes it's annoying (Twitter, SMBC), sometimes it renders the webpage keyboard shortcuts unusable (&!) [2]. I know that people using keyboard browsers are probably the 0.005% of users and thus not worth optimizing Internet for; however as the keyboard shortcuts become more and more popular among webpages, it might be interesting to talk about how to make them well. Should everyone design their own shortcuts, or are there operations so common across webpages, that it would be better to have universal keyboard shortcuts configured browser-side? [1] - I got addicted to keyboard shortcuts in GMail, they're great! :). [2] - fortunately, all of this is (AFAIK) solvable by writing a major mode for given webpage.
- adambrault 15y ago
  Cool! Thanks! ...and you're right: we actually did design it from day one to be a very enjoyable and fast keyboard experience.
michaeldhopkins 15y ago
I'm using this with some projects and enjoying it. Overall I agree it's a very fast way to know what everyone's doing. It is suited for a desk environment since it is desktop-only. (It's closest to working on the iPad but has some bugs.) The price seems a bit much, but we haven't fully ramped up usage and we'd happily pay for anything working well for us.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
antimora 15y ago
I don't get it. What's this? Could this be explained without requiring me to sign up?
- robryan 15y ago
  I thought the landing page explained it pretty well.
  - Groxx 15y ago
    With a small feature list and small, extremely-cropped screenshots? Not even close, in my book. Maybe those represent it accurately, but we have no way of knowing because it's just face + icon + snippet - context - content.
    - adambrault 15y ago
      Yep. It needs to get a lot better. We'll work on that.
  - antimora 15y ago
    Here is Copy-Paste from the home page. At what point should I start understanding what this is? I think I get that there is a suspense point and make me curious, but not strong enough to make me sigh up. In fact I will rather never sign for anything unless I have to. TONS OF TIME GETS WASTED KEEPING YOUR TEAM ON THE SAME PAGE. MEETINGS STRANGLE PRODUCTIVITY. NOBODY GETS IN THE ZONE WITH MORE EMAIL. NAGGING IS A DRAG FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED. WHAT IF SAME-PAGIFYING JUST HAPPENED AUTOMAGICALLY? GET READY TO MEET &!Realtime mind-meldification for teams. Wooooo! Sign up now!let's do this thing Or read on... LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY SHALL WE? IT'S ALL ABOUT SHIPPING Finishing's the hardest part. &! keeps you focused on the most important things—there's no room for anything else. Ship stuff today! DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL "What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done. Never do it again. Ever. Ever! etc etc ...
    - adambrault 15y ago
iand 15y ago
Can't even see site intro because my mobile browser doesn't support websockets. Please fix so I can at least read about why I might want to use your app when I get to a pc with a modern browser.
- adambrault 15y ago
  Good point. Forgive the dirty websockets check. We're going to do this better.
  - ramchip 15y ago
    Same thing here (as a non-mobile Opera user). But it's understandable for such a new site.
doctororange 15y ago
Hey cool! We're a team of two so I'll be trying this out for sure. Your landing page lured me in perfectly. By the way, your <article> tags are rendering with a white background-color, but I assume they're meant to be transparent/#202020. I'm using FF 7.0.1.
- adambrault 15y ago
  Yeah, suddenly border-image rendering changed in Chrome between versions and Firefox got the short end of the stick. Sorry!
  - doctororange 15y ago
    Hm, maybe it's the border-image. For me, specifying `background-color: transparent;` to `#home article` fixes things right up, at least in firebug.
    - adambrault 15y ago
      Yep, and then, if I recall (and without looking), it removes the background on Chrome entirely (leaving it transparent and grey and unreadable instead of white in the center). I messed with it for a couple hours to get Chrome and Firefox to render the same and eventually gave up and moved on to more important things, but it's on my list to investigate.
bjornsteffanson 15y ago
This absolutely needs an interface demo. While the page looks nice, I have no idea what the product actually does, and I'm not really interested in giving up my email address just to find out...
- Palomides 15y ago
  or at least larger screenshots
Vivtek 15y ago
The service itself looks awesome, but let me just say that the landing page is fantastic - just the right balance between humor and information to keep me reading to find out details as they occurred to me, gave me an option to sign up right at the top, but then kept explaining more without making me click to another page to do it. I am truly in awe of that landing page.
- adambrault 15y ago
  Thanks. :) There are definitely tons of places it needs to be improved, but we appreciate the kind words!
sbecker 15y ago
Screencast: http://vimeo.com/31586105 http://vimeo.com/31586105
- heelhook 15y ago
  That screencast is unwatchable! Why are there two people talking at the same time???
- dereferenced2 15y ago
  Lol, this screencast is horrible. It's just one guy talking, but they edited the cuts so close to each other that he's overlapping himself talking. I guess it's "saving time" or "is stylish and cool". Obviously it was a conscious decision on their point, but it's a horrible idea. I don't think I'd trust a company that would put out something this bad as an official video.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - ehutch79 15y ago
    it's apparently been deleted
mperham 15y ago
I test drove it a few days ago. I really liked the UI (with keyboard shortcuts!) but found that it really didn't add value since we already use Pivotal Tracker. PT already has a notion of the story you are working on along with tasks for each story that you can quickly create and check off as you complete them. The group chat feature feels pretty simplistic and isn't even in the same ballpark as Campfire or HipChat. It's a promising design and feature set but still needs a lot of work to justify the high price.
jluan 15y ago
To my cranky old self, the overbearing similarity between this product (aimed at productivity) and services like Twitter and Facebook (aimed at fun), combined with the overly cheery, flippant color scheme, make it difficult for me to take my work in &! seriously and actually get things done.
daodennis 15y ago
Wohooo!
josscrowcroft 15y ago
It's .... it's ..... it's beautiful! :O
zbowling 15y ago
This may be useful for our daily scrum meetings to document tasks.
- fritzy 15y ago
  Howdy Zac! yeah, it's basically fallen out of our evolved scrumlike process. We'll likely add more features and polish in that direction.
JoshTriplett 15y ago
This looks a lot like a successful project status approach I've used on a previous project: everyone kept their status on a wiki, with a very short list of currently active work and a slightly longer list of pending work. Effectively, everyone shared their TODO list, and from the combined list you could tell at a glance what everyone worked on without having to ask or have status meetings. (Thus, meetings only existed to deal with actual blocking problems, and remained short.) Management within the team learned to look at that TODO list rather than asking for status reports; when management outside that team wanted a report on recent accomplishments, they got a rolled-up copy of completed TODO items with a few highlights called out at at the top. I like the idea of having a tool built around the same approach, assuming I've understood it correctly. A few bits of feedback on your launch page: While I found phrases like "mind-meldification" amusing, the first instance of such a phrase occurred when you said "same-pagifying", and that one in particular didn't so much strike me as amusing as pointy-haired-bossish; I almost closed the page right then. Also, do you really want to use the politically charged phrase "don't ask don't tell" in marketing copy? And finally, while I liked the repeated links to the register page, the one with the text "Try using it right now!" somehow made me expect an instant demo page without having to sign up; this seems like the kind of interface where 30-60 seconds playing with it will tell me if I want to use it. (One other thing: you say at the bottom "absolutely free for teams of 2", but honestly this looks like it might make a perfect TODO list application for a team of 1; have you considered that use case?)
- adambrault 15y ago
  You're pretty much dead on. We built the tool based on a completely stripped down paper process we created. We made a set of Post-It notes that we put on a shared space. Then we would put what we were actually working on the door to our office. It worked really nicely, except you had to physically be in the office and it required you to get up from your desk a lot. &bang was literally taking that approach and making it a web app. Thanks for the feedback on the launch page. All valid points. We plan on making it easier to try out as well. Regarding your last point, we are going to improve the one-user experience, too.
moe 15y ago
I don't like to be that guy, but your landing page is a tragedy. It's visually gorgeous, yet completely fails at explaining what the product does and how it's different from the two dozen competitors. Remember rule #1: Show, don't tell (hint: screencast, live-demo). Don't promise "LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY" when all that follows is cropped screenshots and breathless marketing copy. ALL YOUR TEAMS ARE A CLICK AWAY, TEAM STATUS & PRESENCE AT A GLANCE, MINIMALLY DISTRACTING GROUP CHAT ... I can't help but respond: O RLY? Skype has all that. Minus the breathless marketing copy...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- phillmv 15y ago
  +1 Live demo, or at least screenshots of the whole thing. Not gonna sign up just to kick the tires.
- adambrault 15y ago
  I think you make some fair points. 100% agree we desperately need a better demo on the front page. I think the landing page needs help, too, but we've gotten mostly positive responses to it. I personally didn't expect this, because I wanted a nice demo and we just flat haven't had time to put one together. We launched it on the same day as our realtime web app conference (krtconf) and I wrote the bulk of the copy at about 2 a.m. the night before. Not my best work, but no excuses--sometimes you just have to ship! :D
  - moe 15y ago
    Points taken and rest assured my criticism was only about your landing page, not about the product (I didn't bother to sign up for the above reasons). Keep up the work, if your product quality can match that of the visuals then you might be onto something. :-) Edit: Despite the criticism from others in the thread I still like the visual appearance. I just think you overshot a little and forgot that the even the nicest form still needs to follow function.
  - peterwwillis 15y ago
bamazizi 15y ago
very minimal and simple. it's basically a chat + to-do-list... i'm not gonna compare it to Trello but that's what we use right now and so far it has turned out to be great not to mention it's free. $10 a month per team member is WAY over priced for such a minimal app. for a 10 member startup it's $80 a month or $960 a year for a chat app!
- andrewfelix 15y ago
  Our team use Trello too, and it works great. This seems very similar. Why not compare it to Trello?
  - bamazizi 15y ago
    you can, and probably should i didn't want to start a this vs that game and take the spotlight away from these guys
- nicpottier 15y ago
  Agreed, we use Trello (with the Scrum plugin for estimation) and find it really fits the bill, especially for price. We just use one list for 'Doing' and that takes care of the current status thing. It's a pretty great way to work, best interface I've found yet to manage stuff in an Agile way with the interface really getting out of the way. This has a lot of the same things going for it, but ya, for the price is a non-starter. Maybe I'm getting old but all the whiz bang stuff is getting tired as well. (I feel Wufoo does a great job of balancing the cute factor there, but this is is a bit in your face)
bosch 15y ago
You should fire your web developer... How can your homepage not work with IE9? Seriously - WTF do you need websockets for on your homepage? I can maybe (notreally) see it for your application but product sites should be available for all browsers and not discrimiinate.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  Their homepage is perfectly readable without javascript. That puts their web authors well above average, despite the socket problem.
  - bosch 15y ago
    When I get this message when viewing with IE 9 you should fail your web developer! (Unless you don't want to market to 60% of the Internet.) Your browser doesn't (yet!) Chrome, Firefox, and Safari support websockets right out of the box. https://andbang.com/you-need-websockets-yo https://andbang.com/you-need-websockets-yo What are they doing that has to absolutely be done with sockets? I can't comment on the product they're offering but this is annoying to say the least as I can't see the site. (I'm not saying I like IE, but it's the only browser that works great with higher DPI settings and scales properly for using a browser on a laptop with a 1080 res.)
- adambrault 15y ago
  I'm disappointed it pissed you off so much. But I made that call. Why? Because we were getting people pissed off that they didn't find out until they went to sign up. We flat haven't had time to do a more complex and friendly/informative solution, but we want to. Forgive us. Here's the backstory on the websockets decision on an app level: http://andyet.net/blog/2011/nov/14/we-shipped-an-app-that-requires-websockets-heres-w/ http://andyet.net/blog/2011/nov/14/we-shipped-an-app-that-re...
  - bosch 15y ago
    Well I agree with Hanselmen: "The 10,000 people on the planet that care about Web Sockets are not your customers, and while using Web Sockets might get you mentioned on TechCrunch, supporting only Web Sockets is a great way to cut your potential audience in half." But it all depends on who you're looking to as your market. I'd go as far to say that the group of people who DON'T support web sockets is exponentially bigger than the ones who do...
latchkey 15y ago
I applaud you for having a business model. As well as one that does not involve ads. That said, I can't see myself (or anyone else for that matter) spending $10 a month (per user) on the current version of service. Basically, you've implemented a relatively basic 'wall'. There really just isn't enough there to warrant spending that much money. I think you need to spend some more time on adding features than repeatedly posting to HN as a way to drum up business and feedback.
- adambrault 15y ago
  We didn't post this. I was a bit surprised and it made for a completely unexpected and a bit stressful day. No doubt, it's a nice surprise for anyone to be pinned to the top of HN for most of the day, but we haven't put out a press release for &bang for a reason: we have some things we kind of wanted to do first. As far as price goes, businesses spend money on software that they use when they get value out of it. We've bootstrapped our way from just me to a team of 15+ and while we carefully watch our budget, we don't handcuff our team when it comes to hardware and software expense. We subscribe to web apps that run $15, $25, even $45 per month per user. At the end of the day, all of those combined are a ridiculously small part of our budget and we don't even think about the expense. They help us get the job done and that's what we care about. With &bang, we're going to work hard to know our customers and deliver them value by making it easier and more fun to work together efficiently. I absolutely appreciate your sentiments and believe me: we have a lot more we are excitedly eager to do with this product. :)
rickdale 15y ago
Doesnt work on my safari, might want to add a version #?
- Inviz 15y ago
  I confirm, this doesn't work in safari 5.0.3. Lots of trace garbage in console, doesn't do anything when i type things in and press enter.
  - adambrault 15y ago
    Wow. That's news to us. Thanks for the heads up.
jaequery 15y ago
a confusing app ... all the way from the landing page ...
ericingram 15y ago
Overall very well done! I agree with some of the sentiments here regarding launch page copy. I found the repeated use of words like "awesome" a little annoying. I would cut it to to basic "here's what it does and why it's better..." type copy and limit all the hype text. +1
raghavsethi 15y ago
I love the design! Museo was a great choice. Are you using TypeKit?
yavle 15y ago
Ajax username checking makes the field sluggish (https://andbang.com/register https://andbang.com/register with FF 8.0) - when I type username fast, most of the letters don't show at all. I believe the reason is at: register.js line 24 =)
- epaga 15y ago
  had the same issue when registering.
SecretofMana 15y ago
Since the landing page point has been beaten to death, here are a few things I think about the app itself after messing around: the keyboard shortcuts are awesome and just make the application fun to use, but the amount of real screen estate being wasted is criminal. With the window maximized on a 1920x1080, the taskbar is crammed to the left side while the rest of my screen is simply a gaping gray hole. On the task management side of things, I tried to add a task for both members of a team using "$ @all task description" but it seemed to just go to my shortlist. It was difficult to distinguish, as a result, between different shortlists and the team shortlist. I was also confused by the presence of a lightning bolt icon next to one of my tasks that I might have accidentally added when messing around with keyboard shortcuts. The icon seemed to have no clear meaning and there was no helpful tooltip waiting for me when I hovered over it. I also wish there was some way to rank my tasks based on their priority. That being said, this actually looks really cool, and I'd love to support it as the kinks get worked out.
- michaeldhopkins 15y ago
  &! user here. Try it as a Fluid app if you have a Mac, then size the window to fit the app so it takes up the space of a slightly larger IM window. I actually zoom it out using Fluid so it takes up a little less space. &! sends Growl notifications for tasks and directed chat through Fluid which I like as it lets me background the app and still use it.
tnahsus 15y ago
I signed up, created a team, skipped watching the screencast/demo and can't find it again. Now I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. The UI is just confusing. I imagine you have spent a lot of time working on how it looks and not on how it works.
BerislavLopac 15y ago
I hate the word "automagically"...
jgeerts 15y ago
Just signed up and the user interface isn't clear to me. The jumping left bar is terrible, I don't understand how to use this (and I really wanted to for some reason). Put in more effort to make clear to your users how you want them to use your site. I wasn't able with the starting version to make something appear on the right side and the annoying left menu kept on jumping. As it is now, I'm really not going to use this (even the free version).
jrockway 15y ago
Something I've always wanted at work is an "internal Twitter" so that people can share quick status updates without forcing anyone to read them. I would personally just write a quick script to archive and webify the IM clients' status messages, but I suppose if you don't want to program and don't like your current chat system, you could use this. I think one of the problems with this, though, is that only people younger than 30 feel the need to tell a computer what they're doing with their day. Most people would rather go home five minutes earlier than communicate with their team electronically. That's the hard problem to solve here. (Incidentally, automation could work. I remember writing a CPAN plugin that detected which module you were installing and it changed your IM status to show that, kind of like the plugins that show which song you're listening to. Enough incoming data like this and enough filtering for humans, and you could get a pretty good idea of what your team is doing without requiring them to explicitly communicate. Please develop this further :)
- silverlake 15y ago
  Salesforce Chatter does this already.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbuckbee 15y ago
  Yammer does a nice job of this (albeit it is full featured enough to be more like an "internal Facebook").
kunley 15y ago
Well call me incorrect by my team would laugh if I presented them a webapp with sooo pink buttons.
woebtz 15y ago
I left feedback, but it got stuck "Submitting..." The short version: + The graphics are great. + The usability can be improved. + Add a graphical button to access the shortcut/hotkey guide. + Add tooltips for any non-conventional icons (sections, thunderbolt, rocket ship)--include shortcut [esc], etc. + Add non-modal feedback/confirmation when stuff happens: + After adding a task: "woebtz added 'Research cheese puff API' to shortlist." + After thunderbolting a task: "woebtz is working on 'Test meatloaf' now." + After rocket shiping a task: "woebtz shipped 'Deliver milk to client!'" + Keep up the great work.

189 points by bpierre 15y ago

I've registered but after clicking the "and bang!" button I get nothing. I also noticed that tabbing between the username field causes a delay. Probably to do with the username availability check.

adambrault 15y ago
What browser?

tommi 15y ago

Yet another IRC copy?

viraptor 15y ago

> "What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done. So true. I don't believe this solves the problem though. I rarely got asked those questions. But when I did, the person just wanted more and more information: so how long is it going to take, when did you start, at what stage are you, does anyone else need to get involved, is there something to be prepared, etc. This is crazy and tools could not help. Everyone else knew that, yes, everyone is busy with something and that they can just look at what's "in progress" on the bug tracker... Technology won't always solve personality problems. Also - Teambox seems to be similar and also provide the facebook/twitter-like status updates.

FreshCode 15y ago

Looks great, but less caps.

zobzu 15y ago

Someone went to far with the web-design-marketing ;-) Pink, contrasts too much caps makes the site difficult to read.

pjscott 15y ago
I like the pink, in principle; it really draws your eye. The problem is that it draws your eye to disjointed phrases that don't make sense unless you read some of the surrounding non-pink context, creating a confusing effect to readers who are skimming the page.

noinput 15y ago

just signed up and so far it's working great. really appreciate the teams of 2 are always free mentality. didn't realize how many tag-team ventures i had that actually make sense with this model. looking forward to giving this a good run.

adambrault 15y ago

Hi, Adam Brault, &yet CEO here. Thanks for trying &bang. Our team has worked hard on it and we have a lot more work in store for it. We've gotten some incredibly useful feedback so far (lots of "Well, duh!" moments). We certainly would be grateful for any feedback you have and would be glad to answer any questions.

ephermata 15y ago
It's wonderful that you have "give us feedback" as one of the initial tasks in the first team created. It's less wonderful that there is no obvious way to give you that feedback. Five minutes in and already I'm falling behind on shipping! On a different note: I actually need to recruit people I don't previously know to my team. Would it be possible to add a landing page for a team that signs up the person and then auto-ads them to that team. This would have a hard-to-guess URL, so I would have confidence that only people I recruited (or their friends) would show up. Finally, I just need to ask, are you fans of http://www.mspaintadventures.com http://www.mspaintadventures.com ?
- adambrault 15y ago
  Good point and cool idea about the custom invite URL. I've seen mspaintadventures.com and was entertained... why? :)
- ephermata 15y ago
  I can't seem to reply directly to adambrault. Just to expand on why I asked about MS Paint adventures. The aesthetic is similar -- although of course &! is about productivity instead of kids playing a most dangerous game, the emphasis on awesomeness, the suspense, etc. are shared.
rwhitman 15y ago
Things we use at work that I wished this plugged into: Jira, Github, Basecamp, Google apps
- adambrault 15y ago

ramanujan 15y ago

This is really very awesome. The keyboard shortcuts [1] are particularly well done and worth trying out. Just a really great version 1. Down the line, it'd be amazing to have some sort of Github/Github Enterprise integration and/or Salesforce integration. [1] Too few people focus on these, but they are absolutely key to get power users for webapps or apps in general. This is why Gmail is irreplaceable if you need a webmail ui and can't use gnus for some reason. The funny thing is that it's not that hard to build an app around keyboard shortcuts if you design it that way from the beginning. Hopefully we'll see more of this.

HenrikJoreteg 15y ago
Thanks! We've got lots of interesting integration ideas in the pipeline. Stay tuned :)
TeMPOraL 15y ago
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome[1], though they do tend to interfere with keyboard-based browsers. Right now I use Conkeror, which is Emacs-inspired Mozilla-based browser, and encountered some problems with webpage and browser shortcuts interfering witch each other. Sometimes it's annoying (Twitter, SMBC), sometimes it renders the webpage keyboard shortcuts unusable (&!) [2]. I know that people using keyboard browsers are probably the 0.005% of users and thus not worth optimizing Internet for; however as the keyboard shortcuts become more and more popular among webpages, it might be interesting to talk about how to make them well. Should everyone design their own shortcuts, or are there operations so common across webpages, that it would be better to have universal keyboard shortcuts configured browser-side? [1] - I got addicted to keyboard shortcuts in GMail, they're great! :). [2] - fortunately, all of this is (AFAIK) solvable by writing a major mode for given webpage.
adambrault 15y ago
Cool! Thanks! ...and you're right: we actually did design it from day one to be a very enjoyable and fast keyboard experience.

michaeldhopkins 15y ago

I'm using this with some projects and enjoying it. Overall I agree it's a very fast way to know what everyone's doing. It is suited for a desk environment since it is desktop-only. (It's closest to working on the iPad but has some bugs.) The price seems a bit much, but we haven't fully ramped up usage and we'd happily pay for anything working well for us.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

antimora 15y ago

I don't get it. What's this? Could this be explained without requiring me to sign up?

robryan 15y ago
I thought the landing page explained it pretty well.
- Groxx 15y ago
  With a small feature list and small, extremely-cropped screenshots? Not even close, in my book. Maybe those represent it accurately, but we have no way of knowing because it's just face + icon + snippet - context - content.
  - adambrault 15y ago
    Yep. It needs to get a lot better. We'll work on that.
- antimora 15y ago
  Here is Copy-Paste from the home page. At what point should I start understanding what this is? I think I get that there is a suspense point and make me curious, but not strong enough to make me sigh up. In fact I will rather never sign for anything unless I have to. TONS OF TIME GETS WASTED KEEPING YOUR TEAM ON THE SAME PAGE. MEETINGS STRANGLE PRODUCTIVITY. NOBODY GETS IN THE ZONE WITH MORE EMAIL. NAGGING IS A DRAG FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED. WHAT IF SAME-PAGIFYING JUST HAPPENED AUTOMAGICALLY? GET READY TO MEET &!Realtime mind-meldification for teams. Wooooo! Sign up now!let's do this thing Or read on... LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY SHALL WE? IT'S ALL ABOUT SHIPPING Finishing's the hardest part. &! keeps you focused on the most important things—there's no room for anything else. Ship stuff today! DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL "What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done. Never do it again. Ever. Ever! etc etc ...
  - adambrault 15y ago

iand 15y ago

Can't even see site intro because my mobile browser doesn't support websockets. Please fix so I can at least read about why I might want to use your app when I get to a pc with a modern browser.

adambrault 15y ago
Good point. Forgive the dirty websockets check. We're going to do this better.
- ramchip 15y ago
  Same thing here (as a non-mobile Opera user). But it's understandable for such a new site.

doctororange 15y ago

Hey cool! We're a team of two so I'll be trying this out for sure. Your landing page lured me in perfectly. By the way, your <article> tags are rendering with a white background-color, but I assume they're meant to be transparent/#202020. I'm using FF 7.0.1.

adambrault 15y ago
Yeah, suddenly border-image rendering changed in Chrome between versions and Firefox got the short end of the stick. Sorry!
- doctororange 15y ago
  Hm, maybe it's the border-image. For me, specifying `background-color: transparent;` to `#home article` fixes things right up, at least in firebug.
  - adambrault 15y ago
    Yep, and then, if I recall (and without looking), it removes the background on Chrome entirely (leaving it transparent and grey and unreadable instead of white in the center). I messed with it for a couple hours to get Chrome and Firefox to render the same and eventually gave up and moved on to more important things, but it's on my list to investigate.

bjornsteffanson 15y ago

This absolutely needs an interface demo. While the page looks nice, I have no idea what the product actually does, and I'm not really interested in giving up my email address just to find out...

Palomides 15y ago
or at least larger screenshots

Vivtek 15y ago

The service itself looks awesome, but let me just say that the landing page is fantastic - just the right balance between humor and information to keep me reading to find out details as they occurred to me, gave me an option to sign up right at the top, but then kept explaining more without making me click to another page to do it. I am truly in awe of that landing page.

adambrault 15y ago
Thanks. :) There are definitely tons of places it needs to be improved, but we appreciate the kind words!

sbecker 15y ago

Screencast: http://vimeo.com/31586105 http://vimeo.com/31586105

heelhook 15y ago
That screencast is unwatchable! Why are there two people talking at the same time???
dereferenced2 15y ago
Lol, this screencast is horrible. It's just one guy talking, but they edited the cuts so close to each other that he's overlapping himself talking. I guess it's "saving time" or "is stylish and cool". Obviously it was a conscious decision on their point, but it's a horrible idea. I don't think I'd trust a company that would put out something this bad as an official video.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ehutch79 15y ago
  it's apparently been deleted

mperham 15y ago

I test drove it a few days ago. I really liked the UI (with keyboard shortcuts!) but found that it really didn't add value since we already use Pivotal Tracker. PT already has a notion of the story you are working on along with tasks for each story that you can quickly create and check off as you complete them. The group chat feature feels pretty simplistic and isn't even in the same ballpark as Campfire or HipChat. It's a promising design and feature set but still needs a lot of work to justify the high price.

jluan 15y ago

To my cranky old self, the overbearing similarity between this product (aimed at productivity) and services like Twitter and Facebook (aimed at fun), combined with the overly cheery, flippant color scheme, make it difficult for me to take my work in &! seriously and actually get things done.

daodennis 15y ago

Wohooo!

josscrowcroft 15y ago

It's .... it's ..... it's beautiful! :O

zbowling 15y ago

This may be useful for our daily scrum meetings to document tasks.

fritzy 15y ago
Howdy Zac! yeah, it's basically fallen out of our evolved scrumlike process. We'll likely add more features and polish in that direction.

JoshTriplett 15y ago

This looks a lot like a successful project status approach I've used on a previous project: everyone kept their status on a wiki, with a very short list of currently active work and a slightly longer list of pending work. Effectively, everyone shared their TODO list, and from the combined list you could tell at a glance what everyone worked on without having to ask or have status meetings. (Thus, meetings only existed to deal with actual blocking problems, and remained short.) Management within the team learned to look at that TODO list rather than asking for status reports; when management outside that team wanted a report on recent accomplishments, they got a rolled-up copy of completed TODO items with a few highlights called out at at the top. I like the idea of having a tool built around the same approach, assuming I've understood it correctly. A few bits of feedback on your launch page: While I found phrases like "mind-meldification" amusing, the first instance of such a phrase occurred when you said "same-pagifying", and that one in particular didn't so much strike me as amusing as pointy-haired-bossish; I almost closed the page right then. Also, do you really want to use the politically charged phrase "don't ask don't tell" in marketing copy? And finally, while I liked the repeated links to the register page, the one with the text "Try using it right now!" somehow made me expect an instant demo page without having to sign up; this seems like the kind of interface where 30-60 seconds playing with it will tell me if I want to use it. (One other thing: you say at the bottom "absolutely free for teams of 2", but honestly this looks like it might make a perfect TODO list application for a team of 1; have you considered that use case?)

adambrault 15y ago
You're pretty much dead on. We built the tool based on a completely stripped down paper process we created. We made a set of Post-It notes that we put on a shared space. Then we would put what we were actually working on the door to our office. It worked really nicely, except you had to physically be in the office and it required you to get up from your desk a lot. &bang was literally taking that approach and making it a web app. Thanks for the feedback on the launch page. All valid points. We plan on making it easier to try out as well. Regarding your last point, we are going to improve the one-user experience, too.

moe 15y ago

I don't like to be that guy, but your landing page is a tragedy. It's visually gorgeous, yet completely fails at explaining what the product does and how it's different from the two dozen competitors. Remember rule #1: Show, don't tell (hint: screencast, live-demo). Don't promise "LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY" when all that follows is cropped screenshots and breathless marketing copy. ALL YOUR TEAMS ARE A CLICK AWAY, TEAM STATUS & PRESENCE AT A GLANCE, MINIMALLY DISTRACTING GROUP CHAT ... I can't help but respond: O RLY? Skype has all that. Minus the breathless marketing copy...

deleted 15y ago
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phillmv 15y ago
+1 Live demo, or at least screenshots of the whole thing. Not gonna sign up just to kick the tires.
adambrault 15y ago
I think you make some fair points. 100% agree we desperately need a better demo on the front page. I think the landing page needs help, too, but we've gotten mostly positive responses to it. I personally didn't expect this, because I wanted a nice demo and we just flat haven't had time to put one together. We launched it on the same day as our realtime web app conference (krtconf) and I wrote the bulk of the copy at about 2 a.m. the night before. Not my best work, but no excuses--sometimes you just have to ship! :D
- moe 15y ago
  Points taken and rest assured my criticism was only about your landing page, not about the product (I didn't bother to sign up for the above reasons). Keep up the work, if your product quality can match that of the visuals then you might be onto something. :-) Edit: Despite the criticism from others in the thread I still like the visual appearance. I just think you overshot a little and forgot that the even the nicest form still needs to follow function.
- peterwwillis 15y ago

bamazizi 15y ago

very minimal and simple. it's basically a chat + to-do-list... i'm not gonna compare it to Trello but that's what we use right now and so far it has turned out to be great not to mention it's free. $10 a month per team member is WAY over priced for such a minimal app. for a 10 member startup it's $80 a month or $960 a year for a chat app!

andrewfelix 15y ago
Our team use Trello too, and it works great. This seems very similar. Why not compare it to Trello?
- bamazizi 15y ago
  you can, and probably should i didn't want to start a this vs that game and take the spotlight away from these guys
nicpottier 15y ago
Agreed, we use Trello (with the Scrum plugin for estimation) and find it really fits the bill, especially for price. We just use one list for 'Doing' and that takes care of the current status thing. It's a pretty great way to work, best interface I've found yet to manage stuff in an Agile way with the interface really getting out of the way. This has a lot of the same things going for it, but ya, for the price is a non-starter. Maybe I'm getting old but all the whiz bang stuff is getting tired as well. (I feel Wufoo does a great job of balancing the cute factor there, but this is is a bit in your face)

bosch 15y ago

You should fire your web developer... How can your homepage not work with IE9? Seriously - WTF do you need websockets for on your homepage? I can maybe (notreally) see it for your application but product sites should be available for all browsers and not discrimiinate.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
Their homepage is perfectly readable without javascript. That puts their web authors well above average, despite the socket problem.
- bosch 15y ago
  When I get this message when viewing with IE 9 you should fail your web developer! (Unless you don't want to market to 60% of the Internet.) Your browser doesn't (yet!) Chrome, Firefox, and Safari support websockets right out of the box. https://andbang.com/you-need-websockets-yo https://andbang.com/you-need-websockets-yo What are they doing that has to absolutely be done with sockets? I can't comment on the product they're offering but this is annoying to say the least as I can't see the site. (I'm not saying I like IE, but it's the only browser that works great with higher DPI settings and scales properly for using a browser on a laptop with a 1080 res.)
adambrault 15y ago
I'm disappointed it pissed you off so much. But I made that call. Why? Because we were getting people pissed off that they didn't find out until they went to sign up. We flat haven't had time to do a more complex and friendly/informative solution, but we want to. Forgive us. Here's the backstory on the websockets decision on an app level: http://andyet.net/blog/2011/nov/14/we-shipped-an-app-that-requires-websockets-heres-w/ http://andyet.net/blog/2011/nov/14/we-shipped-an-app-that-re...
- bosch 15y ago
  Well I agree with Hanselmen: "The 10,000 people on the planet that care about Web Sockets are not your customers, and while using Web Sockets might get you mentioned on TechCrunch, supporting only Web Sockets is a great way to cut your potential audience in half." But it all depends on who you're looking to as your market. I'd go as far to say that the group of people who DON'T support web sockets is exponentially bigger than the ones who do...

latchkey 15y ago

I applaud you for having a business model. As well as one that does not involve ads. That said, I can't see myself (or anyone else for that matter) spending $10 a month (per user) on the current version of service. Basically, you've implemented a relatively basic 'wall'. There really just isn't enough there to warrant spending that much money. I think you need to spend some more time on adding features than repeatedly posting to HN as a way to drum up business and feedback.

adambrault 15y ago
We didn't post this. I was a bit surprised and it made for a completely unexpected and a bit stressful day. No doubt, it's a nice surprise for anyone to be pinned to the top of HN for most of the day, but we haven't put out a press release for &bang for a reason: we have some things we kind of wanted to do first. As far as price goes, businesses spend money on software that they use when they get value out of it. We've bootstrapped our way from just me to a team of 15+ and while we carefully watch our budget, we don't handcuff our team when it comes to hardware and software expense. We subscribe to web apps that run $15, $25, even $45 per month per user. At the end of the day, all of those combined are a ridiculously small part of our budget and we don't even think about the expense. They help us get the job done and that's what we care about. With &bang, we're going to work hard to know our customers and deliver them value by making it easier and more fun to work together efficiently. I absolutely appreciate your sentiments and believe me: we have a lot more we are excitedly eager to do with this product. :)

rickdale 15y ago

Doesnt work on my safari, might want to add a version #?

Inviz 15y ago
I confirm, this doesn't work in safari 5.0.3. Lots of trace garbage in console, doesn't do anything when i type things in and press enter.
- adambrault 15y ago
  Wow. That's news to us. Thanks for the heads up.

jaequery 15y ago

a confusing app ... all the way from the landing page ...

ericingram 15y ago

Overall very well done! I agree with some of the sentiments here regarding launch page copy. I found the repeated use of words like "awesome" a little annoying. I would cut it to to basic "here's what it does and why it's better..." type copy and limit all the hype text. +1

raghavsethi 15y ago

I love the design! Museo was a great choice. Are you using TypeKit?

yavle 15y ago

Ajax username checking makes the field sluggish (https://andbang.com/register https://andbang.com/register with FF 8.0) - when I type username fast, most of the letters don't show at all. I believe the reason is at: register.js line 24 =)

epaga 15y ago
had the same issue when registering.

SecretofMana 15y ago

Since the landing page point has been beaten to death, here are a few things I think about the app itself after messing around: the keyboard shortcuts are awesome and just make the application fun to use, but the amount of real screen estate being wasted is criminal. With the window maximized on a 1920x1080, the taskbar is crammed to the left side while the rest of my screen is simply a gaping gray hole. On the task management side of things, I tried to add a task for both members of a team using "$ @all task description" but it seemed to just go to my shortlist. It was difficult to distinguish, as a result, between different shortlists and the team shortlist. I was also confused by the presence of a lightning bolt icon next to one of my tasks that I might have accidentally added when messing around with keyboard shortcuts. The icon seemed to have no clear meaning and there was no helpful tooltip waiting for me when I hovered over it. I also wish there was some way to rank my tasks based on their priority. That being said, this actually looks really cool, and I'd love to support it as the kinks get worked out.

michaeldhopkins 15y ago
&! user here. Try it as a Fluid app if you have a Mac, then size the window to fit the app so it takes up the space of a slightly larger IM window. I actually zoom it out using Fluid so it takes up a little less space. &! sends Growl notifications for tasks and directed chat through Fluid which I like as it lets me background the app and still use it.

tnahsus 15y ago

I signed up, created a team, skipped watching the screencast/demo and can't find it again. Now I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. The UI is just confusing. I imagine you have spent a lot of time working on how it looks and not on how it works.

BerislavLopac 15y ago

I hate the word "automagically"...

jgeerts 15y ago

Just signed up and the user interface isn't clear to me. The jumping left bar is terrible, I don't understand how to use this (and I really wanted to for some reason). Put in more effort to make clear to your users how you want them to use your site. I wasn't able with the starting version to make something appear on the right side and the annoying left menu kept on jumping. As it is now, I'm really not going to use this (even the free version).

jrockway 15y ago

Something I've always wanted at work is an "internal Twitter" so that people can share quick status updates without forcing anyone to read them. I would personally just write a quick script to archive and webify the IM clients' status messages, but I suppose if you don't want to program and don't like your current chat system, you could use this. I think one of the problems with this, though, is that only people younger than 30 feel the need to tell a computer what they're doing with their day. Most people would rather go home five minutes earlier than communicate with their team electronically. That's the hard problem to solve here. (Incidentally, automation could work. I remember writing a CPAN plugin that detected which module you were installing and it changed your IM status to show that, kind of like the plugins that show which song you're listening to. Enough incoming data like this and enough filtering for humans, and you could get a pretty good idea of what your team is doing without requiring them to explicitly communicate. Please develop this further :)

silverlake 15y ago
Salesforce Chatter does this already.
deleted 15y ago
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michaelbuckbee 15y ago
Yammer does a nice job of this (albeit it is full featured enough to be more like an "internal Facebook").

kunley 15y ago

Well call me incorrect by my team would laugh if I presented them a webapp with sooo pink buttons.

woebtz 15y ago

I left feedback, but it got stuck "Submitting..." The short version: + The graphics are great. + The usability can be improved. + Add a graphical button to access the shortcut/hotkey guide. + Add tooltips for any non-conventional icons (sections, thunderbolt, rocket ship)--include shortcut [esc], etc. + Add non-modal feedback/confirmation when stuff happens: + After adding a task: "woebtz added 'Research cheese puff API' to shortlist." + After thunderbolting a task: "woebtz is working on 'Test meatloaf' now." + After rocket shiping a task: "woebtz shipped 'Deliver milk to client!'" + Keep up the great work.