I took some time to put together a couple of quick screencasts to help show where Sifter's at right now. There's no shortage of work left to do, but we wanted to share the progress. There are plenty of features still missing, and some parts of the design are a bit rough around the edges.
The first screencast is a quick overview of the dashboard and project view. The dashboard is designed to really serve as a launching point rather than simply a summary. And the project view is designed to facilitate easily working through a list of issues.
The process of creating and updating an issue is heavily focused on the status. The whole purpose of Sifter is to capture issues and ensure that they continually progress from open to resolved to closed as seamlessly as possible.
I'll be keeping a collection of the screenshots and screencasts from the development process in a special Sifter set on Flickr. Hope you enjoy, and of course, even though it's not finished we're all ears for feedback and ideas.
We’re creating a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and blogging about it along the way. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.
Grab our feedWe'll only send emails for significant product announcements, and those happen every couple of months at most. Of course, we won't give away or sell your e-mail address either.
Comments
Wow, this looks great! Can't wait to try it. A hook to GitHub would be perfect.
Love it! Can't wait. Go on, give us a heads up about release date - mid year is rolling along :)
Looks great Garrett. Seems to perform as advertised :)
Looks great. I really like Sifter's workflow (so far).
Hey Garrett,
Thanks for sharing these new bits with us, it's interesting to see things evolve and come together.
I just have two comments/questions about the first screencast:
1) Compared to all the work you've done on colors and typography to visually emphasize the content and status of each element, I find the dashboard a bit confusing.
First, all five numbers for each project have the same look; are they really all equivalently important, or could some be highlighted or others de-emphasized (color, font size, alignment, whatever)? It feels like a bit of an overflow of information and lack of visual distinction between five semantically different items.
Second, the same "visual duplicity" applies among projects. I think it could help to have stronger differentiating elements between rows, especially in the case where project names are visually close (e.g. "Rhino" and "Zebra" have about the same length, and real-life cases could be worse). I usually like to use colors for this (e.g. calendars in Google Calendars), but here it might interfere with your otherwise semantics-carrying use of colors. Maybe less intrusively as the page background, or just a colored square next to the name, or something else?
In short, I love how you used visual clues so far, and the Dashboard looked a bit dull and too uniform compared to the rest of the app. Any comments on this, or conclusions you came to already?
2) Will there be a way to collapse the list of issues (e.g. when you're viewing the issues you've been assigned)? It works fine in your example, but typically, there can be tens or (sigh) a hundred bugs in a list, and it doesn't feel quite usable to list that many open issues if each takes several lines of status and description.
Well again, thanks for sharing this with us, and I am really looking forward to seeing more of it!
Just curious - if Luis were to log in, would he be able to delete your comments as well, or is that own-stuff-only?
Looking very nice so far!
Sébastien - The dashboard is still relatively unpolished. My opinions on it are continually evolving, so I haven't invested the same amount of time with it yet. This is the third incarnation, and I'm still not quite satisfied with it yet. Your points are all very valid and things I'm expecting to address before we actually launch.
Sander - Deleting comments is currently something that can only be done by an admin or account holder. Basic users will not be able to delete any comments, including their own.
I liked what I saw but I do agree with the issue of all counts being the same size, color and weight. My experience is that users care most about their own open workflow items much more than team metrics. I am looking forward to giving this a try.