Hiveminder: A first look

Another service that was announced at this years OSCON was Hiveminder.  Hiveminder has been described as "RT for your life" by some of its users... and I gotta say I agree.  It is currently in a private beta phase, but I was lucky enough to get an account so lets briefly look over some of the high points.

For a more in-depth look at Hiveminder, surf on over to ani ruhama.

RT for your life

If you are not familiar with RT, the site describes it this way:

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

Hiveminder takes the best parts of RT, slaps on some AJAX and more intuitive terminology, delivering a fun and useful experience for the most part.

The breakdown: How it works

Once you have created an account and logged in your are presented with a 'todo' area that lists all the tasks that you have currently open.  One of the big featuers of RT is the ability to make tasks depend on other tasks.  In RT you could either make one task the child of another, or create dependencies links between tasks.  This was less than intuitive, and hard to find. In Hiveminder they have taken the idea of dependencies and implemented them in a beautifully simple and intuitive way.  Once you have created a task, you have a drop down menu with a number of options, but the two we care about now, are:

• But First...
• And Then...

As I am sure you have already figured out, tasks that are to come before the current on are created using the 'But First...' link, and tasks coming after would be created using the 'And Then...' item.  Using these options creates dependencies between the tasks.  Very cool and useful. The system also allows for 'groups' to share and manage tasks.  I can see this being one of the most useful aspects of this platform.  By far my two favorite bits of the Hiveminder system are the Brain Dump area and the export/syndication options. The Brain Dump is a text box that allows you to create any number of tasks all at once; leaving you free to flesh them out and make connections between them later.  The syndication options are pretty impressive.  You are able to print your list, download it as plain text, subscribe to an .ics of your tasks or finally subscribe to an Atom feed of them.

In closing

This is a very short, quick look at Hiveminder; my flickr stream has a couple of screen captures of the site, so if you are interested you can check them out there.  As more happens with this product I will post a more in-depth look.  Until then hang loose people.