Trello is a lightweight cloud-based a digital noticeboard for you and your team (or even just for you) to keep track of things. This week we’ll be looking at its mobile apps, and how the Trello team has tried to make tracking things visually interesting and fun.
With the free tier of Trello, you can choose a background from those available or choose a solid colour, to make your board more visually appealing and interesting. You can also add colour to your cards and lists by adding labels, and giving each label a colour. This makes it easier to keep track of what tasks are in what category, or allows you to colour your tasks based on how urgent they are. There’s even a board power-up that changes the colour of your cards over time, so that you can see if there any tasks that have been sitting around for a while, or any tasks that are close to their due date.
If you’re on one of Trello’s paid plans, you can also use a custom background (upload-your-own) and you can even use sticker packs to make your cards a little more fun. You can use the included sticker pack, or upload your own custom designs. They’re also available to download across the internet. Once you’ve uploaded a background or sticker set, they’re stored in Trello so you can re-use them on as many of your boards as you like.
Like many services now, Trello also has apps for Android and iOS (including iPadOS). If you don’t want to download the app, you can still use Trello quite comfortably in a mobile browser – it still retains all of its features, although it’s a little less neat than the app.
The app is small and lightweight, and gives access to everything from a compact and neat home screen, with a slide-out menu. Boards look much the same as they do in a browser, except that tapping on a list zooms in, to make the cards more easily readable, and tapping away from the list zooms back out again, giving a better overview of the whole board and its lists. You can drag items around to rearrange them, and you can use stickers, add links, add images or file attachments or perform other tasks that you’ve set up using power-ups. Some of the more advanced power-ups are designed to be used only in the desktop or browser version of Trello; but, conversely, there are also some power ups that add functionality specifically for the mobile apps – like access to maps -which leverage mobile-device-specific features and aren’t available on the desktop version.
The apps allow you to carry your Trello boards with you everywhere, providing access to organisation tools on-the-go, at home, or at the office – or even in self-isolation.
Next week, we’ll be having a look at how to keep yourself productive and focused if you’re working from home, as so many of us are at the moment – Stay safe and well!
