Welcome Board

We have created a new board to get you started quickly.

Some texts are long and ellipsized – tap on them to read in full.

Call Help from the main menu for the in-depth documentation.

“Kanban” (Japanese for “billboard”) is a methodology of organizing a workflow.

In its simplest form, a Kanban “board” has 3 “lists”: “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”, filled with “cards” (representing tasks) advancing to the right (or occasionally backwards).

Kanbani doesn’t enforce this scheme – for example, this Welcome Board is different. Just remember:

Cards are sorted into lists. Lists are part of a board. Boards are isolated and do not “see” each other – ideal for sharing when collaborating on a project.

There is no limit on the number of boards, lists or cards.

When a card loses actuality, you can “archive” it – hide unless viewed in “Archived” mode (main menu).

“Unarchiving” (done the same way) restores the card in its pristine state.

The “Archive threshold” preference (disabled by default) will automatically archive old cards.

Cards may be purged permanently from the multi-selection menu.

One distinctive feature of Kanbani is the ability to apply an operation to many tasks at once – move, archive, share, etc.

First, call the menu by holding your finger on one of the cards to be changed.

Then, tap the central button – each card will gain a checkbox.

Check desired cards, call the menu again and finally tap a command button to mass-change them.

You can check cards in different lists or even boards.

As usual, Android’s Back button cancels the selection.

Tip: long tap a checkbox to check/uncheck all cards in the list.

In addition to tapping the Save button you can swipe vertically (as if refreshing a Facebook feed). On success, you will see a thin green line on top.

This is often faster and works even when editing an expanded Description.

By convention, tasks due any time during the day due at “0:00 AM”.

Outside of the form, time portion of such tasks is hidden and their Timeline border is different.

This versatile field may serve as a journal, extended task description, even program code of virtually any length (100,000 symbols or more).

Like any change, Description is not saved until you close the form – or tap the Save button when Description is expanded (keeps you in the form – convenient when editing a long text).

By default, the list of cards shows first 2 Description lines. This can be configured (per-board and even per-list) to show more lines or lines from the end, or without folding line breaks (like done in this Welcome Board).

You can create multiple cards at once by switching the Title input into “bulk mode” using a button on the input’s right edge.

When such a form is submitted, a card is created for every non-empty line in Title, with all card properties (Due Date, etc.) identical except for Title.

This multi-purpose field can hold the card’s author (from the preferences), the project’s title to which the card belongs, or the client’s name. Use it as convenient in your situation.

When a board contains cards with different Related Names, this field appears under every card in the list (can be disabled).

If a card’s Related Name is matching the Author preference, it’s output as “myself” so that you can quickly recognize your tasks.

Kanbani’s unique Timeline view offers a different way to explore your cards by putting ones with Due Date into a time table.

Columns (Y-axis) represent time. Rows (X-axis) represent lists or boards. Cells list cards due in that time frame on that list (board).

With this, Timeline provides overview of dozens of cards at once, turning your Kanban board into a calendar-style planner.

Normally Timeline shows cards from a single board (rows are lists). With Boards enabled, rows are all your boards, a row aggregating cards from all lists in a given board.

For example, if you have 2 boards: Personal and Work, you may switch Boards on to see tasks due “today” both in Personal and Work – on one screen, no matter on which board they are located.

If Boards is off, you will need to switch between Personal and Work to see them – which may be good if you are focusing on Work tasks right now and need them broken down by list in the Work board.

Dotted line on an X or Y-axis indicates that there are no cards on that axis (i.e. in that list or in that time frame).

Dotted border around a cell indicates that the card is due any time of the day (the time portion is “0:00”). Such cards are put first in the cell.

Gray line indicates a time frame in the past (e.g. yesterday). Pale blue line indicates a past Sunday.

Black line indicates a time frame which has not passed entirely yet (e.g. today or tomorrow). Blue line indicates a Sunday.

Unlike Trello, all changes live locally on your device until you explicitly “sync” them.

Sync is used to create cloud backups, collaborate with other users, keep your different devices up to date and more.

To connect to an existing team scan the QR code received from one of its members.

To set up a team read the documentation (Help command in the main menu).

Backup and sync are separate things in Kanbani.

Sync operates per-board. It can’t modify your global preferences (e.g. Author) but it can merge remote changes so that neither another user’s nor your local data is lost.

Backup is blatant: it knows nothing about boards and cards – it simply sweeps everything (like Titanium Backup but needs no root).

To replicate your device’s Kanbani, do backup.

To bring your colleague up to date – do sync. Doing backup here will discard all of his own boards and changed cards, give access to your private boards and make his new cards signed by yourself.

If you’ve read this far – it means you’re ready to begin your own journey.

Tap on the board selector in the top Action Bar, pick Create New Board and turn Kanbani into your perfect task manager.

For discussion, see our community forum at https://pdapps.org/forum

For problems, reach us there or at kanbani@pdapps.org

Please rate Kanbani if you like it!
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-- The PDApps team