Its a relief to see Hive finally out there in BETA and to see the feedback starting to flow in. Hive is a project we’ve been working on this year and has been a lot of fun.
Hive is a SaaS app for scheduling projects and people. Its perfect for people with a team and a bunch of projects to manage. Its based on the premise that most people hate project management and hate project management tools even more. Hive lets you do in a visual, fun and collaborative way what people revert to spreadsheets for – to get visibility of what projects are on the go, who is working on them and to make sure you’re not over (or under!) capacity.
Hive is built as a one page web app and its always fun to run it in full screen mode and have people not believe its a web application. We’ve had a lot of fun working with Darryl Gray who designed this stunning application. Its been nice to have a project where we can make use of the shiniest new CSS and javascript techniques with lots of drag-drop and animations, integrating SVG and wiring it all up to give a seamless user experience. Seamless except for the bugs of course – but that’s what a BETA version is for!
As far as features go – the best of Hive is still to come. Under the hood we’ve implemented live collaboration and its quite fun watching another user’s changes animate on your screen (this isn’t available in the current version). We toyed with allowing viewstate changes to be sync’ed across users too – which is fun, but I’m not sure if its that useful. Because Hive is based on an event model, we’ll be adding undo and redo support soon, but I’ll have to save details of that for another blog post.
We’ve also got some great reports, sharing, publishing and integrations planned, but the most important features to add going forward will be the ones asked for by users, so make sure you sign up at www.tryhive.com, have a play and send us your feedback.
p.s. The screenshot above features a slightly older version of the UI. The latest version is even nicer.
