Wrike

A new lightweight task manager app has launched, called Wrike. It has a more-or-less traditional list of tasks display, and like Smartsheet can be used directly by email. However, (and this is going to crush Smartsheet's cost, which has been improved recently) Wrike is free. And they say it will always be free.

I fiddled with it, and discovered some of the headaches associated with a beta. On the Wrike site, they tell you to assign dates in the form [mm.dd.yyyy]:

But that didn't work.

I sent a support request to which I received this reply:

Hi Stove,

Thanks for your feedback!

There is an issue with US and European date format. So for now we decided to stay with the [2006-12-17] format. We will deal with different formats a bit later, based on either time zone, or special user setting.

Best regards,
Andrew Filev

www.wrike.com

But, Andrew, if you settle on a different way to do it, why not update the description on the site?

Ok, then it works. But the experience annoyed me.

Kind of an annoying interface, too, at the website. There doesn't seem to be a way to show all of your tasks at once, if you start using folders. In this example, I click on the main folder which displays the one taks I have there, but I can't see the tasks in the Travel folder. If I click on the travel folder, the main folder's tasks go away. Ugh.

Perhaps other more involved sharing features would make this tool useful, but the lack of an "expand all" stopped my explorations. I will take another look in a month or so.

tags: wrike, /blip, project+management, to+dos, coordination, social+tools

Comments

[Andrew]

Hi Stowe,

Once again, thanks for your feedback. Here's a couple of news:
-we've updated the screenshot in the blog, referred above;
-option to show all tasks will surely be there shortly; it is one of those features, which were in beta 1, but were postponed a bit in beta 2 in favour of massive (and absolutely positive) changes in the user interface and usability. It will be there soon, but I personally don't think it's all that supercrytical. Why? It's easy. We have thousands (if not more) tasks in our mind, but we don't have "Show all" view in the brains. Because it will be just a big mess. The same thing with wrike. If you have hundreds of tasks there and try to show it all on one page, you will hit the performance, both from the computer side (traffic, computation in your browser and on the server) and from the human side (it will be hard for you to find anything in that mess). So what we desire users (and us) to have is a smart ways to quickly find what they want, not the option to show one big heap. And we are on our way to that. In beta 1 we had quick search, we had quick filters and beta 2 will have more than that soon.

Thanks for trusting us and promising to revisit in a month! I'm sure that you'll be excited with the progress. Anyway, we use the system internally (and with the small circle of outside beta users) for several months and it proved to be time-saving and handy in the current state, that's why we decided to make it public and allow other people to leverage it.

See you!