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For all the many features it’s been lobbing into the world lately, Trello hasn’t given its most dedicated fans the one thing many of them crave mostand that’s a ticket back in time to the app’s original vision. In an era where most software is in a near-constant state of evolution, the very idea of turning back the clock may sound crazy. But plenty of folks think Trellothe multipurpose organization tool owned by Atlassian since 2014has lost its focus on the streamlined approachability that once made it worth using. An engineer from England is hoping to fix that. He’s built a robust reimagining of the original Trello concept as a fully open-source service. His goal is to offer a way for any like-minded Trello enthusiastsor anyone who might appreciate what Trello used to representa simple, frills-free, productive experience more in line with the Trello of a decade ago. If you’re reading this with wide eyes and an involuntary nodding of your head (or at least the sensation of such nodding, with or without the physical movement), his creation might be just the answer you’ve been coveting. And even if you aren’t, you might be intrigued by the pure simplicity of a productivity tool that’s trying only to do one thingand do it exceptionally well. Trello, reimaginedand reinvented Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Henry Griffiths-Ball probably isn’t a name you’ve heard before. He isn’t one of the famed Silicon Valley startup kings who lives to launch a sizzling new company every few years, nor is he a former employee at Google, Apple, or any of the other places most of the flashier founders seem to come from. He is, however, a soft-spoken, regular-seeming guy who really loves Trelloor at least really loved what Trello once represented. And he’s determined to re-create that old vision for other people who feel the same way, then see where it goes from there. Griffiths-Ball has been using his spare time over the past several months to flesh out something he calls Kan.bnor just Kan for short. Using the service really does feel like stepping into a time capsule and getting back to what once made Trello so special, before it went through the kind of identity crisis that seems to plague so many services sooner or later. And you don’t necessarily have to be a Trello fanatic to appreciate it. But the history of Trello’s evolution is a critical part of Kan’s story. Way back in the prehistoric era of 2011, you see, a developer named Joel Spolsky showed off a show-stealing app he’d built as part of a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt. At the time, it was unlike anything else out thereand it immediately won over throngs of devoted users as a result of its frills-free organizational philosophy. That service, as you may have surmised, was none other than Trello. As TechCrunchs Leena Rao summed up at the time: The web-based application is designed to be the centralized place where all collaborative team work can be assigned and tracked. The startup says that other project management systems are developer-focused, too complex, and dont appeal to a broader community. Trello has been built for any type of workflow, from being a business-focused tool to even acting as [a] personal list-management application. Even in that earliest form, Trello’s calling card was its simplicity. The service revolved around a then-unusual board-based interfacewhat’s now commonly known as a kanban-style setupto make it easy to organize anything into lists of column-based cards. Everyone from engineers to product managers and even lowly journalists eagerly embraced Trello and turned it into their all-purpose organizational epicenter for projects both professional and personal. “it just had this kind of magic,” Griffiths-Ball remembers. “They did something that was so simple but so effective.” In 2014, Trello was acquired by software behemoth Atlassian for a cool $425 million. And that moment, in the eyes of superfans like Griffiths-Ball, is when everything started to change. Whether that’s a positive or a negative is of course in the eye of the beholder, but as someone who’s both used and written about Trello for years now, the app’s evolution is impossible to ignore. At times, it’s struck me as a positive, even exciting progressionsuch as when Trello added a powerful automation system into its software back in 2019, opening up the door to all sorts of interesting new possibilities. Other updates seemed notably less in line with the original vision, such as 2021’s move to add alternate views into the mix alongside the signature Trello boardswith the aim of turning Trello into a more versatile all-purpose productivity supertool like Airtable or Notion. That movealong with the ability to embed things like Google Docs documents directly into Trello cardsfaded away over time, suggesting that it wasn’t exactly eagerly embraced. But the notion of transforming Trello into something more substantial continued, most recently with this year’s full-fledged repositioning of the service as a personal tasks app. When I first wrote about that change back in February, I felt cautiously optimistic that it wouldn’t be overly disruptive for long-standing Trello fans like myself. Heck, the Atlassian executive I interviewed outright told me the service would continue to support “legacy” use cases, in spite of the newfound focus on task management. And, to his credit, it does. The issue is with the final form that evolution adopted. Unlike the early version I saw while working on that article, it buried features that were once front and center and made them cumbersome to access. It was a relatively subtle shift on the surface, but all those extra clicks and all the extra hunting for formerly prominent options made an immediately noticeable difference in how the app felt to use. You can certainly still rely on Trello for any manner of project management, but it feels like you’re jumping hrough hoops to do so and using a service in a way it’s no longer designed to handle. Plain and simple, it’s no longer plain and simple. And it’s hard not to wonder how long it’ll be until at least some of those now-legacy use cases fade even further from the foreground. Trello in 2025 is filled with frills and pushes many of the app’s once-primary functions to the background. [Photo: Trello] I’m far from the only one who’s noticed. A Reddit forum dedicated to Trello is filled with pages upon pages of discussions from frustrated Trello customers venting about the changes, begging for a way to undo them, and asking for recommendations about services to seek out as replacements. It’s the feeling Griffiths-Ball has been struggling with for a while now. So he started looking around to see if anyone had built anything to address the lingering demand for the simple board-based organization concept Trello created and eventually abandoned as a primary focus. “I always had in my head this idea of something like Trello but with a more modern twist and modern design practices,” he says. “I thought I’d take a stab at it and see if I can make something that fits my needsthen share it and see if anyone else is excited about the idea.” And that’s precisely how Kan was born. Back to square oneand beyond The interesting thing about signing into Kan for the first time is that it feels new and electrifyingand yet simultaneously quite familiar, especially if you’ve spent any time in Trello over the years. But it truly is an updated take on Trello’s original form, at least as a starting point. And especially as someone who connected more with Trello’s original vision and mostly just tolerated the more recent pivots and additions, it’s a bit of a revelation to use. At its core, Kan gives you a super-minimalist and frills-free Trello-style Kanban boarda framework for creating any kind of cards and then dragging and dropping ’em across multiple lists in as many boards as you want. And the extent to which Griffiths-Ball has been able to build upon the original Trello vision is staggering. Using Kan is like taking a trip back in time to a simpler, more focused, and even more minimalist Trello. [Photo: kan.bn] For now, it feels like a trade-off of sorts: On the one hand, the experience isnot surprisinglynoticeably less polished and more barebones than what Atlassian presently offers. But on the other, it’s so delightfully refreshing to use a version of the core Trello concept without all the bloat and unfocused compromises that have built up over the years, particularly from those most recent Trello changes. The critical context to keep in mind is that Kan is only a couple of months old and still the result of a single person’s primary effort. Although an interesting asterisk does exist: Griffiths-Ball is committed to building Kan as a completely open-source project, and already, he’s had about a dozen other people contributing on some level to the service. “I’m getting messages from people every day,” he says. “That’s the beauty of open source: You put something out there, and you get immediate feedback from everybodynot just on the product but on the code, the features. That’s something you just don’t get with proprietary stuff.” As part of that open source promise, anyone can view Kan’s underlying code on GitHub and, with the right level of technical prowess, see for themselves exactly what the service is and isn’t doing. And beyond that, anyone with the right knowledge can also take the code and host it entirely on their own cloud storageeven (at least in theory) forking and modifying the software to suit their own personal needs. “Especially in the open-source community, people want products but also want the ability to own their data,” Griffiths-Ball says. “That, to me, is really exciting.” That self-hosting option will always remain both free and freely available, Griffiths-Ball promisesas will the ability for individual users to rely on a fully featured hosted version of the service, without any limitations on core capabilities. Where Griffiths-Ball hopes to make money and make Kan sustainable is with the service’s team plans, where he’ll charge $8 per user per month for a managed setup starting this month. But that’s all for down the road. For now, Griffiths-Ball’s main goal is to keep charging forward toward reaching full feature parity with the conventional Trello concept. High up on his road map (which, naturally, exists as a public Kan board) are items such as search, keyboard hotkeys, notifications, automations, and native desktop and mobile apps (though, as Griffiths-Ball notes, the website works quite well in all contexts for the time being, so there’s really no huge rush to move past tat). The Kan road maporganized, naturally, within a Kan board. [Photo: kan.bn] For many productivity app dwellersmyself includedit won’t be possible to trade Trello for Kan until at least some of those more ambitious elements are addressed. But the foundation is already enough to be promising. And, with Griffiths-Ball confident he’ll reach that all-important point of primary feature parity soon, it’s the next phase that’s truly alluring. Griffiths-Ball, you see, isn’t content simply re-creating what was lost in Trello’s past. To him, that’s merely phase oneand what comes next is largely dependent on the people using his product, particularly with what he’s seen happen to Trello and so many other popular services from the perspective of their original users over time. “I don’t want to make something that nobody asks for,” he says. “I want [the service’s road map] to be led by the usersto know how it’s being used and to make things that actually solve specific problems for those same people.” One early idea is creating a Sunsama-like planner feature that’d bring more useful calendar functions into the Kan environment. But more than anything, the goal is about avoiding what Griffiths-Ball sees as Trello’s failureand that’s focusing on the business first and the vision second. “What’s important to me is usability. I want to hear how people are using Kan and I want to know how we can make it better for people.” Be the first to find all sorts of fascinating productivity apps with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. A single useful new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!
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Labor Day has arrived, and with it, the start of meteorological fall. Both are on September 1 this year, and it’s the day many consider to be the beginning of autumn. Astronomical fall, the day when locations on the equator have virtually equal daylight and darkness, begins three weeks later on Monday, September 22. With both starts to fall now within range, and the summer quickly receding, many are looking forward to the cooler weather and explosion of natural colors that come with the season. However, depending on your location, you may see the changing leaves earlier or later than others in the country. But when? These two interactive maps show when the autumn leaves are expected to change color in your area in 2025. Use these maps to reveal when the leaves will change Two excellent interactive map tools can help reveal when the leaves are likely to change in your area. However, it should be noted that no tool is entirely accurate when predicting fall colors, and several factors, including local temperatures and rainfall, can affect when the leaves will change. Still, as September progresses into October and October into November, the leaves will continue to change through their cascade of seasonal colors, progressing from north to south. This means that states in the northern U.S., including Washington, Montana, Wisconsin, and Vermont, will see the leaves change before those in the southern U.S., such as Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. Smoky Mountains Fall Foliage Prediction Map The first map comes to us from SmokeyMountains.com. The interactive tool displays the continental U.S., and you can drag the date slider beneath it to see a swath of colors gradually spread across America. These colors represent the level of coloring of the trees: Green: No Change Yellow: Minimal Peach: Patchy Orange: Partial Red: Near Peak Maroon: Peak Brown: Past Peak Explore Falls Fall Foliage Map 2025 The second map is from ExploreFall.com, and it offers more granular controls. You can use the slider below the map to watch falls colors spread south. However, you can also enter the name of a city or a ZIP code to view a locations current color conditions and the estimated peak date for the area, when colors will be at their most brilliant. The color code for this map is: Green: Little to No Color Yellow: Low Color Orange: Moderate Color Copper: High Color Maroon: Peak Color Black: Past Peak Color When will fall colors be at their peak in 2025? Several factors can affect when the fall colors will reach their peak, including local temperature conditions, rainfall, and other climate events. Location also plays a significant role, with northern states experiencing the leaves changing first and southern states seeing foliage turn later. Northern states, including Montana, North Dakota, and Maine, are expected to reach their peak as early as the first week of October. And southern states, including Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, won’t be seeing their peak until late November. However, for most of America, peak colors will occur sometime within the last ten days of October.
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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. CEOs appear to love artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly 95% of chief executives and founders running Inc. 5000 companiesthe fastest-growing privately held businesses in the U.S.say they are optimistic about AIs potential to run their operations. Thats up from 91% who held that same opinion in 2024. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs surveyed by IBM say they currently are adopting AI agentssoftware that autonomously performs tasks. CEOs still on the AI fence But many CEOspresent company includedare lagging when it comes to adopting AI in their personal and professional routines. When I recently sought responses from global CEOs on how they use generative AI to do their jobs, the only leaders who responded were entrepreneurs and tech executives. The New York Times recently published a piece highlighting the deficiencies of AI usage in corner offices. AI is weird and off-putting, Ethan Mollick, an AI expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, told The Times. Theres a lot of psychological resistance to using the systems even for people who know they should be doing it. So, I was pleased when Jim OLeary, Weber Shandwicks North America CEO and global president, agreed to talk about his AI journey. Weber Shandwick is a 4,000-person communications consultancy, and OLeary advises CEOs on navigating business issues, including AI adoption and usage. Turning the office of the CEO into an experimentation test bed enhances Weber Shandwicks credibility with clients. If Im going to advise clients, I need to be able to master for myself what Im advising them on, he says. Having done it for ourselves, it puts us in a position to be able to show versus just tell. Leadership’s lab experiment OLeary says he started the process about six months ago by assembling his executive administrator, his chief of staff, Weber Shandwicks chief innovation officer, and a technologist to discuss what they ultimately wanted AI to enable. They decided that they wanted a tool that could summarize meetings securely; a system that could gather and prioritize information such as news and research; and a repository for all that knowledge but also Weber Shandwicks library of press releases, presentations, CEO memos, and more. They also wanted AI agents that could automatically generate specific projects and a way for all the software to work together. Maintaining privacy, confidentiality, and security protocols was table stakes. Building this AI innovation ecosystem has involved considerable up-front work and some customization, but the end result, OLeary says, is a system that automatically processes, summarizes, and prioritizes the information he needs to do his job. And while his administrative assistant and chief of staff still review much of what the system creates for him, OLeary says the output keeps getting better. Scaling the CEO OLeary says this AI-powered approach has also allowed him to essentially scale himself. Knowledge doesnt just live in my head or inbox, he says. It exists in a widely accessible way that informs our work and systems. For an all-hands email, for example, OLearys writing agentwhich is accessible to everyone in the CEO officeis capable of producing a high-quality draft tapping the central repository for relevant meeting notes, timely articles hes saved via a news curation platform, and his library of memos (to get his writing style and tone right). I asked OLeary if hes contemplated creating a chatbot that employees could query instead of coming to him for answers. (Nearly half of CEOs surveyed in 2023 by online learning company edX said most or all their work could be replaced by AI.) He says he hasnt turned himself into a bot, but Weber Shandwick employees do have access to a proprietary platform called Halo, whose AI agents leverage the consultancys intellectual property to produce client-specific press releases, proposals, and more. OLeary says his offices embrace of AI has, in turn, stoked employee usage of AI software. I think its empowering the team, he says. These tools are also giving the CEO the most valuable return: time. OLeary estimates hes saving one to two hours per day, which he can reinvest in higher-value activities. He says he now has more time for blue-sky thinking, more time for leadership development of my team on AI. Perhaps above all, maybe I get to spend a little more time with my kids. How do you use AI? As a CEO, are you leading by example on AI? What are some of the ways youve deployed AI, and what are you doing with the time youre getting back? Send your examples to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Ill feature some of the most compelling case studies in a future newsletter. Read more: CEOs using AI 25 AI hacks high-growth founders swear by How 7 startups are deploying AI now Will your next CEO be AI?
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