Task management can be a nightmare. Whether you need something for our own family chores or overseeing a team of employees, it can be a cluttered mess. A new app called Kanbani hopes to help you not get overwhelmed.
Just another task and to-do app?
Well… yes and no. Most of the things that Kanbani does can be achieved by existing apps. Asana, Trello, and Todoist all offer similar services. However, Kanbani offers some unique interactions.
The company behind Kanbani (kanban is Japanese for billboard), PDAapps, describes the app as the Advanced Task Planner. This results in a tier paradigm of Boards, Cards, and Lists. It’s a little hard to follow but come along for the ride.
Boards are the highest level of the Kanban and each one is assigned three lists: To-do, Doing, and Done. Each one of these lists then contains the Cards filled with pertinent information like dates, descriptions, and titles.
The status of the Lists is influenced by your workflow as you go. Any upcoming task is automatically aggregated into To-do. When the event is started it moves to Doing. Finally, once complete, the Done list comes into play.
You can also align the Boards in Kanbani with your calendar to create a Timeline. This offers you a more confined view of all your tasks in chronological order. If you have multiple Boards across personal and work-related tasks it can really pair down your day to make it more manageable.
Hosting is the winning feature
The real contrast from other apps for Kanbani is that you can store your data on their servers, your server, or online storage. You can have the app sync only locally in encrypted fashion if that’s what you prefer.
But, if you want to have your tasks across devices, you can sync with their servers or open an FTP connection with your own server. By default, Kanbani uses its own servers to sync over WebDav.
Backups are also a breeze and can be handled in similar ways. You can use your own data stream or sync with existing services like Dropbox or Google Drive. This is done by changing your local backup path from internal hardware file paths to your synced Dropbox or Google location.
Sharing
You can even share links to your boards with anyone. This option reminds me of links of Google Drive or Flickr from the past. As long as the other party has the link they can get to a webpage viewer of the Kanbani board to see what tasks need to be knocked out.
Hard space to break into and rough interface
Two things are really holding Kanbani back in my mind. For starters, this is a flooded market of established apps. Trello, Asana, Microsoft ToDo, and Todoist are just a few offerings from truly powerhouse development companies. To break into this array seems like an uphill battle for PDApps.
The other is the interface. It’s not intuitive at all and just looks dated. That’s the nices way I can say ugly. It reminds me of a 90s Java app for Windows or a first-generation Android app. The team has a long way to go before this one can match the others above in polished UX for consumers.
However, Kanbani does offer an interesting sync and backup model for users to handle their data in any way they want. And it’s completely free! Be sure to check it out if you’re looking for a task manager and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
EDITOR NOTE: This is a promoted app review, however the views and opinions expressed here are entirely those of AndroidGuys. No editorial consideration or adjustment was made on behalf of the sponsor.