Dynamic, Focused, Collaboration: New ‘Card Layout’ and ‘Full Screen Mode’

17.10.12 Posted in Product News by

"Just the apps ma'am" - get a dedicated overview of what you and your team are working on in full screen.

Project management isn’t for the faint of heart and sometimes you just need a new perspective on things… or maybe even two? Well, prepare to feel refreshed with some very, very useful new ways to look at Apps and information on Podio!

Today we’re introducing ‘Card Layout’ and ‘Full Screen Mode’ for Podio Apps, designed for those times when you need to clear away the distractions and focus on just one project and its moving parts.

Card Layout is a new way of visually displaying the items in your Podio Apps, enabling you to put projects and deliverables (or any other type of information) on “cards” that are categorized to display progress through different stages of your workflow.

Full Screen Mode – available for all of the different app layouts including the new Card Layout – helps you get a fully focused overview of the work in your apps.

Not yet working on Podio? Sign up for free here and start working the way you want, today.

Card Layout

Card layout presents your Podio App content in a grid-like layout. More elegant and easy to interpret than commonly used Gantt Charts for project management, each app item (e.g. a project, deliverable, customer, candidate, design or whatever else you have in your Podio Apps) is represented by a “card” that is organized in columns and rows, representing the different fields or ‘building blocks’ used in your Podio App’s structure.

The columns and rows in Card Layout can be selected by each individual Podio user, depending on how the information is best displayed for a given purpose. A good example would be to base the columns of Card Layout on the categories in a Category field in your app. This could simply be the status of deliverables, such as: Not started, Working on, and Complete, so your cards would be displayed like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

You can drag and drop each card into another column to change the category or value of that App item; for example, moving one item from Working on to Complete.

Customize how your cards will be displayed to suit your team.

You can take things further by organizing the cards into rows, too. Your columns could be the previously mentioned categories and the rows could represent the different team members working on the project, and the items they are responsible for. Some more great use cases for Card Layout could be:

  • Sorting job applicants by qualification: Not good enough, Okay, Want to meet. Or, job candidates based on process stage: Application reviewed, Arranging interview, First interview, Second interview (try Podio Recruitment Apps here).
  • Following up on sales leads with likelihood of a sale categorized horizontally: cold, medium, hot; responsible sales person shown vertically (try Podio Sales Apps here).
  • Bug tracking with bug prioritized horizontally: Low, Medium, High; responsible developer shown vertically (try a Podio Bug Tracking App here).

Full Screen Mode

The aptly named, Full Screen Mode, enables you to view just the contents of any Podio App you’re working in, effectively focusing and simplifying the display of any given content or information being interacted with. Just as your larger monitor has helped you perceive, interpret and interact with your work more intimately, Full Screen viewing will give you that same experience by augmenting the display of any Podio App to open the browser screen to the full monitor size.

Well there you have it, Podio Card Layout and Full Screen Mode. Try it out and let us know what you think. We’ve also made some big upgrades to the way different App Layouts and Filters work together to create fully customized ‘Views’. Podio’s CTO, Phil Chambers has a great post to help you make the most out of them that you can read here.

Want to take advantage of these two amazing ways of getting your work done? If you haven’t yet, sign up for Podio here – it’s free!

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About the author

I believe Podio is at the center of the biggest shift in how we work since the industrial revolution. I carry this message to media and to anyone else who'll listen. Boom.

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  • Tobias Grønlund

    Looks really really REALLY cool! But the Drag’n'drop feature in Card layout doesnt work if the card is in the “(No value)” column?

  • Eduardo Silva

    Amazing! Me and several people were asking this feature (Board) for some time… and here it is, and it looks better that I expected (with all the filtering possibilities)! Great job!!

    Any ideas on providing a similar board, but capable of having inputs from multiple Apps from multiple Workspaces? This would allow us to have a kind of general overview on “all” the activities one is involved… maybe this is not easy to implement, given the “variations” from App to App… but this would be great too :p
    …any ways, with this development, I think you finishing covering the little issues we had with Podio!

    Congratulations, and thank you for these nice new features!

  • http://twitter.com/talexcel TalentExcel

    Amazing work Podio Team, well done. We are already seeing high productivity for some of our key apps.

  • Anonymous

    Hi Tobias. We plan to enable that later this week. Stay tuned.

  • http://twitter.com/doefiets DoeFiets

    This is ff-ing awesome!!
    I’m so happy that this got implemented.

  • http://twitter.com/mauricekock Maurice Kock

    This is very cool. Could you enable the card layout for tasks as well?

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.lallemont Michael Lallemont

    I second the sorting capability. Look at apps like Pivotal Tracker and Trello. They allow cards to be dragged up or down in a column to represent priority. This is especially useful in a Scrum board or Kanban style view. The columns would be status of a user story, the rows would be participants (developers), and the sort order within a column would be priority. We definitely need to be able to define what is shown on a card too.

  • http://www.facebook.com/santoro.alessio Santoro Alessio

    Awww yeah :D Another View ! and really useful too

  • Eric Epstein

    Fantastic! Love the full screen and the card layout looks great! We just dumped Privia for our proposal writing and moved to Podio!

  • Eric Epstein

    I am using Podio from a ChromeBook as a test. 100% cloud! Its really great and I am so much more efficient.

  • http://www.churchbuzz.org Patrick Steil

    Another great feature from Podio… we have been using this Beta and the new interface for filtering and creating views is awesome! Love it…

  • http://www.facebook.com/tom.bauer3 Tom Bauer

    The new card layout is absolutely great. Can I also use progress sliders instead of categories to manage columns?

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.lallemont Michael Lallemont

    Oh I just want to say thanks and that I love it too. The Podio devs rock!

  • http://twitter.com/fredsmoo Daniel Pouzemski

    Hi Michael. Sorting inside columns is supported and persisted after page reload.

  • http://twitter.com/craigdcrook craig d crook

    Great addition – I second Maurice, add this to tasks.

  • Frank Nazario

    THANK YOU!!! very very cool add ons!!!!

  • http://twitter.com/fredsmoo Daniel Pouzemski

    You are very welcome :)

  • http://twitter.com/RockyWalls Rocky Walls

    This looks really cool, but am I missing something or did the “reporting” feature disappear?

  • Steve Ryan

    Yet another reason why embracing Podio as the ultimate flexible project management tool is a winning choice. Thanks Podio team!

  • http://twitter.com/residualreach Marni Melrose

    Click on View last used and there is “Make a report” right there.

  • http://twitter.com/residualreach Marni Melrose

    Proposal writing, I’d love to see how you do that in Podio!

  • http://twitter.com/residualreach Marni Melrose

    Wow just love it. Switched over our opportunity views and it is so helpful!

  • http://twitter.com/RockyWalls Rocky Walls

    YES! Thank you. Was having the hardest time finding that but couldn’t fathom that they would have removed it. Thanks for the help!

  • Manfrombar

    Absolutely great!!!! Many thanks. I suggest to fix column titles when you are rolling down. Excellent!

  • Alexander Kashin

    Looks great! But can I organize somehow one view with different stuff on it -like tasks, milestones etc?

  • http://www.facebook.com/markewarn Andreas Markewärn

    Wonderful features Podio! Thx for still delivering the most impressive platform on the market :D Still on my wishlist is the ability to remove left/right-column to get more space, but not in fullscreen mode. I have other (sorry about that) webservices running like gdocs and would like to have them side-by-side with Podio. Keep up the work!

  • http://www.facebook.com/keoniahlo Keoni Ahlo

    How do you enter the “full screen mode”?

  • http://www.facebook.com/keoniahlo Keoni Ahlo

    Hmm…sorting inside columns doesn’t work/stick for me. And if I add row sorting, the turn it off, it defaults back to row sorting up on refresh.

  • http://www.facebook.com/keoniahlo Keoni Ahlo

    What is that “No value” column for? It doesn’t show up in the images posted in the blog. Is it my settings? Thanks!

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.lallemont Michael Lallemont

    So does that means when I drag a card up or down and drop it and it jumps back to it’s original position, I can then reload and it will display where I dropped it?

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.lallemont Michael Lallemont

    Oh one more subtle thing. Can we have a little more contrast between cards and background in the card layout view? Everything is pretty white. Just a suggestion.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=571901645 John McCann

    needs to be on tasks or don’t really see the point of it?

  • Alexander Colson

    Very nice.

    I was thinking it might be nice if the new view and filtering capabilities could also be applied in the Activity app.

    This way you could set a filter for a certain project, getting all data from your different apps, in one overview.

    See my forum post: https://help.podio.com/entries/22207196-overview-of-data-from-different-apps

  • http://twitter.com/fredsmoo Daniel Pouzemski

    @facebook-563094909:disqus @facebook-1274799432:disqus There was in fact an issue with sorting, that should be resolved now. Sorry about that.

  • http://twitter.com/fredsmoo Daniel Pouzemski

    Tobias, drag and drop for “no value” columns should be working now.

  • http://twitter.com/fredsmoo Daniel Pouzemski

    The “no value” column shows all items that cannot be put into one of the columns. Those do not have anything set in the app field you have selected in the card layout configuration.

  • http://twitter.com/RomansMoves Roman Ryan

    Amazing addition. Visualizing accountability, priority and completeness simultaneously makes this a true MS Project killer.

  • http://www.agentnoir.ca/ Summer Coley-Ward

    BRILLIANT! Your card is otherwise known as a “Kanban Board” popularized by Toyota manufacturing. Toyota revolutionized production management via their implementation of Kanban, replacing the standardly used Gantt or WBS. In doing so, they were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of “less is more,” the importance of creating a visual representation of progress and a project’s “moving parts” in a way that every member of the team could interpret at a glance. I am STOKED about this new feature. Your team seems to be moving in the right direction with furthering development of you PM features. BRAVO! PS: I have a few ideas for your Kanban (what is displayed on each card that could indicate how many comments, tickets, tasks or files are attached to each, which is great for development teams.

  • http://www.agentnoir.ca/ Summer Coley-Ward

    @twitter-41552520:disqus Totally agree. Why stop at Apps. This would be a powerful layout for tasks. Note: Best practice for Kanban (Card) to avoid project bottlenecks, is to ensure only 7 tasks at a time are in the column “In Progress.” Thus, in order to move more tasks from the backlog through to “Do Next/Not Started,” there has to first be tasks moving from your “In Progress” column to the next column “Ready for Approval” or “Completed.” Kanban is my thing. Anyone feel free to ask me questions. I’d be delighted to discuss this methodology.

  • http://www.agentnoir.ca/ Summer Coley-Ward

    Me too, Marni. Did you know that the third party App “QuoteRoller” can be integrated to Podio? Quoteroller is pretty useful for expediting the proposal writing process, depending upon how complex your proposals need to be. There is another App for this, which I am about to look into. If you are interested, message me and I will share details. I don’t recall the name of it, but I have it listed in my Podio links library.

  • Eduardo Silva

    When we started using Podio we were using a lot of Tasks within the Apps… However, with time we started to mostly use the App itself (where you have described the Activity you are working on, and all the details/state/etc. of it). By working most of the time in the App we fell we have a much focused way of work: we leave comments in one place about our progress (instead of spread over multiple tasks), which we find better. We use tasks for some specific things we need to do at a specific time in the context of the Activity/App. The current “Cards” (Kanban-style) work fine if you have a workflow mostly based on Apps (you can follow the approach Summer refers using Apps too)… But I do agree it would be nice to have also “Card” view on tasks (although I still do not know how we would see things if we do not have “state” on the tasks – maybe based on “time” or “tags”, for example). Cheers!

  • Alexander Colson

    One small suggestion:

    In the card view settings: please allow us to chose as column or row “none”.

    This gives some added possibilities, for example:
    Organise cards in rows, by category. There would basically be 1 single column, without title.

  • http://twitter.com/jafferhaider Jaffer Haider

    I love the Card layout, it’s exactly what I’d wanted for a project I’ve been working on for ages. Thank you and keep up the great work! :)

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Thanks for the suggestion Eduardo, getting a better overview of multiple apps and workspaces is definitely something we’ll be working towards going forward.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Hi Alex, please see the reply to your comment on the blog post about views: http://blog.podio.com/2012/10/17/views/

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Thanks for the suggestion Michael, I think it may look less white when the app has a lot of cards in it, or if we were to add colour coding to the columns related to category fields, but I agree it can look a bit plain now.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Thanks, we could possibly add floating column titles in the future.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Cheers, that’s great to here.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Hi Keoni, it’s in the top right corner of the app. It’s the icon with two diagonal arrows pointing in opposite directions.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Cheers Jaffer. :)

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Now if we could get Toyota onto Podio they’d really get those Corolla’s rolling out the factory! ;) Good idea about indicating attachments etc. to the cards, could be an addition going forward.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Thanks Roman.

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Hi John, personally I think apps are a much better way of structuring things that your team needs to get done. Then you can have multiple people working on certain things and also more stages of progress than simple complete and un-complete. Along with all the other advantages of filtering and visualising projects in this way. I usually just use tasks for small things e.g. “Proof read this” and the tasks are almost always related to an app item with the related content in. How is it you’re using tasks?

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Thanks. Currently it’s not possible to visualise multiple apps like that but we’re looking into ways to do this going forward.

  • Adrien Blaise

    Hi guys, great new card view. Kudos. One question though: cards are often mentioned as Gantt chart replacement, however, I’m seeing that you can’t use dates in card view. How can cards replace Gantt without using time? Take resource allocation for instance (e.g. members of a business unit). Care to enlighten? Thanks.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=625774140 Donovan Lord

    i cannot figure out how to use these new layouts

  • Charlotte

    I have been trying to get the answer to HOW to enable the Card lay out ALL DAY….And can not seem to get the answer from the person who keeps emailing me.,….Does ANYONE out there know how to enable it?

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Hi Charlotte in this blog post you can see how to switch layouts in your apps to get to card layout: http://blog.podio.com/2012/10/17/views/
    Hope this helps.

  • Daniel Coates

    Is there any way to edit / change the fields that appear on the the cards?

  • http://sashakovaliov.com/ Sasha Kovaliov aka nlupus

    Eric and Marni, Summer Coley-Ward is absolutely right :) Try Quote Roller for proposal writing. We have a great Podio integration too!

  • AdamBergkvist

    Keyboard shortcut for fullscreen mode?

  • Jack

    The card consists of two rows. The second greyish row only consists of the Podio contact [photo] and lots of empty space to the right of it! Any chance of extra information being able to display here? Such as the progress bar or start / end date if added? Thanks!