The year 2020 brought the opportunity to spend time learning new skills. I picked the old pet project, My Personal Kanban and decided to rewrite it with a completely different technology set.
Here it is, version 2.0 of My Personal Kanban. This time, it’s a standalone app, running on MacOS, Linux and Windows.
I’m using the app instead of a real-life Kanban board for my Personal Kanban. If you are not familiar with Personal Kanbans and why they are suitable for Personal Productivity, I recommend this short article with a video explaining why Personal Kanban is excellent.
A bit more about technologies
My Personal Kanban 1.x was a single page web app using local browser storage and suffered from never-ending cross-browser compatibility issues. I also delivered it using Angular 1.x of which I was not a big fan.
As I saw beautiful applications written with Electron framework, including Visual Studio Code or Slack Desktop client, I thought of learning Electron myself.
In the end, I landed the following stack:
- Electron – it’s a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies. It helped me to focus on building functionality, without worrying about cross-browser compatibility. It also made it easy to write the content of boards to the file system.
- TypeScript – it’s a programming language, that brings type system to the power of JavaScript. I spend a lot of time at my job Java or Kotlin, and I like having type system to hand. Also, it was an excellent excuse to learn another language.
- ReactJS – it’s a JavaScript library for building User Interfaces. It was not my first contact with React, and I liked it from previous projects. However, this time I used it using functional style.
- Material-UI – it’s a library of React Components. I used the included Material Design style.
- electron-react-boilerplate – it’s a boilerplate code, including all of the above frameworks (except Material-UI). It gave me a great starting point.
I open-sourced the entire code at GitHub. And you can fetch the latest binaries from the My Personal Kanban 2.0 page.
Please get in touch via GitHub or the comments section if you have ideas about features or improvements to the application.
Greg Gigon's wEbLOG 
Hi Greg, congratulations for the project, we have also launched a similar app with Electron for offline personal kanban and much more, take a look here http://stacks.rocks/, it would be great to see if there is a way to collaborate together.
Hi Nicola, thank you.
Perhaps we could 🙂 Get in touch if you have ideas.
Hi Greg, sure, please drop an email to nicola@stacks.rocks and we can schedule a call to present both projects, their goals and see if there is a way to collaborate
Greg – very nice implementation. Hoping to get a lot of use out of it.
Before I do, however, I want to be sure that I’m backing up the data on the boards. Your first board would (seem?) to store the data in the same location as the file, but I don’t see that you explicitly state where it’s being stored (I’m on Windoze). Can you help?
Thanks!
Hi Steve
Thanks for trying the app. Have a look in the AppData folder on Windows. In there you should find a folder called mpk.
AppData might be hidden on Windows, here’s how you can get to it: https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/server/configuration/show-windows-appdata-folder/
Your boards should be in there.
Greg
Hi Greg, Thanks for the updated implementation. Is it possible to import the json data file of your older my-personal-kanban 0.80 version.
Hi Greg. Thanks for the upgraded version of this app. It’s very useful when no cloud is wanted and you only need a clean board. I tried boths versions and I also tried (with no success) the previosus “private cloud” version (file not found).
I have two computers and I’d like to have only one shared board, maybe using a direct access link or even duplicating the needed files and refreshing them manually if there’s no better solution but I was not able to solve the problem. As I see no shared network configuration in the new version, do you have any suggestions about how to access the board from two different computers? Thanks again
Fer.
Hi Fernando
The previous Cloud version backend systems are switched off and will not work. I also stopped supporting the previous version a long time ago. I do however am getting ready to release a new version, just need to for the final few touches.
The new version might come with a small subscription, to make the data sync between multiple computers. It’s a work in progress. If you are happy to be my beta tester when the feature is available, I will get in touch? 🙂
Very cool tool! Can you tell me where to find the files/data where My Personal Kanban stores files on Windows?