This month marks a momentous occasion in the life of any budding product: the halfway point to a million users. That’s right: Trello has officially passed the 500,000 signups mark!

500,000 jelly beans weigh about 10 US tons. We’re not sure how much 500,000 users weigh, but it must be a lot. We’re so floored by all the people around the world who’ve chosen Trello to help them streamline workflows, communicate efficiently, and plan 500th anniversaries for their kingdoms. To all of you: thank you, thank you, thank you.

But we don’t just want to say it, we want to show it. Do you remember this cute little guy from the very first time you poked around this new thing called Trello?

That’s Taco. He’s always been a little shy, but he agreed to make a special appearance to celebrate our coming-of-age.

So today, you might spot him hanging around the Trello site. He’s even stepped up to personally deliver gifts to our first 500,000 users. If you’re one of them, check out your Profile page. He hopes you like it and that you’ll show all your friends.

In the future, Taco could visit again. Since huskies work in mysterious ways, we can’t really say when. But we will mention that he loves meeting new people—something about all the hugs he gets. So the more folks you invite over to Trello, the more likely he might stop by…

We’ve also added an awesome new feature called Card Cover, which lets you put images on the front of cards. Imagine the possibilities!

If you have any questions, comments, or love letters to Taco, you know how to find us. Cheers!

P.S. To celebrate the 500,000th account Joel has written a blog post about kanban, backlogs, and shipping, complete with pictures of the real-life Taco!

A couple weeks ago, we ran our first-ever “How Do You Use Trello?” Contest, and the response from our community has been nothing short of incredible. As you can imagine, this has made it quite the challenge to choose just three winners, but choose we finally did.

We want to thank everyone who has taken the time to submit to the contest. Your entries have really opened our eyes to all the ways in which Trello can be used, many of which we’ve never even thought of. We hope you’ll continue to share your creativity and insights with us, your friends and your colleagues, well beyond this week. Thanks again!

Without further ado, here are the winners of the ”How Do You Use Trello?” Contest:

Best Use of Collaboration – Pedro Oliveira

Pedro manages a European Union pilot project called SPOCS. With a team scattered over 200km, communicating has been a challenge. Furthermore, the project includes many components with several European countries working on it.

Pedro writes: ”My team had no common vision and with Trello we actually get that, and our team Skype calls became more efficient in the sense that each meeting time went from 40m to 15m because we follow the lists and labels from our trello board. Huge wins in efficiency!”

We were inspired by the team’s ability to communicate effectively despite language, cultural and locational barriers. Congratulations, Pedro!

Most Creative Use of Trello – Douglas Shand

Trello is often used for managing processes and pipelines; the left-to-right Lists framework seems to suit this kind of use quite naturally. But Douglas has dreamt up a whole new way of using this tool: he harnesses cards and lists to plan out the parts of a novel.

Douglas says: “I am using this board to collect and collate my notes and process for a book I am planning. I am able to keep everything in one place, and structure/re-plan in an ad-hoc fashion by moving cards around between lists.”

The lists he’s using are Concept, Characters, Plot, Themes, Motifs, Recurring Motifs, Endings, Beginnings, and Research. We’re excited to see how the book turns out. Congrats to Douglas!

Most Efficient Use of Trello – Jeff Lawson

A real-estate investor, Jeff uses Trello to collaboratively analyze real-estate candidates with his business partners. To make this even more streamlined and efficient, Jeff wrote a custom Trello application called rss2trello that monitors a custom real estate RSS feed. As new properties come in, cards are automatically inserted into Trello.

“This allows my business partners or myself to inspect each property’s listing and decide whether it needs to be followed up with a visit or even an offer. Comments, photos, and votes can be attached to each card and we can use lists to track positives and negatives about each property.”

We’re delighted to hear that Jeff has taken advantage of Trello’s API, combining his ideas with Trello’s core functionality to create even more powerful applications. Awesome work, Jeff!

Thanks again for all your submissions. We’ll be contacting the winners next week to send out gift packs!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Search just got so good. There are a few new updates in addition to being faster.

First, you’ll notice it’s more visual. Things look like you remember them, making them easier to find. Cards look like actual cards with badges, labels, and members. Boards have more identifying information like visibility.

You can also add modifiers to narrow your search. Use “@” followed by a username to search for cards with a specific user. There’s a special “@me” modifier to search for just your cards. Use “#” follow by a label color or title to search cards by label. Filter by open status with “is:open” or “is:archived”. This means you can type “search #feature @daniel is:archived” to get archived cards assigned to Daniel with the feature label that have “search” in the title.

Search the Archive

Searching for cards within the board archive is now possible as well. Just click “Options” > “Archived Items”, start typing, and you’ll see results instantly. No more clicking “load more” over and over in hopes of finding that one old card. You can use all the same modifiers to narrow your search.

And finally, search is now part of the API. Your app can have all the power and new features of search. Check out the documentation page to get started.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more news and tips, and check out the Trello Development board to see what we’re working on next.

It’s been almost 10 months since Trello was launched. Since then, so many clever folks have made it a part of their lives. These people are engineers, novelists, filmmakers, mothers… and we think it is now time to give them—you—the spotlight you deserve.

So we are announcing a mini-contest for all our users. We want to know:

How do you use Trello?

Tell us about the one board that you can’t live without, the way you’ve organized it (What lists do you use?), and why this board is important to you.

To enter, fill out the entry form here.

We will be giving out prizes in the following categories:

• Most Efficient Use of Trello
• Most Creative Use of Trello
• Best Use of Collaboration

Each winner will receive a Trello gift pack in the mail, and be featured on our blog. Just our way of saying thanks for being awesome!

You have until Saturday, June 30th (the last day in June) to get your entries in, and winners will be announced the following Tuesday, July 3rd.

Best of luck!

UPDATE: Due to the US Holiday this week and the impressive amount of responses we had, we need a few extra days to pick the winners. (Believe me, it’s really hard to choose—there have been so many good submissions!) Winners will now be announced on Friday, July 6.

You think Trello is great. You love the way it organizes your projects, letting you see everything at once and flawlessly mapping your brain and keeping everybody up-to-date. But let’s say you’ve got a project with some repetitive tasks. For new client work, for instance, you need the exact same set of checklists, attachments, and details in order to get started. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just set up a template card and copy it? (Drumroll…)

Well, now you can.

We just launched card copying. It’s really easy. Just open a card, click the “Copy…” button on the back, and hit enter. You can change the title or choose whether to keep things like members, checklists, labels, attachments, and comments. Too much clicking? There’s an even faster way. Click “Add a card…” from the bottom of the list then type “%” plus the name of the card. A list of matching cards will show up then you can hit enter or click to select one. It will put the copied card at the end of the list. The “%” is supposed to look like the card is splitting into two, get it?

Bonus: we’ve beefed up board copy to include the board description, attachments, and comments.

Mini Profiles

We’ve also introduced the mini-profile, a pop-over menu that you get when clicking a member’s avatar. It includes a bigger profile picture and more info including the bio. You’ll also be able to change profile info and your avatar from the mini-profile. We hope it makes the app a little more personal and expressive.

That’s all for now, but there’s more to come. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and the Trello Development board for more updates.

To do so, click the “Options” button in the board sidebar and select “Copy Board”. Give your new board a name and you’re good to go.

How will this get used? You might use it for recurring projects like new client work or weekly chores. It’s also great for setting up new employees. It may work better than a stale PDF and is easier to set up than a wiki.

You’re also able to copy any public board. So if you see a particular board structure you like you can copy it. You’ll have the option to keep or leave off copies of the current cards in case you want to start anew.

We plan to add list, card, and checklist copying in the future. We just didn’t want to give ourselves too many bugs all at once.

Color Blind Mode

1 out of 10 people are color blind… is a statistic we’re pretty sure we heard one time. That makes card labels useless for a lot of people. We’ve added a color blind friendly mode to help. To enable, open the change label menu on a card and select “Enable Color Blind Friendly Mode” from the bottom. It should cover most common color vision deficiencies.

Updates to Card Subscribe

When we last spoke, we had just released card subscribe. We’ve since added some features to make it even better including a keyboard shortcut (“s”), a badge on the front of cards so you can quickly see what you’re subscribed to, and a subscribe action to the card menu. We’ve got more subscribe features planned.

Changing email address

Probably not our most exciting update, but an important one. You can now change the email address you use for logging in and receiving notifications. Visit https://trello.com/my/account and select “Change Email Address”.

As always, check out the Trello Development board to see what we’re working on next and to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.

Previously, you only received notifications for things concerning you. When so-and-so commented on a card or invited you to a board, a little red square with the number of unread notifications popped up in the header to let you know. All your updates are kept in a tidy list that you can always come back to.

The problem was that lots of people wanted to get updates about other cards on the board. Important things tended to get quickly buried in the activity feed. Occasionally people would assign themselves to other cards just to get updates, making it difficult to see who was actually working on what.

There was obviously a problem here. We wanted to keep you up to date, but didn’t want to flood you with notifications about every card on every one of your boards. That would be too much.

Solution? Subscribe!

You can now subscribe to any card. When you subscribe, you get a notification about anything that happens to that card: when somebody comments, when somebody gets added, and when it ceremoniously gets moved to the done list. To subscribe, just click the subscribe button on the back of a card. If you see the green checkmark, you’ll get notifications.

You’ll be automatically subscribed when you join a card, just like before, but you’ll also have the option to unsubscribe and turn off notifications. You can also subscribe to cards on public boards to keep track of your favorite upcoming features, like, say, Templates and Copying on the Trello Development board. No need to check back or bookmark the board. When something happens, you’ll know.

That’s subscribe. We hope it keeps people more up to date and helps you keep track of the stuff you’re interested in. It’s live for everybody. Go try it out.

Announcing Announcements

Another thing… In the interest of keeping people informed about all the latest and greatest stuff in Trello, we’ve added an in-app announcement system. When we launch a new feature (like subscribe), we’ll send out an announcement. A little red mark over the ‘info’ button will show up, and you’ll get a short blurb about it when you click. There’s also a place for all recent announcements, in case you want a reminder.

For more more tips, tricks, and news, or to start a meaningful conversation (read: yell at us), you should follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

In our excitement to get Trello out to you, our productive and good-looking users, we sometimes put things together quickly. We think done is better than perfect. But over time, and after enough slightly painful interactions, we have to stop making excuses and pay down the design debt we’ve accumulated. That’s why we tackled the troublesome board profile pages.

The what pages? Exactly. The board profile pages were those ill-conceived administrative pages that were used to do things like change the board description, change label titles, add members to the board, and view archived cards and lists. We shoehorned the interface from the back of the cards, which was an awkward fit for such simple interactions.

So we’ve gotten rid of those pages in favor of simple menus. Here’s what’s new.

Adding Members

When you clicked the add members button it showed a big page with a list of current members and organization members, with a search box haphazardly tacked on underneath. As much you may like seeing the faces of your pleasant and attractive coworkers, you were probably just trying to add somebody.

We’ve boiled it down to a simple popover. Search or add an email address, click, and they are invited. You can use the up and down arrow to navigate the list and press enter to select. It’s a bit easier than before where you had to search, add them to a list, and click the “Invite” button. If you’ve added your board to an organization, it will also list organization members. No need to look them up. There’s also an option to add all organization members at once.

We’ve also ditched the organization members page. To add members to an org, click the “Add Members” button beneath the list of current members on the org profile. That’s one fewer page you have to visit.

Visual Archive

The archive used to be just a list of text with cards names with the options to delete or re-open. It was kind of hard to make sense of it because the cards didn’t look anything like you remembered them. Now cards in the archive look like real cards, with the badges, members, and labels you remember. We call this the visual archive.

Board Settings

Nobody really likes fussing with settings, and far fewer like having to hunt for them. The board “profile” housed a hodgepodge of administrative stuff like the board description, a way to change permissions, and a way to change the organization of a board. Again, with that word “profile”… It’s now known as “Settings” and we’ve split it into five sections and actions: “Rename Board”, “Change Organization”, “Permissions”, “Board Description”, and “Layout”. We hope that’s more self-explanatory.

Board Description

You may or may not have been aware of the board description. It’s a place to describe your board in detail. Very useful for describing bigger goals or just what that one list means. Unfortunately, it was buried in the board profile, making it difficult to discover. Now there’s a button in the header that takes you directly to it. We hope the added visibility fosters better communication and collaboration and also synergy.

And more…

We’ve cleaned up a few other things like the menu for editing label titles and the “Recent Activity” dialog. We recognize there is more design debt around the app, but don’t worry, reader, we’ve got plans. Soon things will be done before you even touch a keyboard. After that, we’re just going to read your mind directly. You’ll be moving cards in your sleep. Stay tuned!

Adding a card. As a serious Trello user, you do it all the time. Have ever wished you could do more when creating a new card? Like, say, add members and labels or change the position?

Well, surprise! You can do that now (as you probably might have guessed).

There are two ways to do it. First, you can click the new menu button at the bottom right of the composer. You can select “Members…” and get a list of available board members. You can do the same for labels and changing the position. The composer will show the selected members and labels. It will move to the new position if you select one.

OR, if you can’t be bothered to click around, you can use autocomplete. For members, just type “@” plus a member’s name, username, or initials, like “@bobby” or “@bg”. Use “#” plus a label color or title to filter labels, like “#red” or “#seriousbusiness”. For position, use “^” plus a name of a list, like “^Doing”, or a position in the list, like “^5″. There are also shortcuts for “^top” and “^bottom” if you want to quickly jump to the beginning or end of a list.

This is a good time to remind you about the “n” keyboard shortcut. Hover over a card and press “n”. The card composer will open beneath that card so you don’t have to reposition it. There’s also a new “Add Card…” option in the list menu. If you click the menu button on the top right of a list and click “Add Card…”, it will open the composer at the top of the list. This is especailly nice if you are using a phone and don’t want to scroll to the bottom of a list to add a card.

Can’t get enough power user tips? We’ve collected as many as we could find and put them on a public board. Visit the Trello Resources board.

Happy Trelloizing! (We need a better word for that.)

The contest is over! Thanks everyone who played. All the solutions can be found on this Trello Board

Let’s have a little fun. We have ten books and ten timers to give out in conjunction with our guest blog post on the Pomodoro Technique.

Here is how the contest works.

This Trello Pomodoro Contest board has ten “puzzles” hidden in it.

What’s a puzzle on this board?  Well, they can be hidden words, hidden questions, patterns, puns, obvious questions, word play, and so on. Lots of different kinds of things. Some of the puzzles require an answer to a question (perhaps on the back of a card), some are just patterns or other things that you could discover. The puzzles might be contained within a list, might span a list, might be on the back of cards, might be on the front…how is that for a set of very specific clues?

Keep in mind that there are ten official “puzzles”. You may find some pattern that we didn’t intend, but they don’t count.  They have to be on the list of highly secret official puzzles that only a handful of shady and untrustworthy people know about.

Once you find one, or think you find one, send an email to contest@trello.com, and let us know what you think the puzzle or pattern is. In some cases it is the answer to a question found on the board. We’ll email you back if you got the right one.

If you have a twitter account, let us know what yours is so we can mention you.

So, 1) find the pattern, hidden word, answer, etc., 2) send us an email, and 3) if you’re first, win a copy of Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique book and a timer.

The first person to send us an email with the solution wins that puzzle, and it’s considered closed. (Also, a person can only win one puzzle, so even though you successfully found five of them and emailed us first, you’ll get credit for one and we’ll go to the next person who has not yet won something, just to spread the Pomodoro love around).

As the puzzles are discovered or solved, we’ll announce them on the Trello twitter account, and we’ll announce them on the Trello Pomodoro Answer Board.

If any of these prove to be too hard to solve, we’ll give out some hints along the way.

So go to the Trello Pomodoro Contest Board now, and see if you can find any of them.