What Smoke is

Smoke keeps a living picture of what your team is working on, so that time together is spent deciding rather than reconstructing status.

There are three things to know, and everything else is built from them.

A page

A page is a place where work lives, and the only thing that makes a line visible to somebody else. A page for each person you work with, a page for a piece of work, a page for a team. You have one of your own that nobody else can see.

A line

A line is one thing: something to do, decide, chase or answer. You write it the way you would say it out loud. Lines are numbered, they stay in the order you put them in, and each one is open, blocked, or done.

A read

Smoke reads your pages and brings back what it noticed — a line you are missing, a note under a line that has moved on, somewhere two people are working from different facts. It arrives on the page it is about, not on a dashboard, and none of it happens to your work until you take it.

That last part is the whole design. Smoke offers; you decide. Nothing it produces is ever written to a page on its own.