Bee - Issue Tracking made Native App Reviews

If you check my review history, youll notice most of the reviews I leave for apps are pretty bad. But today is different, because this app is different. This software has been a lifsaver (and a timesaver) since I bought it last year. The UI is sleek, the notificaitons and display options are incredibly flexible, its incredibly fast and easy to use. The developers are friendly and responsive, its really nice to see a team take their work this seriously. This is everything a task management system should be Im also excited about the development teams ambitions to include additional task management systems down the road. All in all, this is the kind of software I always hope for when downloading stuff from the app store, but rarely see. If I could give these guys 10 stars, I would. One thing on my wishlist: I would love for a future version of this to have an option to work in the background from the menubar, completely outside of the dock.

I havent been to that slow, clunky site in the 2 weeks since I bought this app. Hands down awesome.

Where is a new UI ? It’s exaclty the same as before.

I love the program. I use it with jira and works great. I do have one request that bugs the heck outta me. When a notification pops up and I click it it will open the issue on the workspace I am currently on but then switch to the workspace that the main window is on. So I then have to go back to the workspace I was on just to view the issue. I would like a check box to disable the feature that opens a new window for the issue. I would rather it change the main window to the issue I clicked on. Thanks!

I’m so used to Majic’s Kanban layout that I cringe when I open up Bee and see the mess. Unfortunately, Majic is no longer in development. If Kanban support was added with the ability to choose specific Agile boards to maintain and sift through, I promise to figure out how to give you a 10-star review. Please do this. Please. :(

The support for this application is really terrible. If you are lucky to get an answer, it comes after 5-7 days. Otherwise, it never comes.

I had an issue getting this to work with JIRA 6.x. I got a support response in a few hours and had it working the next day.

I took a chance on this and now, after about a month and a half, can say that I love it. I’ve had maybe two issues I had to email about and the support team got back to me within a day or two with clear instructions on what I had to do to integrate with Jira. I can’t speak for anything else, but for Jira it works great!

Lets get the niceties out of the way. Bee has a bunch of lovely screen shots. The interface looks clean, and the features it is supposed to provide without bloat are almost too good to be true. Of course, it is too good to be true. The app started hanging from the moment I logged into GitHub. My late-2014 MacBook Air is still whining, almost 10 minutes after I force quit Bee, though its only been a minute since Bee actually quit. Don’t be a sucker. Don’t buy this app. I’m sure every feature that it claims to have is there. It just takes up every ounce of resource on your computer. All the productivity management, none of the productivity. I’m rarely mad at app purchases, but when I buy a 4 star app, expect it to, you know, work.

Works perfectly for tracking JIRA tasks without having to use the web interface. Ive emailed the author a few times for support and feature requests and have received a response in a timely manner. Its

This version has been a massive waste of time. It is riddled with bugs. The app brings up windows that display half offscreen and can’t be closed causing data loss. It frequently displays error messages full of unintelligable error text and numbers with no recommendation about how to resolve them. Sometimes the app will create two or three copies of the same bug sometimes no cases is created. Bee incorrectly diagnoses permissions problems and makes fields uneditable. On top of all those bugs, the app fails to delivery really useful benefits over JIRA’s web app. Keyboard shortuts to to switch between filters (like Slack does for channels) would be so helpful but even the small opertunities to add value seem to be overlooked.

Im using this primarily with GitHub Issues (though I intend to try it out with FogBugz soon). For the way I work, its perfect. As a Mac developer myself, I nearly always prefer native Mac app tools over web applications, and Bee is no exception. I appreciate being able to quickly switch between Github projects, bring up Bee with global keyboard shortcuts, and receive notifications when new issues are created, updated, etc. Ive emailed the developer once with a question and a feature request, and he replied very promptly with a great answer. Ive had zero issues with bugs, instability, etc. Bee has been great for the several weeks that Ive been using it.

1. Need OAuth support for Jira. Some of us are using SAML-based single-sign-on (E.G. Okta), and so we dont have a password we can provide. OAuth is necessary to get around this. As there are browser plugins this probably needs to be handled through the main web browser and *not* an embedded browser view. 2. Needs support for Github Enterprise. 3. Need a consolidated issues dashboard or some way of clustering things together. I have *dozens* of Github repositories! Its not sufficient to have Assigned-to-me/Created-by-me/Mentioning-me/etc. Id like things like "All issues created by / assigned to / mentioning me or subscribed to by me", and all issues for a *set* of repositories (or all issues relevant to me in a set of repositories), etc. More importantly -- and in fact the one that makes this, unfortunately, *completely* unusable to me at the moment: When viewing issues from multiple repositories, theres no clue given about *which* repository the issue is in! Seriously, why is the name of the org/repository not shown?