About Hoobie
Hoobie is a Kanban project manager built for the way real life works — not just sprints and standups, but family goals, personal projects, and everything in between.
Create workspaces for different areas of your life, break big dreams into projects, and track progress with drag-and-drop boards. Invite family members or collaborators and give them the right level of access with granular role-based permissions.
What you get
- Workspaces to organize different areas of your life
- Kanban boards with drag-and-drop cards
- Hierarchical tasks — cards can nest into sub-boards
- Notes and file attachments on every card
- Invite members with admin, manager, or member roles
- Full audit log so you can see (and undo) every change
- Works on web, desktop, and mobile
Hoobie's Story
Hoobie started as a tool I built for my wife and me. We needed a simple way to organize our life together — home projects, family goals, things that don't fit neatly into a work-style project manager. I wanted something that felt personal, not corporate.
As I built it, I realized other people might want something like this too — especially because of the design. Most productivity apps look the same: minimal, muted, serious. Hoobie is the opposite on purpose. Life goals should feel fun, not like a quarterly review.
Design Inspiration
Hoobie's visual style is rooted in neobrutalism — bold borders, saturated colors, visible shadows, and UI elements that feel like physical objects. Some people call the softer side of this movement soft brutalism: rounded corners, warm palettes, and playful energy instead of harsh edges. We took that and pushed it further into something that could (should?) be called meme UI: cartoonish, ridiculously bright, and unapologetically goofy. I designed the app I'd actually want to open every day, because it was fun.
The initial spark came from Party-ify — a site that proves UI doesn't have to be boring. I used my own ThemeForeseen library to find the right funky color palette. After I picked it, I realized the hot pink on golden yellow matched one of my favorite Warhols — the pink cows on yellow wallpaper. Happy accident.
The buttons are what we call cartoon skeuomorphic — they mimic real, physical press buttons with thick borders and colored drop shadows, and they depress with inset shadows on hover like a toy you'd actually push. Neobrutalism gives us the bold foundation; the cartoon skeuomorphism makes it tactile and playful.
"Meme UI" isn't a thing, but it should be. Cartoonish color palettes, exaggerated interactions, software that looks like it's having a good time. If that's not a design movement yet, consider Hoobie patient zero.
Built with
Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Supabase, Claude, and a lot of coffee. Building with Claude means I spend less time wrangling boilerplate and more time on the design — which has always been one of my favorite parts. Open source under the MIT license.