All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is the only task management tool that's designed specially for global, remote teams.

Our latest version: better integration with Google, and more UI coolness

Kerika, Technology, Usability

You will have a new version of Kerika tomorrow, with a bunch of great new features. One big improvement is in Kerika’s integration with Google: we are upgrading to Google’s newer, better authentication system, so you will be asked to sign-in through Google again as if you were a brand new user — but don’t worry, none of your old projects or data are affected in any way by this change! The new sign-in process consolidates in one place all the permissions that Kerika requests with respect to your Google account; they include:

  • Access to your basic information: name, email address and photograph, which we use to make sure your Kerika account is set up properly. Now, the photo you use on Google will be used automatically for your Kerika projects as well.
  • Access to your Google Docs account, which, as before, we use to store the files you upload to your Kerika projects. Now, when you upload files to a Kerika project, they will be stored in the Google Docs account of the Account Owner. This makes it easier for Account Owners to manage all the content assets related to their projects.
  • Access to your contacts: this will be used in our next release (look for it in a couple of weeks) which will have auto-completion of names and email addresses when you invite people to join your projects.

There’s a long list of benefits that come with the new version of Kerika:

  1. When you add a URL to a Kerika page, that web site will show up as an embedded page within your Kerika page (i.e. as an IFRAME): you can customize the size and the display, so that only the content you are interested in is shown. Which means that Kerika lets you literally cut-and-paste the Internet.
  2. When you add Web content to Kerika pages, the system automatically gets the title of the Web content, so you don’t have to enter that by hand. And, of course, you can always rename it if you like.
  3. When you upload files to Kerika projects, they will now be stored in sub-folders within your Google Docs that are named for the Kerika projects. This means your Google Docs account doesn’t get cluttered with files in the same way as it did before.
  4. If you use Google Drive, you will find that your Kerika documents are available across all your computers. Kerika is well integrated with Google Drive.
  5. When someone joins a project that already has a bunch of Google Docs, they won’t get a bunch of emails any more from Google letting them know that they have access to each of these files. (These emails were kind of annoying ;-)
  6. If someone is removed from a project team, they will no longer have access to the Google Docs that were part of that project.
  7. On Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE9), you will see thumbnails of the documents on your Kerika projects, which makes it easier for you to quickly distinguish between several files.
  8. When you make a project open to the public, its documents are available only to people who know the URL of the documents. We feel this is a better approach to privacy when you considering making a project open to the public.
  9. When you are uploading a large file to your Kerika project, you don’t have to wait for the uploading to finish in order to do other work inside Kerika.
  10. When you copy a project, or use someone’s public project as a template, you will get your own copies of all the documents in that project.
  11. Switching between different Kerika pages is now much faster since images are now retrieved from your browser cache instead of from the server.
  12. A long-awaited bug fix: when you have images (pictures) on your Kerika pages, they will be shown properly on Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. (We had to fix a problem with the way these browsers dealt with Google Docs.)
  13. Text blocks can now have a border color as well.
  14. The emails sent when you invite people have been improved.
  15. And, finally, the thumbnails of Kerika pages — which you can post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. — are much improved.

Thanks for your continued support of Kerika, and for providing feedback on how we can improve the product. There’s more good stuff coming your way, so keep collaborating…

A simpler way to deal with thumbnails

Technology, Usability

Sometimes you have to admit that your bright ideas just didn’t turn out as well as you liked…

One such bright idea was to have Idea Pages show thumbnails of their contents when viewed from their parent pages. Here’s an example of this works in practice:

Old thumbnails implementation
How thumbnails of Idea Pages used to look

A great idea in theory; not so great in practice…

The original goal was two-fold:

  1. To let users know quickly which items on an Idea Page contained other pages;
  2. To give users a quick visual sense for what was contained in those pages;

In practice, however, the effect of these thumbnails showing through all the time was a splotchy, rather ugly effect. To remedy this, we are adopting a new mechanism that we hope will continue to meet our two goals: with our latest version, any item on an Idea Page that contains another page will appear with it’s text/label underlined, like this:

What thumbnails look like now
What thumbnails look like now

As you can see, items that contain pages now appear with their text labels underlined. If you move your mouse over a shape that has underlined text in its label, you see a thumbnail appear as before:

A thumbnail appears on mouseover
A thumbnail appears on mouseover

Selecting the shape now provides a green “+” button: this lets you open the page contained within that shape.

Thumbnail on selection
Thumbnail on selection

This new green “+” button also appears on shapes that don’t contain any pages within them: in that case, clicking on the “+” button lets you create a new page that is contained within that shape.

In effect, the old double-click mouse operation has been replaced with a green “+” button that appears when you select a shape with a single mouse click.

We hope you find these changes helpful; we earnestly seek your feedback!

The value of trademarks (and other intellectual property)

Intellectual Property, Kerika

Not many startups seem to think that having a registered trademark, or a patent for that matter, can help real, tangible assets for the company. Most entrepreneurs seem to think that getting a “.com” domain name is all that’s needed to create their company’s identity.

While getting a “.com” domain name for your new company is undoubtedly valuable – and we don’t believe a “.net” or “.biz” or any other variant is nearly as worthwhile – getting a registered trademark, a registered service mark (if appropriate), and patents are all very important for startups.

Early on we registered “Kerika” and our distinctive flower logo as registered trademarks and registered service marks. Getting the registered status for a trademark is more expensive – although not prohibitively so, in our opinion – and certainly more time-consuming than simply slapping on a “TM” after your product or company name, but there are very valuable benefits from having the registration.

One simple benefit is that you can claim your registered trademark on social media platforms even if you weren’t the first to register that particular name. For example, we weren’t the first to register “kerika” as a username on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but we were able to get these usernames assigned to us because the word is a registered trademark, and that’s a very powerful lever to use with third-party companies.

There are other benefits, of course, particularly if your company or product name is a “made-up name” – which, incidentally, makes it a lot easier to get registered as a trademark or service mark – such as making sure that your competitors don’t try to get cute by using similar names. (Remember Jobster?)

And once you get a registered trademark, you need to remember to file additional paperwork after the first 5 years, and that’s what we finished doing recently. The US Patent & Trademark Office have improved their processes in recent years, so that when you file for an extension after 5 years of using a registered mark, you can apply for a “declaration of incontestability”, which gives you even greater rights to your product or company name.

(We just received our “declaration of incontestability” for registered trademark and our registered service mark.)

There’s a lot of value in getting a patent as well, although the cost of this can be very significant. If you have been truly innovative, and have really invented something new, you should get it patented. A patent reflects the hard work you put into your innovation: it isn’t granted lightly by the US Patent Office – despite what you may read in the press about “thousands of junk patents” being issued everyday. In our case, getting a patent for visual templates took years of waiting, hundreds of hours of effort, and cost a bundle.

But, we feel it was well worth the time and effort! If a competitor tries to copy Kerika, we will make our displeasure known!

Kerika’s blocks of richly formatted text: an example of “glass box documents”

Kerika, Technology, Usability

Our next release will primarily focused around the text block feature, which is turning out to be perhaps the single most popular feature of Kerika.

When we first built Kerika, the ability to put formatted text on Idea Pages was viewed as an incidental feature: we figured that people would want to draw flowcharts, and in doing so they would need to put small bits of text on the canvas to use as labels and markers. Nothing more.

So, we considered a variety of open-source programs that provided HTML editing capabilities for our initial versions of Kerika , before settling on Whyzziwig which appeared to have more functionality than we thought we would ever need…

However, as we started using Kerika ourselves, and talked extensively to our helpful users, we slowly realized that text blocks were a very helpful feature indeed: perhaps the most important feature in Kerika’s bag of tricks.

We have dubbed this the “glassbox documents” phenomenon: if you are sharing user requirements or collaborating on a design, you don’t need the full capabilities that come with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Instead, what you really need is the ability to quickly write relatively small bits of text, perhaps a few paragraphs long, with a table or some links and pictures, and use these to mark up an Idea Page.

Here’s an example of how we used these text blocks for developing the next version of Kerika, which will contain a hugely improved text block feature:

Example of using Kerika to design a user interface
Example of using Kerika to design a user interface

 

This picture shows an Idea Page that we used to share ideas between the designers, users and developers about how the text block feature could be improved.

  • In the middle of the Idea Page, we have a mockup of a new text block toolbar, to replace the existing Whyzziwig toolbar.
  • Above it are various pages that define the working of each button: inside each of these sub-pages we have small blocks of text that provide the detailed requirements for a particular button, as well as design notes from the developers and test data from the QA team.
  • Towards the bottom you can see a larger text block contain additional notes about the design.

Using text blocks in this manner, to capture and share our ideas and designs, we have reached that ultimate state of perfect collaboration: even though the Kerika team is distributed between Bellevue and Issaquah in Washington State, and Gujarat and New Delhi in India, we have zero emails being sent within the team!

This is the power of a glassbox document: the ability to sharply increase productivity and shared understanding of requirements and design, by putting text directly on an Idea Page instead of hiding it inside a conventional document (which we would call a “blackbox document”).

Playing whack-a-mole with Google Docs and Chrome: where’s your image being stored today?

Technology

We recently talked about a shift within Google Docs that resulted in their using a new domain name – googleusercontent.com – to store images that users upload.

The way Google stores images on various sub-domains of googleusercontent.com is a bit of a mystery to us: it isn’t just that when you upload images to your Kerika pages they get stored by Google in some seemingly-random sub-domain of googleusercontent.com, but that the location may change from day to day!

This is making it very hard to run the Chrome browser with the “Disable third-party cookies” preference turned on, because you may find that each day some of the images on your Kerika pages are not being displayed because they have suddenly shifted to a different sub-domain of googleusercontent.com – one that you haven’t previously whitelisted.

Firefox used to have a very simple way of whitelisting domains for which you were happy to get cookies, but that disappeared several versions.

Chrome doesn’t offer any easy way of whitelisting domains either, presumably because Google is strongly in favor of third-party cookies since these underpin so much advertising. There’s an extension for Chrome called “Vanilla Cookies” that supposed to allow you to whitelist domains using wildcards, but it doesn’t seem to solve the whack-a-mole problem with googleusercontent.com as far as we can tell.

Now, your only options appear to be:

  • Disable all third-party cookies, which means that images you upload to your Kerika pages are not shown because they are being stored somewhere on googleusercontent.com, which is a third-party since it is neither kerika.com nor google.com, or
  • Allow all third-party cookies which means all sorts of junk can find its way onto your computer.

If Google is innovating like crazy, why aren’t Android users benefiting?

Technology

There’s a remarkable graphic over at the theunderstatement.com that shows how infrequently updates to Androids have made it into the hands of end-users. Here’s the graphic and the money quote:

Android and iPhone update history
Android and iPhone update history from theunderstatement.com

Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today. If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:

  • 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
  • 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
  • 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
  • 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
  • 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
  • 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
  • In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
  • At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

Also worth noting that each bar in the chart starts from the first day of release – so it only gets worse for people who bought their phone late in its sales period.

It’s well worth reading the entire blog post, which is one of the most detailed analyses we have seen in a while. While Google has done a great job of rapidly innovating on the Android platform, they have completely neglected the job of getting these innovations into the hands of end-users.

A new pricing structure, reflecting a mature product

Kerika

Now that we are well and truly out of beta, we have updated our pricing structure to reflect the maturity and unique features of the Kerika software.

We still have the same great freebies as before:

  • Everyone starts with a free Standard Account, which lets them create an unlimited number of projects, and have an unlimited number of visitors to these projects, so long as they keep the overall Account Team size limited to the Account Owner and two other Team Members.
  • People working in academia, which includes schools, colleges, universities and research institutions get free Accounts, which can include up to 20 Team Members.
  • People involved in open-source or advocacy projects also get free Accounts, which can include up to 20 Team Members.

For people working in commercial settings, the new pricing is as follows:

  • Once your Account Team size gets past 3 (i.e. you Account includes more than just you and two of your colleagues or friends), you need to upgrade to the Professional Account, which give you an Account Team of 20 people. This now costs $66.67 per month, which works out to just $3.33 per user per month.
  • If your team grows even larger, you can upgrade to the Premium Account which gives you an Account Team of 200 people. This now costs $333.33 per month, which works out to just $1.67 per user per month.

If you are an enterprise customer, give us a call.

Kerika adds Social Media Links

Technology

Finally… yes, we know we should have done this a while ago, but we were busy making the core Kerika software more robust and polishing away some of the usability friction that users had reported, but now we have done it: we added social media links to Kerika!

The old “Share!” button at the top of the Kerika UI is still there:

The Share! button
The Share! button is on the toolbar, just above the canvas

Clicking on this button brings up a whole bunch of new possibilities:

The Share! options for a project that's open to the public
The Share! options for a project that's open to the public

The first option, from the left, is the “People” action: you can use the Share! button to quickly add people to your project team. (This is an alternative to using the Team button to manage your project teams.) Here’s how you can add people using the Share! button:

Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team
Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team

You can also use the Share! dialog to:

  • Post to your Facebook wall
  • Tweet about your project. (Your tweet will include a link to the project page.)
  • Post it as an update to your LinkedIn profile page. (That will include a link to the project page as well.)
  • Share it with your Google circles by doing a Google +1 on the page.

And, you can simply grab the URL of the page it you want to share it with someone:

Grab the URL for your project page
Grab the URL for your project page

And, finally, you can email a friend or coworker about the project, and include a link to the page in your email message.

There’s more to come: in the near future we will be making it possible for you to embed a picture of your project page in your own website or blog!

So, why are we still learning typesetting?

Technology, Usability

Many, many years ago, as a young boy living in Delhi I had the good fortune of being a neighbor and friend to the then-elderly, since deceased, M. Chalapathi Rau, the publisher and editor of the newspaper National Herald which had been founded by Jawarharlal Nehru himself during India’s freedom struggle. (“M.C” or “Magnus” as he was known to his friends was a man of many talents and a true eminence grise who unobtrusively operated the levers of power in India.)

To help me research a school project, M.C. took me to his newspaper’s printing press, a vast, clanking space where I watched with great fascination the painstaking process of laying out moveable type by hand: a craftsman’s job that had remained essentially unchanged, at least in India, since the 19th century. I did my school project, thinking that this would be my first and last experience with typesetting…

At college, however, typesetting reappeared: in order to get a job, one had to have a beautifully laid out resume, particularly if one had no “professional experience” to list other than the insalubrious qualification of having toiled in the scullery of a campus dining hall for minimum wage. So, I dutifully learned the obscure commands that helped set fonts and margins using troff, the first document preparation software for Unix computers.

I prepared and padded my resume, bluffed my way into my first job, and assumed that that would be my last encounter with typesetting. Ironically, my first job was at AT&T Bell Labs, working on Unix-based applications.

Typesetting is closely tied to the history of Unix, and, indeed, provided the raison d’etre for Unix’s existence. In 1971, when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and others) at Bell Labs wanted to get funding for developing the Unix operating system, their business case was based upon the rather tenuous argument that developing this new operating system (Unix) would help them develop a better typesetting program (troff), which could be used by Bell Labs to file patents.

In those halcyon days, Bell Labs generously recognized and encouraged geniuses to explore their ideas, and, more mundanely, Bell Labs actually did need a better typesetting programs: since it’s inception in 1925 the organization had averaged one patent per business day (and collected about nine Nobel Prizes by the time I showed up as a very junior programmer).

So troff, the typesetting program, is responsible for the creation of Unix, which means that typesetting is the reason why Linux, cloud computing, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all exist today!

Typesetting occupied a relatively small part of my workday until I started moving into management roles, which coincided with the widespread adoption of Microsoft’s Word software. Suddenly, most of my day was spent typesetting memos, performance appraisals, proposals, etc. I emphasize “typesetting”, rather than “writing”, because Microsoft Word remains, at heart, a typesetting program, not a writing program. It requires you to learn the same obscure catechism of tab settings, kerns and serifs, character and line spacings that those ancient typesetters at the National Herald had mastered as a craft.

And, yet, no one considers it strange that all of us highly trained, highly paid “knowledge workers” are required to master a craft that was first invented in China in 1040 AD!

The advent of the modern Web, starting with the release of the Netscape browser in 1995, has provided little relief: we exchanged one set of obscure keystroke combinations for another, equally opaque set of symbols (i.e. HTML). It is only in recent years that blogging tools, like the excellent WordPress software I use to pen this essay, has helped hide the typesetting and allow users to focus on the writing.

Between the release of the Netscape browser and the current robustness of WordPress came the advent of Google Docs. Google Docs’ primary innovation (or, more precisely, Writely’s primary innovation — remember Writely?) was to offer online editing; Google Docs did nothing to fundamentally alter the typesetting nature of word processing.

Google Docs continues to evolve, but as a persistent shadow of Microsoft Office. This makes sense from a business perspective, of course: it is easier for Google to get customers signed up if they can state simply that Google Docs works like the familiar Microsoft Office, and is a lot cheaper and easier to access. It would be much harder to get people to sign up for a Google Docs that seemed to fundamentally alien in comparison to that reliable reference, Microsoft Office.

And, so it continues… Centuries after the invention of moveable type, we remain trapped in its formatting conventions. At Kerika, we are starting to think seriously about making our embedded text editor (which is based upon Whizzywig) be the primary way for people to write for the Web. Kerika is all about creating and sharing pages stuffed with your greatest ideas and coolest content, and it’s high time we put aside typesetting. For good.

Up next: a replacement for the Google Docs Gadget

Kerika, Technology, Usability

The current version of Kerika uses an embedded Google Docs Gadget, that’s part of the Sidebar within the application. There’s no polite way to describe this software, which comes in four different flavors from the mighty Google itself; let’s just say that the technical term for it is “p.o.s. software”.

A Google Docs Gadget is supposed to be something that you can easily embed within a website or application: it supposed to provide easy, direct access to your Google Docs from within your site or Web App. There are at least four official Google Docs Gadgets out there:

  • There’s this one from “Claudia C. and Ted C.“, both employees at Google – as you can easily see by viewing the XML code for this Gadget. It doesn’t work, which probably explains why Claudia and Ted are coy about revealing their last names. And when we say it doesn’t work, we don’t mean that it has some subtle bugs that are unlikely to surface for most users: just visit this Gadget, at Google’s own official website, and try setting the number of documents to show in the list. It doesn’t work.
  • Here’s another one: presumably a later one than the first, since it’s authorship is attributed to “Claudia C. and Ted C. Modified by Gordon Bunker”. We don’t know who Mr. Bunker is, but he couldn’t get Claudia and Ted’s Gadget to work properly either.
  • Here’s a third one: also the work of Claudia C and Ted C. This one is hilariously broken: just visit the link that says “Add to your home page” and you see the helpful message “Error parsing module spec: Not a properly formatted file missing xml header”. So, here we have an example of two Google employees, hosting an official Google Gadget, on Google’s own website, that is completely broken…
  • Finally, we have this one, attributed to “Claudia C., Ted C., and Sam B.”. Sam, like Claudia and Ted, found it wiser not to disclose his last name given he somehow managed to reduce the utility of the original Gadget.

So, there you have it: four different, official versions of the embeddable Google Docs Gadget, none of which work… The situation became untenable for us because with the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser, the drag-and-drop function stopped working altogether. No small irony here, that Google’s own browser doesn’t work with their own Gadgets, when Firefox’s drag-and-drop continues to work.

We can’t fix these Gadgets because they were built by Google employees; instead, we are building our own replacement for this Gadget which we expect to release this weekend. It’s simple, functional and reliable. It will let you perform a search across all your Google Docs, and drag-and-drop results from this search straight onto your Kerika pages. And, it will work on all browsers.