Well, the last time we saw Jason, we asked him how the wedding had gone, and he said it went beautifully!
Heather was new to the whole Kanban concept, but Kerika helped her understand all the moving parts that needed to come together just right for a great wedding, and she liked the experience so much that their house chores are now organized and managed online.
In other words, the “Honey Do” list has now gone online!
When you add files to your Kerika+Box projects, either as attachments to cards on Task Boards or Scrum Boards, or on canvases and Whiteboards, these get stored in your Box account.
If you have a premium (enterprise) version of Box, you can directly download these attachments, instead of having to go through Box’s preview display first: just hover over an attached file, and you will see a “download” button appear:
Directly downloading files from Box
This works fine for enterprise users of Box, but if you are using the free version of Box, you will see a Box error page, like this:
We are starting to realize that a card’s status, e.g. “Ready for Review,” “Needs rework,” etc. is pretty important not just in terms of what they show about a card’s current state, but also in terms of its history.
Previously, we weren’t tracking changes to a card’s status as part of the card’s history; without our latest release, that’s now a feature, so if you are wondering who put a card “On Hold”, you can just open the card’s History and Kerika will tell you:
Here’s a new feature we are adding: when you copy and paste an entire project from one account to another, you can decide whether to take the team as well.
Consider these two scenarios:
Alice makes a copy of a project that she owns and pastes it right back into her own account. (Why? Well, maybe she wanted to make a backup copy, or maybe the actual project was going to split into two parallel efforts and so copying-and-pasting the entire project makes sense.)
Bob makes a copy of a project that Alice owns, and pastes it in his own account. (Of course, to do this Bob would need to have access to Alice’s project in the first place.)
In the first scenario, the duplicated project is showing up in the same account as it was before, so Kerika assumes that the team should be copied as well: in other words, “Project A” and “Copy of Project A” will both have the same team, at least to start with although each version of the board may then change its project teams independently of each other.
In the second scenario, however, it’s a little more murky: did Bob just want to copy the cards and canvases of Alice’s project, or is he trying to actually set up the same project in his own account? It’s hard for Kerika to make a really good guess in this scenario, so the system asks you:
If Bob responds “Yes” to this question, his copy of Alice’s project will also come with all the team members who were originally working on Alice’s project.
Of course, this might mean that Bob is now adding some folks to his account team: people he hadn’t worked with before. These people are added automatically to Bob’s account team if he wants to take the team along with the project.
Kerika+Google, our integration with Google Drive, and Kerika+Box, our integration with Box, are very similar in terms of user interface, but the underlying cloud storage platforms are different in some subtle ways.
One of these has to do with the way images that are added to a canvas are named: when you add an image to a canvas, either by using the Upload button or simply by dragging and dropping the image from your desktop onto the canvas, Kerika will show a small thumbnail of the image on your canvas.
The thumbnails provided to Kerika by Google are better than those provided by Box in a couple of ways:
Box’s thumbnails are square, which can result in a cropped view of the image; Google’s thumbnails show the entire image.
Google’s thumbnails can be resized nicely on the Kerika canvas, simply by selecting it and then dragging on one of the corners; Box’s can’t.
If you rename a Google thumbnail and take off the original file extension, e.g. you rename “picture.jpg” to be just “picture”, the thumbnail still renders correctly, but Box’s doesn’t. (Because Box relies on the file extensions to detect the file’s MIME-type.)
There are some other quirks with the way Box and Google work, but most of them are going to be invisible to most Kerika users.
We have been trying out Google’s new domain management service for the past month, and we are impressed.
(Caveats: this service is in “beta”, whatever that means in Google-speak; it is available only to people in the U.S.; it doesn’t handle every one of the new top-level gLTDs — yet.)
But for all that, Google’s simplicity of UI and the overall user experience is way betterthan what we have seen from Register.com, GoDaddy, NameCheap, and a bunch of others.
In many ways this reminds us of Google in 1999, when it’s very simple search engine was a welcome contrast to the muddled portals offered by companies like HotBot, Lycos, and AltaVista.
Everything extraneous has been stripped out, and the process of transferring and managing domains has been made very clear even for non-technical people.
Folks like GoDaddy have a very short window of time to, literally, clean up their act before Google mows them down.
Google Apps has created a Bizarro World for some of its premium customers, and in the process is doing really bad things to its ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) like Kerika.
Two questions come to mind:
Do they know?
Do they care?
First, an explanation of how this Bizarro World came about…
Google Apps has a lot of free users — anyone with a Gmail or YouTube account, for example — but they also have several million business users who pay around $5 per user, per month, to get “Google Apps for Business” (which is also variously rebranded as Google Apps for Government/Education/Nonprofits…)
It used to be that any Google user could easily try out an app like Kerika that uses a Google ID for sign-in, and Google Drive to store files.
This was a pretty good arrangement, and among other things it encouraged ISVs to integrate with Google Apps — which helped Google in it’s “all your base are belong to us” goal of world domination.
Last year, however, they made a significant change: premium users of Google Apps can now only try out new apps like Kerika if their Google Apps Admin permits it.
In other words, no more experimentation, exploration, discovery…
Instead, we have the quite deliberate creation of a bureaucratic bottleneck (justified by the always useful umbrella excuse of “this is better security”?) where every user in every organization that wants to try out Kerika must first find out who their Google Apps Admin is — which is no easy task, if your organization consists of several tens of thousands of employees! — and then get them to approve the use of Kerika by everyone within the organization.
This is simple enough if your organization is small — you can easily contact your Google Apps Admin — but what happens if, say, you work in a university with 30,000 other people in that Google domain?
We have been finding out the hard way that Bizarro World hurts: the Google Apps Admin at one university has been working for over 6 months to reconcile Google’s demands with the university’s own policies.
Because…
Only the Google Apps Admin can approve use of Kerika.
The university prohibits system administrators from entering into any agreements — all licenses and agreements can be accepted only by the Purchasing Department.
No one in the Purchasing Dept is a Google Apps Admin, since this is an IT function that has nothing to do with purchasing.
Does Google know this is happening? Yes, they know.
It actually affects two large universities right now that are interested in trying out Kerika — each university has a population of about 30,000 people, so, yes, Google does know this is a problem.
And, we have
Does Google care? Apparently not.
The Google Apps Admins at these universities cannot get any kind of help from Google, and we at Kerika have directly brought this to the Google folks and not heard anything either.
One of the coolest features in Kerika is how well the system alerts you to changes made on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards that you haven’t seen — i.e. because you were working on another board at the time your coworkers made changes, or maybe because you were fast asleep in a different timezone!
Whenever a coworker makes any change to a card that you haven’t seen — moving the card to a different column, changing its description, changing its tags, leaving some chat, etc., the change is highlighted on the card using orange.
Smart highlights
And when you catch up on that change, e.g. open the card and read the new chat, the orange highlight gets turned off automatically.
(You can also mark a card’s changes as “read”, using the right-mouse-click menu.)
These smart highlights are great for distributed teams, and indeed for any person who is involved with multiple projects because it lets you catch up on what’s changed while you weren’t looking.
Now, these smart higlights are even smarter: if a card has multiple changes to it that you haven’t seen, e.g. it has a new attachment and it has new chat, Kerika keeps track of which changes you have caught up with, and which ones you haven’t.
In this example, if you read the chat, the orange highlight of the chat icon will go away, but the orange highlight of the attachments icon will remain until you catch up on the new attachments as well.
When you first use Kerika, your browser has a reassuring sign that your connection to our servers is being encrypted:
No warning when you first use Kerika
But as soon as you open a card that contains any attachments, e.g. files stored in your Box account if you are using Kerika+Box, this reassurance would disappear, and instead you would see a warning about “Mixed Content”, which basically means that some of the data shown on your Kerika page was coming from a source that wasn’t using HTTPS.
Why there is a mixed content warning
This was because of a small bug in how we were dealing with the thumbnails we got for files stored in your Google or Box account: for faster performance we were caching these on our own Amazon S3 cloud storage (so we wouldn’t have to keep getting them from Google/Box every time you open the same card.)
It turns out that we weren’t fetching the thumbnails from S3 using HTTPS, which meant that as soon as you switched to the Attachment view of a card, your browser’s address bar would show the “mixed content” warning.
There was no real vulnerability resulting from this, but it did interfere with the user experience for that minority of users who like to keep a sharp eye on their browser’s address bar so we have fixed that with our latest release.
Now you should always have the warm reassurance of seeing the green secure site symbol on your browser when you open a card!
Where dates are shown on Kerika’s boards and cards, we try to show them in relative terms rather than absolute terms.
For example, if something was updated today, we use the word “Today” instead of the actual date.
There’s a simple reason for that: relative times and dates are much easier for people to comprehend than absolute values. In other words, it’s much easier for someone to comprehend “5 minutes ago” than “Dec 30 2014 3:58PM PST”.
Absolute dates and times may be more accurate, but relative values are a whole lot easier to process for regular humans.
One problem we had with our display of relative times, however, was that they were not continuously updating — instead, they relied upon the page being refreshed in order to show the most accurate relative time description.
For example, if something was updated “2 minutes ago”, the phrase would remain displayed on the screen for a long time, if the page was never refreshed. This obviously can lead to confusion, since users are not going to be aware of when they last refreshed a page.
With our newest release, we have fixed that problem: relative times will still be in use, but they will update themselves automatically, so that “5 minutes ago” will soon become “10 minutes ago” and then “1 hour ago” without the user having to do anything.
