iOS 7 is a great improvement over iOS 6, but we are sorely disappointed that a very simple bug fix to the iOS Maps App and the Calendar App remains undone!
Here’s the problem: if you create a calendar entry and add an address in the “Location” field, for some bizarre reason the Calendar App does not recognize the full address.
Here’s an example: a meeting between Rame and Arun is scheduled to take place at 255 108th Ave NE in Bellevue, Washington (which, by the way, is a well-known local office building known as the Civica Center). When you create the calendar entry, you can type in the full address like this:
Creating a calendar entry in iOS Calendar
But when you are viewing the calendar entry, the Calendar App only recognizes “255 108th Ave NE” as a clickable link: everything after the comma, in this case “, Bellevue” has been ignored.
Viewing a calendar entry in iOS Calendar
That’s bug #1: a simple bug, which could be solved simply by adding some logic to read the rest of the text string after the comma since the entire field is a “location” anyway!
Now we come to the iOS bug, which is far more irritating — and, indeed, baffling considering that the Maps App was designed specifically for mobile devices with built-in GPS capabilities!
If you click on the “255 108th Ave NE” link within the Calendar App, e.g. to get driving instructions for getting to this location, the Maps App completely ignores your current location!
Instead, it starts, very bizarrely, with the center of the continental United States and offers suggestions in Omaha, Nebraska (about 1,000 miles away from the current location of the phone, as you can see from the blue dot in the upper-left corner):
Why would a Maps App designed specially for a mobile phone ignore the value of the user’s current location, and start off by suggesting locations that are hundreds of miles away?
Google Maps, in contrast, doesn’t have this problem. If you copy-and-paste just the “255 108th Ave NE” string into the Google Maps app, it wisely starts off by suggesting the closest locations, not the ones that happen to be closest to the center of the continental United States:
Suggestions from Google Maps
A problem that seems so simple to fix, and yet it persists one year after Apple’s Maps was introduced…
LinkedIn’s “endorsements” feature was an interesting innovation when it first came out, last year, but the way it has been implemented isn’t great, and it runs the risk of becoming a devalued currency.
LinkedIn is too aggressive in soliciting endorsements. With old-fashioned recommendations, you had to do some work – and, more importantly, your best contacts had to do even more work – in order to get a written recommendation.
LinkedIn takes away all of that work by throwing up a splash screen whenever you log in to their site that very persistently solicits endorsements on behalf of everyone you know. First you are prompted to endorse 4 people, and if you do that, you are again prompted to endorse another 4 people. And so on, ad infinitum. It’s like being trapped in an infinite loop: even after you have endorsed a contact for a few skills, you are asked if that person has yet more skills.
It’s one thing to make a feature accessible and easy to use; quite another to push it down everyone’s throat, devaluing your currency in the process.
The other, more subtle problem with LinkedIn’s endorsements is that the data appear highly structured but are, in fact, not really normalized. Take a look at this graph which shows the endorsements given to Kerika’s CEO (Arun Kumar):
Arun Kumar’s LinkedIn endorsements
The long tail is immediately apparent: of the 35 categories of skills representing a total of 251 endorsements, the top 5 skills provide 55% of all endorsements.
The long tail of LinkedIn endorsements
Several categories could be combined quite easily: for example, Board of Directors and Board of Directors Experience are surely the same thing?
What should we do with this long tail: a tail that grows longer by the week?
Yes, another update to Kerika! You can now set Due Dates on cards, and get a personalized email summary each morning of all the work items assigned to you that are due today, tomorrow and are overdue.
We implemented Due Dates in a smart way, in keeping with our focus on distributed teams: the system automatically adjusts for people working across multiple timezones. You can read more about this on our blog.
Your personalized work summary is sent at 6AM every day, adjusting automatically for your timezone, to help you organize your day. We think it is a really handy feature, but you can turn it off if you like by setting your user preferences.
Managing your Inbox and your Sentbox (all the invitations and requests that you have sent out, that haven’t been acted upon yet) are both simpler now: there’s a separate blog post describing that as well.
There are a bunch of other usability improvements as well: you will continue to see more over the next few weeks. Thanks for your support: please continue to help us improve Kerika by providing your feedback!
We have built a simpler way to handle invitations and requests in Kerika, part of a continued (indeed, never-ending!) push to improve usability. A quick recap of what invitations and requests are all about:
Invitations
Invitations are the messages you receive when someone wants to add you to a project team. If you have never worked with someone before, you need to accept their invitation to join a project – to establish a working or “buddy” relationship. This simple mechanism reduces the possibility of you getting dragged onto projects that you have no interest in, or getting involved with people you don’t know.
When you are invited to join a project, you get a (regular) email that looks like this example:
Example of an emailed invitation
After you have accepted an invitation from someone, it becomes easier for that person to add you to other projects: we call this an “auto-add”, where they can add you to another project without waiting for your to accept yet another invitation. This makes it easy for you to work with the same set of colleagues and friends without having to wait for them to accept one invitation after another. So, if you are “auto-added” to a second project, you get a notification email that looks like this:
Example of an email sent when you are auto-added to a project
Requests
Requests can be made in a couple of different ways:
You might want to upgrade your role on a project, where you are not the Project Leader or Account Owner. For example, you might be a Visitor on a project, with read-only privileges, who wants to become a full-fledged Team Member. In that case you can easily request an upgrade in your role by using the Project Team dialog box, which is found in the upper-right corner of the Kerika application. Here’s an illustration of how that’s done:
Requesting an upgrade in role
In this example, Betty is currently a Team Member on the project, and is requesting an upgrade to Project Leader. This request for an upgrade in role gets sent to whoever is currently a Project Leader, and the email sent looks like this:
Email sent when someone requests an upgrade in role
The other type of request is made when a Team Member wants to add someone else to a project team: this will automatically trigger a request sent to the Project Leader, who is asked for approval since it is Project Leaders who ultimately control who gets to be on the project team. The email sent to the Project Leader looks like this:
Email sent when a Team Member wants to add someone to a project team
What’s new: the Inbox
The email aspect of invitations and requests isn’t changing – although we are looking at ways to reduce the odds of these emails getting trapped by spam filters. What is changing is the way you can access invitations and requests from within the Kerika application itself: we have simplified the user interface to look like this:
The total number of invitations and requests you have outstanding
The old envelope icon is being replaced with an orange square that contains the total number of outstanding (pending) invitations and requests you have: in the example above, this is 6.
Clicking on the orange square will bring up a compact display of all your pending invitations and requests organized into an “Inbox” and a “Sent” list:
Example of Inbox
In the example above, there are 4 items pending in the Inbox; from top-to-bottom, they are:
Betty has “auto-added” Arun to the Marketing Review project; Arun’s gotten a notification to that effect. He can open this project by clicking on the Open Project button, which will remove this item from his Inbox.
Betty has a request to invite Sean to the Build a website project. Since Betty is only a Team Member, her invitation has triggered an request for the Project Leader (Arun, in this case) to approve her invitation. If Arun approves Betty’s request, her invitation to Sean will get sent automatically by the system.
Betty wants to upgrade her role in the Build a website project from Team Member to Project Leader; this request has gone to Arun who is one of the current Project Leaders. (Maybe Betty wants to be able to add people more easily to this project, without having to wait for Arun’s approval…)
Susan has invited Arun to join the Getting Started project as a Team Member.
What’s new: the Sentbox
Clicking on the Sent link would bring up a list of all of Arun’s pending invitations and requests:
Example of Sentbox
In the example above, this includes:
A request made to Betty to upgrade Arun’s role in the Getting Started project from Team Member to Project Leader.
An invitation to rika@kerika to join the Release 29 project.
The great thing about the Sentbox is that it lets you pull back (i.e. cancel) an invitation or request that you may have made in error, or where you have subsequently changed your mind.
For example, you may have typed in someone’s email address incorrectly when you were adding them to your project – although Kerika’s seamless integration with Google Contacts makes that less likely! – and you would naturally want to cancel that invitation (quickly) before it gets accepted by the wrong person.
To learn more about people and roles in Kerika’s project teams, check out this video:
We have added email notifications for Project Leaders: you can now get email alerts sent when cards are added to your projects, reassigned, or marked as Done.
Easier ways to manage your tags and do quick filtering of your view of a project board.
Easier way to retrieve entire projects that you may have deleted.
Here’s Google Voice’s transcription of a voice-mail:
Hey, I wanted to. Sorry I was. I would call me when you called driving a satellite probably be in the popular half hour and, I pledge appointment if you’re around. Gimme a call. Otherwise, I think it later. The off and also from Iraq. Thanks. Bye
From the very beginning Kerika has been built to leverage the Google Apps platform, and today we are one of the most elegant apps in the Google Apps Marketplace! The Google Apps integration, however, has been something of a double-edged sword: folks who are already committed to using Google Docs and Google Drive love Kerika, but there are also folks who like Google Drive but not Google Docs, and these folks haven’t been too happy to lose the advanced formatting and other “power-user” features of Microsoft Office.
This has been particularly true for some of our consulting users who make extensive use of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in dealing with RFPs and client reports.
The fact that we have always converted files to the Google Docs format is really more a historical artifact than an integral part of the Kerika design and product vision, so now we are offering users the choice of using Google Docs or not, while retaining our integration with Google Drive. Here’s how it works:
There will be a new user preference that lets you decide whether you want to use Google Docs or not. By default, this will be OFF, which means that you will not be using Google Docs.
If the preference is OFF, then files that you add to your Kerika project boards — onto individual cards or canvases — will still be shared using your Google Drive, but the original Microsoft Office format will be preserved. This means, for example, Excel files will remain as Excel files even as they are getting shared across your project team using Google Drive.
This setting is on a per-user basis: it means that you are controlling whether projects in your own account are going to use Google Docs or not. Other Kerika users may have different preference settings, so on some projects you may find that the files have been converted to Google Docs because that account’s owner prefers that way of sharing files.
We are adding a bunch of new ways in which Project Leaders can choose to get email notifications when there are important changes taking place on their project boards; these include the following:
Email me when cards are added to my project:if new cards are added to a board where you are one of the Project Leaders, you can get an email notification. By default, this is turned ON: it’s a useful way for Project Leaders to know when the work expected of the team, particularly in Scrum projects, is increasing. (Team Members never get emailed when new cards are added.)
Email me when cards on my projects are marked Done: if any cards are moved to the Done column on a Task Board or Scrum Board, the Project Leaders can get notified by email. By default, this is also turned ON. (And Team Members never get emailed.)
Email me chat messages on cards in my projects: this is actually a two-part change that we are making. Previously, everyone who was part of a project got an email if there was any chat on a card. Now, this is more targeted:
If a card is assigned to one or more people, chat messages are emailed only to the assigned people. This reduces the overall volume of emails sent by Kerika by targeting only those folks who care the most about a particular card.
If a card isn’t assigned to anyone, chat messages are sent to everyone who is part of the team. Here, our assumption is that if you are writing a message about an unassigned card, you would like to get everyone’s attention with that message. For example, you might be suggesting a path forward for an unassigned card, or calling attention to an issue that isn’t assigned to anyone to fix.
Project Leaders can choose to be part of the chat notifications for all cards, even if they aren’t assigned to these cards, and this is a new preference setting that we have created with a default value of Off. So, if you are a Project Leader that would like to know about each and every chat message on your project boards, you could turn this preference On.
Email me general chat messages: this refers to chat that takes place on the board itself, that isn’t tied to any particular card. Chat that takes place on the board itself is usually intended for the entire team, so this preference setting applies to Project Leaders and Team Members. By default, this is turned On.
Email me when cards in my projects are reassigned: when a card is reassigned, i.e. an old team member is taken off a card, or a new person added, everyone affected by the change is notified by email: the people who were formerly assigned the card, and the new people. This is an easy way for you to know when someone expects you to handle some new work, or, conversely, if someone else is now expected to do the work that had previously been assigned to you. We have added a new preference setting for Project Leaders to be told, by email, when cards are reassigned: this is an easy way for you to know that your team has self-organized itself to handle its work differently.
All these changes means that your Preferences page, which is always found at https://kerika.com/preferences, now looks like this:
Your new Kerika preferences page
We have been using these new features internally for the past couple of weeks, and have found them to be really useful!
We are adding a bunch of new ways in which Project Leaders can choose to get email notifications when there are important changes taking place on their project boards; these include the following:
Email me when cards are added to my project:if new cards are added to a board where you are one of the Project Leaders, you can get an email notification. By default, this is turned ON: it’s a useful way for Project Leaders to know when the work expected of the team, particularly in Scrum projects, is increasing. (Team Members never get emailed when new cards are added.)
Email me when cards on my projects are marked Done: if any cards are moved to the Done column on a Task Board or Scrum Board, the Project Leaders can get notified by email. By default, this is also turned ON. (And Team Members never get emailed.)
Email me chat messages on cards in my projects: this is actually a two-part change that we are making. Previously, everyone who was part of a project got an email if there was any chat on a card. Now, this is more targeted:
If a card is assigned to one or more people, chat messages are emailed only to the assigned people. This reduces the overall volume of emails sent by Kerika by targeting only those folks who care the most about a particular card.
If a card isn’t assigned to anyone, chat messages are sent to everyone who is part of the team. Here, our assumption is that if you are writing a message about an unassigned card, you would like to get everyone’s attention with that message. For example, you might be suggesting a path forward for an unassigned card, or calling attention to an issue that isn’t assigned to anyone to fix.
Project Leaders can choose to be part of the chat notifications for all cards, even if they aren’t assigned to these cards, and this is a new preference setting that we have created with a default value of Off. So, if you are a Project Leader that would like to know about each and every chat message on your project boards, you could turn this preference On.
Email me general chat messages: this refers to chat that takes place on the board itself, that isn’t tied to any particular card. Chat that takes place on the board itself is usually intended for the entire team, so this preference setting applies to Project Leaders and Team Members. By default, this is turned On.
Email me when cards in my projects are reassigned: when a card is reassigned, i.e. an old team member is taken off a card, or a new person added, everyone affected by the change is notified by email: the people who were formerly assigned the card, and the new people. This is an easy way for you to know when someone expects you to handle some new work, or, conversely, if someone else is now expected to do the work that had previously been assigned to you. We have added a new preference setting for Project Leaders to be told, by email, when cards are reassigned: this is an easy way for you to know that your team has self-organized itself to handle its work differently.
All these changes means that your Preferences page, which is always found at https://kerika.com/preferences, now looks like this:
Your new Kerika preferences page
We have been using these new features internally for the past couple of weeks, and have found them to be really useful!
The next release of Kerika will include a bunch of bug fixes and usability improvements, as usual, but a big new feature that we hope you will find useful is Card History: every card will contain a succinct history of everything that’s happened to it, since it was created.
Here’s an example:
Card history
Our implementation of this new feature is actually kind of clever, under the covers (of course!): rather than log every action immediately we wait a little to see if the user changes her mind about the action.
So, for example, if a user moves a card to Done, and then moves it back to another column soon afterwards, the Card History doesn’t show the intermediate action since the user clearly changed her mind about whether that work item was actually done or not. In other words, the system is forgiving of user errors: an important design principle that we have tried to adopt elsewhere as well.
Because the Kerika user interface makes it so easy to make changes to your task board, a built-in delay in the history is necessary to avoid creating a “noisy” or “spammy” history.
From a technical perspective, the most interesting aspect of creating this new feature was that we expanded our infrastructure to include Amazon’s DynamoDB.
DynamoDB is a fast, fully managed NoSQL database service that makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. This is our first foray into using NoSQL databases; up to now we had been exclusively using MySQL.
