When cards, or entire projects, were copied and pasted, the chat attached to them were not getting copied as well.
That’s been fixed in our latest version. One side-effect of this to note, however: if you copy a card from Project A and paste it into Project B, the chat will be copied along with the card, and be resent to appropriate people in Project B.
As with Android tablets, we have been doing a bunch of testing and bug fixing related to using Kerika on Windows tablets and touch devices generally (i.e. the many combinationss of touch and keyboard that make up the Windows computer ecosystem)
And, as with iPads and Android tablets, you don’t need to install a special app in order to run Kerika: you can just use the Internet Explorer browser (or any other browser you have installed) to access Kerika, and use your finger to move stuff around just as you would with a mouse.
There were some problems with the touch interface that we have fixed; the overall experience should be a lot better than it was before!
The growing number of new top-level domains (in addition to the old familiar .com, .org, etc.) that are available is finally starting to have an impact upon us…
While we haven’t seen a lot of use of these new domains yet, a few useful websites are starting to pop-up, e.g. using the .guide top-level domain, and this has required us to abandon an old feature of Kerika that is not going to work any more.
We used to have some validation code that checked that people were entering URLs correctly, e.g when they wanted to add a Web link to a card or to a canvas.
This validation is pretty much impossible to do in the old form, because of the rapid proliferation of new top-level domains, so we are dropping that validation feature which was kind of nice to have…
For a very long time we had a feature which was kind of cool (although we don’t know how many people actually used it!) — you could embed another website on a Kerika canvas, using a technique known as IFRAME.
IFRAMEs were common a few years ago, but have steadily dropped out of favor as browsers have increasingly become more secure.
By running another website inside your own, you can be vulnerable to various cross-scripting errors if you cannot fully trust that third-party website you have embedded. And, at the same time, people who run websites have become less keen on having their sites embedded into other sites — a practice known as “clickjacking”.
(You can read more about this on Mozilla’s website, if you are interested in the technical details.)
Since it became impossible for us to provide a consistently good experience across all modern browsers, particularly as the number of websites that allow themselves to be IFRAMEd dropped drastically, we decided to drop this feature. If you were using this feature in the past, you will find your old IFRAME is now just a simple bookmark…
We were trying out Kerika using Amazon’s Silk browser on one of their Fire (color) tablets, and found that Kerika worked surprisingly well.
On standard (un-forked) Android tablets, the Chrome browser works better than the standard browser that comes with all tablets, mainly because Google has been improving Chrome with a lot more enthusiasm than they have been improving “stock Android“.
So, we weren’t sure how good the Silk browser would behave with Kerika, given that Silk is a relatively old fork of the standard Android browser.
It turns out that you can use Kerika on Amazon’s Fire tablets quite well: just open the Silk browser, go to kerika.com, and login like you would on a laptop or desktop. Just let your finger do the dragging-and-dropping…
We have been doing a bunch of testing and bug fixing related to using Kerika on Android tablets.
As with iPads, you don’t need to install a special app in order to run Kerika: you can just use the Chrome browser on an Android tablet to access Kerika, and use your finger to move stuff around just as you would with a mouse.
We found an fixed some problems with the Chrome touch interface; the overall experience should be a lot better than it was before!
Note: you are almost always better off using the Chrome browser rather than the standard browser that comes with all Android tablets; that’s because Google has a lot more enthusiasm for improving their proprietary (non open-source) products than “stock Android“.
If you are wondering whether Kerika is faster than it used to be, yes, it is.
We made a change in our software architecture — the way each board would connect to the server and ask for all its cards and all the updates on these cards — that has reduced the total upload of data.
This was actually a significant improvement in upload speed: about 10x.
Since upload speeds are frequently much slower than download speeds, even on broadband connections, this should help load larger boards much faster. And on mobile connections this should help reduce the amount of data consumed.
We used to have Export as HTML and Export as CSV as options for our Task Boards and Scrum Boards, and with our latest version we are tweaking the Export as CSV to become Export as Excel instead.
There are a couple of reasons we did this:
Export as Excel
We are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards! (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))
Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Your new viewing choices include:
Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.
Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.
The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:
All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date. As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:
Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:
Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:
As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!
Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).
Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…
A long time ago we used to have a feature we called the “Daily Digest” which sent an email everyday summarizing all the changes that had been done to your Whiteboard projects overnight.
(This was back before we added Scrum Boards and Task Boards as a feature, when all we had was our patented Whiteboards.)
We never got this feature to work properly: not because it was buggy in a technical sense, but because we could never figure out how to make it a useful feature.
After trying numerous times to tweak it we finally gave up a long time ago.
And promptly forgot all about it.
It turns out that the feature had only been turned off on our server software; it hadn’t actually been ripped out.
We stumbled upon it in an obscure corner of our vast code base recently and were surprised to find it still there, albeit in a “commented-out” form.
Well, it’s gone for good now. It never worked well, it had been turned off for years, and now it’s in the trash…