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 made a small label change that we hope makes it clearer what your choices are for managing the privacy of your Kerika Task Boards, Scrum Boards or Whiteboards: “By Invitation Only”.
We used to have a setting that we had labeled “Team Members and Visitors”; it came with some help text that we thought clarified the issue, but which didn’t work well enough for everyone — as we found out through our ongoing conversations with users.
This is what it used to look like:
Team Members and Visitors
It turned out that not everyone was reading the help text that appears just below the choice for “Team Members and Visitors”.
So, we are tweaking the choice to say “By invitation only”, which we hope will be more self-explanatory.
By invitation only
Sometimes the best usability improvements come from just changing a few words…
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:
We now include chat and document links in the export: this was done specifically to help our many government users who need to respond quickly to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
(See our separate post on how Kerika makes FOIA-compliance one-click easy.)
Everyone who uses the CSV export wants the data to end up in an Excel file anyway, so why not put it in that format to start with? (After all, it’s easy to go the other way as well, from Excel to CSV…)
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:
Example of Workflow View
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Selecting a View
Your new viewing choices include:
Next 3 days: this will show you everything that’s Due Today, Due Tomorrow, Due the Day After, and beyond
Next 3 weeks: everything that’s Due This Week, Due Next Week, Due the Following Week, and beyond.
Next 3 Months: everything that’s Due This Month, Due Next Month, Due the Following Month, and beyond.
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:
Example of 3-day View
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
All cards without any due date are shown first, in the Not Scheduled column.
Next, any Overdue cards are always shown in a special column by themselves, so they can be easily rescheduled.
Beyond this are columns for Today, Tomorrow and the Day After.
And finally, there is the And Beyond column, which summarizes all the cards that have due dates beyond the day after tomorrow.
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Example of 3-week View
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:
Example of 3-month View
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:
Smart drag and drop
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:
Where cards are in your Workflow view
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:
Navigating the Planning Views
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…
