We have added a keyboard shortcut to make it a little faster to send chat messages — on cards, canvases or the board itself.
After typing in your chat message, use the Ctl-Enter (or Ctl-Return) key combination to send the chat immediately. It will save you having to reach for the mouse to click on the Send button…
(And thanks, as usual, to our users for urging us to add this new feature!)
(Thanks to our users in the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board for helping us find this bug.)
We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.
Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:
(Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)
Here’s an example of chat email:
And what clicking on the Reply button does:
In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
“Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>”
(This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)
The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.
In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.
For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.
Once again Arun Kumar, Kerika’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at the annual Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington.
This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.
Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.
We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!
We are currently seeing a bunch of errors from Google with respect to their authentication service — which lets you login to your Kerika+Google account using your Google ID, and they seem to be affecting a wide range of users.
Here’s a sample of what we are seeing:
This error normally shows up when a user is logging in with a Google for Work ID, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education.
What’s surprising today is that we have seen at least 1 user with a regular Gmail address have this same problem, which is theoretically impossible.
Right now there’s not much we can do but wait this out. The problem seems to be small enough that Google is not even reporting it on their Google Apps Status Dashboard. :-(
Our thanks to Tatjana and Steve from Ducks Unlimited in Canada, who helped us track down a bug that was stopping notification emails being sent properly when a Team Member is assigned a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board.
(Board Admins were getting these emails when people’s assignments changed, but not the Team Members themselves.)
We fixed this with our latest release.
If you use the “file picker” that’s built into Kerika to add an existing Google Drive or Box file to a card, canvas or board — for a Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard — you will see a message that says the file is being copied.
This is the file picker:
Clicking on the File Picker button brings up the File Picker dialog:
And this is the “copying…” message that’s shown.
So, what’s happening?
Well, Kerika stores all your Kerika-related files in a set of special folders within your Google Drive or Box account, if you are using Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box, and these are organized neatly into folders corresponding to each of your boards.
Here’s what the folders in your Box account look like (you can learn more by reading about how Kerika integrates with Box):
It’s a similar structure if you are using Kerika with Google:
Keeping all the Kerika files together in a set of related folders makes things cleaner for you: when you look at your Google Drive or Box Account, you know exactly what’s being used by Kerika, and what’s other stuff.
And this is why we make a copy of your existing Google Drive or Box file when you use the File Picker: it enables us to put a copy into your Kerika-specific folders, where it is easier to share with the rest of your project team.
Less is a CSS pre-processor: it extends CSS by adding variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow easier maintenance of your browser stylesheets.
You can compile Less either on the client side, or on the server. We thought it didn’t matter; but it turns out that Google search engine crawler doesn’t like the client-side compilation:
If you are using Less on your website, you might want to also avoid client-side compilation so that Google doesn’t barf on it…
A new tutorial video on how you can easily draw curved lines and arrows on Kerika’s canvases and Whiteboards:
Animation often gets a bad reputation, and often this reputation is well deserved because too many designers and developers use animation gratuitously: just because they can, or just because they want to show off their technical skills.
At Kerika we have been very cautious about using animation, and have generally restricted its use to scenarios where it can help give users a “sense of place”: providing transitions from one display to another, so that a user has a sense of having journeyed from one part of the system to another.
Animations are particular useful when returning to where you come from: an effective animation can help users understand that they have returned from their journey.
Using animation to unfold drop-down dialogs helps the user understand that the dialogs are literally unfurling on top of the Task Board or Scrum Board: in other words, the user isn’t going anywhere different, just unfolding another display for temporary use.
With our latest version, we added some more animation: now, when you open a card on your Task Board or Scrum Board, it will appear to literally open in front of your eyes.
Animation is also used when you close a card: it appears to collapse in front of you in a way that draws your eye to its position within a crowded column.
This kind of animation, we believe, is useful rather than gratuitous: it helps the user understand what is happening when she opens or closes a card.
(We may consider some other touches of animation where we think it could help provide useful transitions, but we have to be mindful of the performance hit of animations as well…)
At the time we added “In Progress” as a new status value, we also removed the “Done” status, mostly because the drop-down list of status choices was becoming rather long — and “Done” was not quite like all the other choices that we were presenting for marking a card’s status.
This is what the old choices looked like:
And this is what the new status choices look like:
There are two small UI tweaks here that we made: