Monthly Archives: September 2011

Like a project? Copy it with a single click

We are encouraging our users to create public projects: projects that are open to the public to visit, and which can serve as templates for other users who need to perform similar functions. For example, a template on how to use Michael Porter’s Functions of a Competitor Intelligence System, adapted from his classic book on Competitive Strategy, might be useful for a number of people who are either studying the topic as part of an MBA program, or are simply applying these concepts as part of their jobs in marketing, product management or strategy.

Whenever you visit a public project, you now have an easy way to make a personal copy of that project using a new “Copy Project” button that we have introduced. Clicking on this button makes a complete copy of the public project for your personal use: it gets added to your own Account, and you can start working on it for your own purposes right away. This is what it looks like:

The Copy Project button lets you make a personal copy of a public project
The Copy Project button lets you make a personal copy of a public project

If you like the idea of contributing your ideas to the Kerika community, please consider making some of your projects accessible by the public. If you have a methodology, process or set of ideas or content that you want to share with the world, it’s easy to make your project accessible by the public: just click on the Team button and check the “Make project public” box, like this:

Make your project open to the public
Make your project open to the public

Remember, when you make your project open to the public, it doesn’t mean that anyone can just wander by and vandalize it. It just means that people can view your work, and if they like what they are doing, they could ask to join your project (which is great if you want to attract people to an open source or advocacy project), or they could use the “Copy Project” button to make a personal copy of the project that you have so kindly provided!

Kerika adds Social Media Links

Finally… yes, we know we should have done this a while ago, but we were busy making the core Kerika software more robust and polishing away some of the usability friction that users had reported, but now we have done it: we added social media links to Kerika!

The old “Share!” button at the top of the Kerika UI is still there:

The Share! button
The Share! button is on the toolbar, just above the canvas

Clicking on this button brings up a whole bunch of new possibilities:

The Share! options for a project that's open to the public
The Share! options for a project that's open to the public

The first option, from the left, is the “People” action: you can use the Share! button to quickly add people to your project team. (This is an alternative to using the Team button to manage your project teams.) Here’s how you can add people using the Share! button:

Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team
Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team

You can also use the Share! dialog to:

  • Post to your Facebook wall
  • Tweet about your project. (Your tweet will include a link to the project page.)
  • Post it as an update to your LinkedIn profile page. (That will include a link to the project page as well.)
  • Share it with your Google circles by doing a Google +1 on the page.

And, you can simply grab the URL of the page it you want to share it with someone:

Grab the URL for your project page
Grab the URL for your project page

And, finally, you can email a friend or coworker about the project, and include a link to the page in your email message.

There’s more to come: in the near future we will be making it possible for you to embed a picture of your project page in your own website or blog!

Our latest version, and then some!

In the immortal words of Jim Anchower: “Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya.”

Our apologies for not posting blog entries for a while, but we have the usual excuse for that, and this time it’s true: “We’ve been incredibly busy building great software!” It’s going to be hard to summarize all the work that we have done since June, but let’s give it a shot:

  1. We have curved lines now. And not just any old curved lines, but the most flexible and easy to use drawing program that you are likely to encounter anywhere. You can take a line and bend it in as many ways as you like, and – this is the kicker – straighten it out as easily as you bent it in the first place. There’s a quick demo video on YouTube that you should check out.
  2. We have greatly improved the text blocks feature of Kerika. The toolbar looks better on all browsers now (Safari and Chrome used to make it look all scrunched up before), and we have added some cool features like using it to add an image to your Kerika page that’s a link to another website. (So you could, for example, add a logo for a company to your Kerika page and have that be a link to your company’s website.) Check out the nifty tutorial on YouTube on text blocks.
  3. You can set your styling preferences: colors, fonts, lines, etc. Previously, all the drawing you did on your Kerika pages was with just one set of colors, fonts, etc., but now you can set your own styling preferences, with a new button, and also adjust the appearance of individual items.
  4. We have improved the whole Invitations & Requests process. Now, when you invite people to join your projects, the emails that get sent out are much better looking and much more helpful, and the same goes for requests that come to you from people who want to join your projects, or change their roles in your projects. Check out this quick tutorial on how invitations and requests work.
  5. We have made it easier for you to personalize your Account. You can add a picture and your own company logo, which means that when you use Kerika your users see your logo, not ours! Check out this quick tutorial on how to personalize your Account.
  6. We have hugely increased the kinds of third-party content you can embed on your Kerika pages. The list is so long, we really should put that in a separate blog post. We have gone way beyond YouTube videos now; we are talking about all the major video sites (Vimeo, etc.), Hulu, Google Maps, Scribd and Slideshare… The mind boggles.
  7. Full screen view of projects. There’s a little button now, at the top-right corner of the Kerika canvas: click on it and you will go into full-screen mode, where the canvas takes up all the space and all the toolbars disappear. This makes it easy to surf pages that contain lots of content, or work more easily with your Google Docs.
  8. Full support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). Not as easy as you might think, given that Microsoft has historically gone their own way, but we have sweated the details and now Kerika works great with IE9. As Microsoft continues to converge around common standards, this should get easier for us over time.
  9. Full support for all desktop platforms. OK, so this isn’t really a new feature, but since we are bragging we might as well emphasize that Kerika works, and is tested, to work identically on Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7, Mac OSX and Linux.
  10. Literally hundreds of usability improvements. Yeah, okay, we should have gotten it all right in the first place, but our focus over the past few months has been very much on working directly with our early adopters, observing them use the product, and noting all the tiny friction points that we could improve upon. We are not saying that we have all the friction removed, we are just bragging about the hundreds of tweaks we have made in the past 3 months.

Since June, we have had two major releases: one at the end of July that had nearly 150 bug fixes and usability improvements, and one this week, with over 120 bug fixes and usability improvements.

The product is now in great shape from an infrastructure perspective: the core software has been well debugged and is now very robust. Performance is great: you should get sub-second responsiveness when working in an environment with decent broadband wireless, where you see updates to your project pages in less than one second after a team member makes a change. (We test this with users in Seattle and India working simultaneously on the same project.)

Having this robust infrastructure that’s been well debugged and tuned makes it easy for us to add new features. In the coming weeks, look for more social media hooks, a revamped website, an extensive collection of public projects (that you can use as templates for your own work), and more. Much more. After all, if “less is more”, just think how much more “more” could be 😉