Monthly Archives: March 2012

An easier way to share Web-versions of your project pages

Technology

Our new version will have an easier way for you to share Web-versions of your Kerika project pages.

“Web-versions” are automatically generated for every Kerika page: they can be viewed as regular Web pages, and easily embedded inside your own website or blog.

For a great example of how an embedded Kerika page can look inside your own website or blog, check out Ogden Murphy Wallace’s “Startup Action Kit” which provides an online resource for entrepreneurs interested in starting healthcare IT ventures. This page contains a Web version of a Kerika page that has been inserted into OMW’s microsite as an IFRAME, something that’s easily done by using the “Share!” button inside Kerika:

How to embed your Kerika project inside your website or blog
How to embed your Kerika project inside your website or blog

 

With our latest version, getting the URL of the Web-version of your project pages is easier than before: just click on the Share! button, and when the dialog box shown above opens, you can grab the URL from either of the two places indicated above.

An even easier way to get the URL of the Web-version of your project: all Kerika project pages have URLs of the form “kerika.com/m/XYZ“; just change the “m” to a “c”, as in “kerika.com/c/XYZ“, and you have the Web-version of your project.

Remember: the Web version gets updated in real-time as you update your Kerika project pages, which means you are publishing on the Web in real-time!

 

A simpler way to deal with thumbnails

Technology, Usability

Sometimes you have to admit that your bright ideas just didn’t turn out as well as you liked…

One such bright idea was to have Idea Pages show thumbnails of their contents when viewed from their parent pages. Here’s an example of this works in practice:

Old thumbnails implementation
How thumbnails of Idea Pages used to look

A great idea in theory; not so great in practice…

The original goal was two-fold:

  1. To let users know quickly which items on an Idea Page contained other pages;
  2. To give users a quick visual sense for what was contained in those pages;

In practice, however, the effect of these thumbnails showing through all the time was a splotchy, rather ugly effect. To remedy this, we are adopting a new mechanism that we hope will continue to meet our two goals: with our latest version, any item on an Idea Page that contains another page will appear with it’s text/label underlined, like this:

What thumbnails look like now
What thumbnails look like now

As you can see, items that contain pages now appear with their text labels underlined. If you move your mouse over a shape that has underlined text in its label, you see a thumbnail appear as before:

A thumbnail appears on mouseover
A thumbnail appears on mouseover

Selecting the shape now provides a green “+” button: this lets you open the page contained within that shape.

Thumbnail on selection
Thumbnail on selection

This new green “+” button also appears on shapes that don’t contain any pages within them: in that case, clicking on the “+” button lets you create a new page that is contained within that shape.

In effect, the old double-click mouse operation has been replaced with a green “+” button that appears when you select a shape with a single mouse click.

We hope you find these changes helpful; we earnestly seek your feedback!

A completely rebuilt text block capability in our latest version

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We have been toiling away for the past 4 weeks on our latest version of Kerika, with the vast majority of time consumed with a complete rewrite of the Text Block feature. This is the feature that lets you place blocks of richly formatted text, including Web links, pictures and tables, onto your Kerika page. (What we termed, in an earlier post, “glassbox documents”.)

Here’s a simple example of a text block:

A simple example of a text block
A simple example of a text block

 

Having realized just how important this feature is for our users, we decided to do a complete rewrite of all the code, abandoning the open-source library called Whyzziwig that we had been using previously in favor of our own implementation. We did all this work because it was clear that we needed to be in greater control of this particular feature’s destiny: something that’s impossible when you are using an open source library. As a result of all our hard work, you will now have a bunch of great new functionality!

  • An Undo button: at long last! We still need to create a broader Undo function that works across all of Kerika’s operations, but this particular button works nicely when you are editing a text block.
  • A strikethrough button: great for marking up requirements and discussions.
  • A new color picker: a simple palette of 84 colors with a cleaner user interface. Along with this comes an easier way to set the font, highlighting and background colors.
  • More options for numbered lists: including using alphabetic and Roman numerals.
  • More options for bullet lists.
  • A clear formatting button: this can be particularly helpful if you are importing content from Microsoft Office. (See our earlier post on just how much junk HTML is carried over if you copy material from a Microsoft Office document.)
  • Easier ways to add, edit and remove Web links: we have considerably simplified the user interface for attaching a Web link to some text (or to a picture that you have embedded inside your text block).
  • Easier way to embed pictures in text block: a simpler, cleaner user interface.

We also have reatly improved capabilities for creating and managing tables: this was where the bulk of the work was done! We have added a number of features that our users asked for, such as:

  • Setting Cell, Row and Column Properties: you can set horizontal and vertical alignment, as well as the background (fill color) for a single cell, an entire row, or an entire column.
  • Resizing column widths by dragging: something that we have wanted for a long time, and which took a lot of effort to build… Now you can re-size a column simply by dragging its edges, as you would with Word or Excel.
  • Copy and Paste: you can now copy and paste a single cell, an entire row, or an entire column. Great for moving stuff around inside tables!
  • Border color: easier to set, with our new Color Picker. And, to improve the usability and appearance of tables, we automatically make the outer border of tables twice as thick as the inner borders (that separate individual cells).

That’s not all that’s new in this release, but this particular blog post is long enough, so we will talk about other goodies in our next posting… Here’s a Kerika page that shows these changes: it’s open to the public to visit, so come on over!

 

The value of trademarks (and other intellectual property)

Intellectual Property, Kerika

Not many startups seem to think that having a registered trademark, or a patent for that matter, can help real, tangible assets for the company. Most entrepreneurs seem to think that getting a “.com” domain name is all that’s needed to create their company’s identity.

While getting a “.com” domain name for your new company is undoubtedly valuable – and we don’t believe a “.net” or “.biz” or any other variant is nearly as worthwhile – getting a registered trademark, a registered service mark (if appropriate), and patents are all very important for startups.

Early on we registered “Kerika” and our distinctive flower logo as registered trademarks and registered service marks. Getting the registered status for a trademark is more expensive – although not prohibitively so, in our opinion – and certainly more time-consuming than simply slapping on a “TM” after your product or company name, but there are very valuable benefits from having the registration.

One simple benefit is that you can claim your registered trademark on social media platforms even if you weren’t the first to register that particular name. For example, we weren’t the first to register “kerika” as a username on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but we were able to get these usernames assigned to us because the word is a registered trademark, and that’s a very powerful lever to use with third-party companies.

There are other benefits, of course, particularly if your company or product name is a “made-up name” – which, incidentally, makes it a lot easier to get registered as a trademark or service mark – such as making sure that your competitors don’t try to get cute by using similar names. (Remember Jobster?)

And once you get a registered trademark, you need to remember to file additional paperwork after the first 5 years, and that’s what we finished doing recently. The US Patent & Trademark Office have improved their processes in recent years, so that when you file for an extension after 5 years of using a registered mark, you can apply for a “declaration of incontestability”, which gives you even greater rights to your product or company name.

(We just received our “declaration of incontestability” for registered trademark and our registered service mark.)

There’s a lot of value in getting a patent as well, although the cost of this can be very significant. If you have been truly innovative, and have really invented something new, you should get it patented. A patent reflects the hard work you put into your innovation: it isn’t granted lightly by the US Patent Office – despite what you may read in the press about “thousands of junk patents” being issued everyday. In our case, getting a patent for visual templates took years of waiting, hundreds of hours of effort, and cost a bundle.

But, we feel it was well worth the time and effort! If a competitor tries to copy Kerika, we will make our displeasure known!

Kerika’s blocks of richly formatted text: an example of “glass box documents”

Kerika, Technology, Usability

Our next release will primarily focused around the text block feature, which is turning out to be perhaps the single most popular feature of Kerika.

When we first built Kerika, the ability to put formatted text on Idea Pages was viewed as an incidental feature: we figured that people would want to draw flowcharts, and in doing so they would need to put small bits of text on the canvas to use as labels and markers. Nothing more.

So, we considered a variety of open-source programs that provided HTML editing capabilities for our initial versions of Kerika , before settling on Whyzziwig which appeared to have more functionality than we thought we would ever need…

However, as we started using Kerika ourselves, and talked extensively to our helpful users, we slowly realized that text blocks were a very helpful feature indeed: perhaps the most important feature in Kerika’s bag of tricks.

We have dubbed this the “glassbox documents” phenomenon: if you are sharing user requirements or collaborating on a design, you don’t need the full capabilities that come with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Instead, what you really need is the ability to quickly write relatively small bits of text, perhaps a few paragraphs long, with a table or some links and pictures, and use these to mark up an Idea Page.

Here’s an example of how we used these text blocks for developing the next version of Kerika, which will contain a hugely improved text block feature:

Example of using Kerika to design a user interface
Example of using Kerika to design a user interface

 

This picture shows an Idea Page that we used to share ideas between the designers, users and developers about how the text block feature could be improved.

  • In the middle of the Idea Page, we have a mockup of a new text block toolbar, to replace the existing Whyzziwig toolbar.
  • Above it are various pages that define the working of each button: inside each of these sub-pages we have small blocks of text that provide the detailed requirements for a particular button, as well as design notes from the developers and test data from the QA team.
  • Towards the bottom you can see a larger text block contain additional notes about the design.

Using text blocks in this manner, to capture and share our ideas and designs, we have reached that ultimate state of perfect collaboration: even though the Kerika team is distributed between Bellevue and Issaquah in Washington State, and Gujarat and New Delhi in India, we have zero emails being sent within the team!

This is the power of a glassbox document: the ability to sharply increase productivity and shared understanding of requirements and design, by putting text directly on an Idea Page instead of hiding it inside a conventional document (which we would call a “blackbox document”).

How to say “Hello, World!” in 1,287 words using Microsoft Word

Technology, Usability

People using Kerika love the text block feature – the one that lets you create richly formatted text blocks on a Kerika page that contain pictures, tables, lists and links – but all too often they try to create these text blocks by copying and pasting text from a Microsoft Word document.

The problem with doing this is that Microsoft Word produces a gigantic amount of HTML junk, even with the simplest text.

Here’s an example: create a new Microsoft Word document and type in the words “Hello, World!”. That’s it: just two words, a total of 13 characters including spaces and punctuation, using your default font. Nothing fancy – no colors, bold or italics, no lists, nothing at all. Just two words.

Now try to copy and paste this text into something that will display the HTML generated by Microsoft Word. One option is to paste this text into a Kerika text block, and then use the “View as HTML” option to see all the HTML that comes with these two words, but we will be temporarily removing the “View as HTML” feature in our next version as part of our rewrite of the text block feature. (More on that later…)

You will find that Microsoft Word produces an astonishing 1,287 words, which add up to 18,008 characters of HTML, just to represent a total of 13 characters of content. In other words, your simple bit of Microsoft Word text exploded by a factor of 1,385.

(If you look at the HTML, you can see, of course, that this expansion factor doesn’t stay constant: a lot of the HTML is simply a dump of a lot of styling information that wouldn’t change proportionately as you increased the size of the original Microsoft Word content, but still…!)

Here’s how you can say “Hello, World!” using 1,287 word of HTML:

Playing whack-a-mole with Google Docs and Chrome: where’s your image being stored today?

Technology

We recently talked about a shift within Google Docs that resulted in their using a new domain name – googleusercontent.com – to store images that users upload.

The way Google stores images on various sub-domains of googleusercontent.com is a bit of a mystery to us: it isn’t just that when you upload images to your Kerika pages they get stored by Google in some seemingly-random sub-domain of googleusercontent.com, but that the location may change from day to day!

This is making it very hard to run the Chrome browser with the “Disable third-party cookies” preference turned on, because you may find that each day some of the images on your Kerika pages are not being displayed because they have suddenly shifted to a different sub-domain of googleusercontent.com – one that you haven’t previously whitelisted.

Firefox used to have a very simple way of whitelisting domains for which you were happy to get cookies, but that disappeared several versions.

Chrome doesn’t offer any easy way of whitelisting domains either, presumably because Google is strongly in favor of third-party cookies since these underpin so much advertising. There’s an extension for Chrome called “Vanilla Cookies” that supposed to allow you to whitelist domains using wildcards, but it doesn’t seem to solve the whack-a-mole problem with googleusercontent.com as far as we can tell.

Now, your only options appear to be:

  • Disable all third-party cookies, which means that images you upload to your Kerika pages are not shown because they are being stored somewhere on googleusercontent.com, which is a third-party since it is neither kerika.com nor google.com, or
  • Allow all third-party cookies which means all sorts of junk can find its way onto your computer.