Monthly Archives: September 2016

Don’t use snapshots of evolving libraries

Technology

Some advice to fellow developers: don’t be tempted to use a local snapshot of a rapidly evolving library, like Polymer.

One of our team members was doing this because he thought it would hasten his compilation when he needed to do new builds of Kerika (he is located in an area with somewhat slow Internet connections).

This might, sort of, work with a very stable library, but with something that is evolving fairly rapidly (like Polymer), you run the far greater risk that you snapshot’ed a somewhat buggy version.

That’s what happened to us, leading to a perplexing day of debugging: we had a version of Polymer that didn’t work well with Internet Explorer 11.

Just our luck that our developer took a snapshot of that particular build and then kept it on his local machine…

Bug, fixed: handling situations where drag-and-drop of content won’t work

Technology, Usability,

The easiest way to attach files to a Kerika card, canvas or board is to simply drag and drop it onto Kerika, like this:

Dragging and dropping files onto cards
Dragging and dropping files onto cards

This works with nearly all kinds of files, but we sometimes hit a limitation, like we discovered when a user tried dragging and dropping an email directly from his Outlook onto Kerika.

This operation used to fail, but in a confusing way: Kerika made it look like it was possible to drop the email onto a card, but the email never showed up.

We have fixed this by checking the kind of content that someone is trying to drop onto Kerika, and if the content isn’t something that can be directly dropped, we don’t show the “drop zone”: the yellow area in the image above that encourages you to drop something onto a card.

And, by the way, if you need to attach an email to a Kerika file, here’s a good workaround: first drag and drop the file onto your computer’s desktop.  That will create a regular file out of the email, which you can then drop onto Kerika.

Bug, fixed: handling situations where drag-and-drop of content won’t work

Technology, Usability,

The easiest way to attach files to a Kerika card, canvas or board is to simply drag and drop it onto Kerika, like this:

Dragging and dropping files onto cards
Dragging and dropping files onto cards

This works with nearly all kinds of files, but we sometimes hit a limitation, like we discovered when a user tried dragging and dropping an email directly from his Outlook onto Kerika.

This operation used to fail, but in a confusing way: Kerika made it look like it was possible to drop the email onto a card, but the email never showed up.

We have fixed this by checking the kind of content that someone is trying to drop onto Kerika, and if the content isn’t something that can be directly dropped, we don’t show the “drop zone”: the yellow area in the image above that encourages you to drop something onto a card.

And, by the way, if you need to attach an email to a Kerika file, here’s a good workaround: first drag and drop the file onto your computer’s desktop.  That will create a regular file out of the email, which you can then drop onto Kerika.

Bug, fixed: handling situations where drag-and-drop of content won’t work

Technology, Usability,

The easiest way to attach files to a Kerika card, canvas or board is to simply drag and drop it onto Kerika, like this:

Dragging and dropping files onto cards
Dragging and dropping files onto cards

This works with nearly all kinds of files, but we sometimes hit a limitation, like we discovered when a user tried dragging and dropping an email directly from his Outlook onto Kerika.

This operation used to fail, but in a confusing way: Kerika made it look like it was possible to drop the email onto a card, but the email never showed up.

We have fixed this by checking the kind of content that someone is trying to drop onto Kerika, and if the content isn’t something that can be directly dropped, we don’t show the “drop zone”: the yellow area in the image above that encourages you to drop something onto a card.

And, by the way, if you need to attach an email to a Kerika file, here’s a good workaround: first drag and drop the file onto your computer’s desktop.  That will create a regular file out of the email, which you can then drop onto Kerika.

Tracking Kerika users

Kerika, Technology,

If you use Ghostery (which is a pretty cool browser plug-in, by the way), it’s easy to see which “trackers” are being used by a website.

The only tracker that Kerika uses is Google Analytics:

Trackers on kerika.com
Trackers on kerika.com

Google Analytics is a free service from Google that we use to get a general understanding of who visits Kerika.com, from where, and using which kinds of browsers.

For example, Google Analytics tells us that an amazing 98.27% of all visitors to Kerika.com use the Chrome browser: this is way above the general market share for Chrome, which is about 29.15%!

And that’s the only tracker you will find on Kerika.

Here, by way of contrast, are what news sites like the New York Times and CNN use in terms of trackers:

Trackers on nytimes.com
Trackers on nytimes.com: 11 in total
Trackers on cnn.com
Trackers on cnn.com: 18 in total