A new tutorial video that shows you how the Trash works in Kerika (like a Recycle Bin): you can retrieve any card, canvas or even entire projects or templates that got deleted by mistake!
All posts by Kerika
How to use Planning Views in Kerika
A new tutorial video, featuring our so-very-soon-to-be-released new user interface, that shows you how you can use Planning Views to manage your due dates, across all your Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
How to Export Cards from a Kerika Board
A new tutorial video on how to export cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board, in the HTML format or as an Excel workbook — featuring our very-soon-to-be-released new user interface.
Box restores our Box Notes hack :-)
Our last blog post noted that a very useful Box Notes hack had gone away, following an unexpected update to the Box platform a couple of weeks ago.
We asked Box if they could consider adding something to their API that would allow us to restore this functionality, and their response has been very helpful and very fast!
Here’s how fast they responded:
- July 15, we enter a support request at 6PM.
- The next morning, Box Support put us in touch with Jon Berger, the Product Manager for Box Notes.
- The same day, Jon talks to his dev team and commits to providing us with a fix.
- Less than a week later, the fix is in production!
Very nice.
A new tutorial video on how Notifications work in Kerika
We have created a new tutorial video on how Notifications work in Kerika. It is based upon our new user interface, which hasn’t been released yet, so some of the menu options shown on the top-right of Kerika boards will look a little unfamiliar :-)
Deleting canvases attached to cards
You can attach as many canvases as you like to cards on Task Boards or Scrum Boards, and if you don’t need them anymore, you can delete the canvases.
Here’s how you add a canvas to a card:
By default, the new canvas is simply called “Canvas”, but like with any other attachments on a card, you can easily rename it by clicking on the pencil icon that appears to the right when you hover your mouse over it:
Clicking on the “x” button at the far end will let you delete a canvas that you no longer need:
If the canvas is empty — which means that there is nothing visible on the canvas, and nothing in the canvas’ Trash either — you see a simple confirmation message asking if you are sure you want to delete it:
But, if the canvas is not empty, you see a Restore option instead:
If it seems puzzling why a canvas that appears empty isn’t really empty, make sure you open the canvas and take a look at the Trash: there may be items there that you had previously removed from the canvas:
In this example, above, the canvas looks empty but isn’t really: there are items in the Trash.
In situations like this, Kerika is careful to avoid losing all your work: until you empty the Trash on a canvas, the canvas isn’t considered to be truly empty, and until a canvas is truly empty, it cannot be removed from a card.
So, in this example, you see the Restore option rather than the Delete option:
How “Sort by Status” works
When working with Task Boards and Scrum Boards, you get a variety of options for quickly sorting a column of cards:
Sort by Date is easy enough to understand, but what about sort by status?
Sort by Status organizes the cards in a column as follow:
- Critical
- Is blocked
- Needs rework
- Needs review
- In progress
- Normal
- On hold
This sort order reflects the normal priorities of most projects: the most important stuff would ideally show up at the top of the column to get dealt with first.
Yes, there is a “Kerika Blue”
We try to be consistent in our use of colors and shades throughout the application, although it is easy to slip up from version to version, particularly since we do so many releases a year.
One recent diversion we corrected was in the use of the color blue: we have a specific shade we call Kerika Blue (#0099CC) which is used to indicate the concept of “new”:
Kerika Blue is more muted than the regular blue that you might find elsewhere: we generally try to keep our color scheme muted, so that the decoration of the Kerika app doesn’t compete with your data — after all, your data are far more important to you than anything we do in terms of decorating your screen ;-)
Security within a Virtual Private Network
All of Kerika’s servers, which run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), operate within a Virtual Private Network (VPN), so they can be configured to only listen on local ports, e.g. ports like 10.0.0.1, etc.
This means that they cannot be accessed directly from the Internet: instead, all connections are routed through an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which is a special kind of AWS server that handles connections from all users.
The ELB is very secure: it implements SSL 2.0, and when vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and POODLE are discovered, it is relatively easy for us, with Amazon’s help, to quickly ensure that the the ELBs are patched. Patching the ELBs quickly gives us breathing room to patch all the other servers involved, particularly if vulnerabilities are found at the platform level itself.
But, running a VPN isn’t enough: while it blocks people outside the Kerika server environment from directly accessing our database, there is still — at least a theoretical possibility — that an attacker can find his way inside the VPN, and then try to connect to our database server on a local port.
To avoid this scenario, we use SSL within the VPN as well, so that the connections from the load balancers to the database servers are also authenticated and encrypted.
Showing Due Dates in local times
Many of our users work in globally dispersed teams; our own team is spread out between Seattle and India.
With multiple timezones, particularly when they are widely spaced apart, commitments like “I will get this done today” become a little tricky to understand.
If someone in India says “I will get this done today”, is that India time or Seattle time? Well, that depends upon where you are, when you log into Kerika.
Kerika automatically factors in differences in timezones when showing due dates: someone who commits to getting something done “today” in India is actually committing to get it done by 11:30AM Pacific Standard Time, now that the US is in Daylight Savings Mode.
So, the due date is shown in a way that’s relevant to the user’s local time: our Seattle folks see an Indian’s commitment like this
These timezone differences automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time: there’s nothing you need to do to see when a commitment is actually due.
Except, perhaps, notice that the item is now overdue, as indicated in red in the example above…