As with Android tablets, we have been doing a bunch of testing and bug fixing related to using Kerika on Windows tablets and touch devices generally (i.e. the many combinationss of touch and keyboard that make up the Windows computer ecosystem)
And, as with iPads and Android tablets, you don’t need to install a special app in order to run Kerika: you can just use the Internet Explorer browser (or any other browser you have installed) to access Kerika, and use your finger to move stuff around just as you would with a mouse.
There were some problems with the touch interface that we have fixed; the overall experience should be a lot better than it was before!
For a very long time we had a feature which was kind of cool (although we don’t know how many people actually used it!) — you could embed another website on a Kerika canvas, using a technique known as IFRAME.
IFRAMEs were common a few years ago, but have steadily dropped out of favor as browsers have increasingly become more secure.
By running another website inside your own, you can be vulnerable to various cross-scripting errors if you cannot fully trust that third-party website you have embedded. And, at the same time, people who run websites have become less keen on having their sites embedded into other sites — a practice known as “clickjacking”.
(You can read more about this on Mozilla’s website, if you are interested in the technical details.)
Since it became impossible for us to provide a consistently good experience across all modern browsers, particularly as the number of websites that allow themselves to be IFRAMEd dropped drastically, we decided to drop this feature. If you were using this feature in the past, you will find your old IFRAME is now just a simple bookmark…
We were trying out Kerika using Amazon’s Silk browser on one of their Fire (color) tablets, and found that Kerika worked surprisingly well.
On standard (un-forked) Android tablets, the Chrome browser works better than the standard browser that comes with all tablets, mainly because Google has been improving Chrome with a lot more enthusiasm than they have been improving “stock Android“.
So, we weren’t sure how good the Silk browser would behave with Kerika, given that Silk is a relatively old fork of the standard Android browser.
It turns out that you can use Kerika on Amazon’s Fire tablets quite well: just open the Silk browser, go to kerika.com, and login like you would on a laptop or desktop. Just let your finger do the dragging-and-dropping…
We are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards! (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))
Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:
Example of Workflow View
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Selecting a View
Your new viewing choices include:
Next 3 days: this will show you everything that’s Due Today, Due Tomorrow, Due the Day After, and beyond
Next 3 weeks: everything that’s Due This Week, Due Next Week, Due the Following Week, and beyond.
Next 3 Months: everything that’s Due This Month, Due Next Month, Due the Following Month, and beyond.
Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.
Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:
Example of 3-day View
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
All cards without any due date are shown first, in the Not Scheduled column.
Next, any Overdue cards are always shown in a special column by themselves, so they can be easily rescheduled.
Beyond this are columns for Today, Tomorrow and the Day After.
And finally, there is the And Beyond column, which summarizes all the cards that have due dates beyond the day after tomorrow.
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Example of 3-week View
Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.
The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:
Example of 3-month View
All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date. As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:
Smart drag and drop
Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:
Where cards are in your Workflow view
Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:
Navigating the Planning Views
As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!
Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).
Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…
Using Kerika with Safari in “Private” mode can result in some odd behavior, and that is entirely due to the way Safari works — it’s pretty much out of Kerika’s control :-(
The underlying problem is that Safari doesn’t allow Web apps to use local storage (cache) when the browser is in “Private” mode.
Since Kerika relies upon local storage to provide a smooth, real-time effort, this can compromise the user experience if you use Safari in Private mode.
Rating Kerika (and other apps) on the Google Apps Marketplace used to be a lot simpler than it is now.
Google changed a bunch of things in the Google Apps Marketplace that now restricts rating of apps to Google Admins.
If you are the Google Admin for your organization, we would love to get your review and rating of Kerika on the Google Apps Marketplace!
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to rate Kerika (and any other app) on the Google Apps Marketplace:
1. Start off on the Google Admin Screen
Go to admin.google.com, and then click on the “Google Apps Marketplace” link on the right:
Click here to get to the Apps Marketplace
2. Search for Kerika
Search for Kerika
The Google Apps Admin for your organization (hopefully, you — if you are reading this blog post!) will need to install Kerika from the Google Apps Marketplace.
If Kerika is already installed as an approved (authorized) app for your Google Apps domain, you will see a “Rate It” button:
Click here to rate Kerika
4. You need to have a Google+ Profile
As with rating Kerika on the Chrome Web Store, you need to be signed into your Google+ profile in order to rate Kerika (or any other app from the Google Apps Marketplace):
Make sure you have a Google+ Profile
Assuming you are signed into Google, here’s how you can rate and review Kerika:
Rating Kerika
Click on the stars to rate Kerika, but what would be even better is a short review — even a couple of sentences would be great!
We would love to get your feedback on the Kerika app; one way, of course, would be to contact us directly at support@kerika.com, and an even better way would be if you could post a review of Kerika on the Chrome Web Store.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to posting a review of an app on the Chrome Web Store. (Of course, it’s going to be useful only if you use the Chrome browser, not if you use Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox.)
We have been one of the last jazzy Web apps out there that was still running on Internet Explorer 9, but that’s going to change: with our next release, due in a month or so, we will be asking Internet Explorer users to upgrade to IE10 or later.
The main reason for this change is that all “modern” browsers — and IE9 qualifies as “modern” only when it stands next to IE8 — do a lot of work within the browser itself that Kerika currently does: stuff like managing and manipulating the DOM structure of the Kerika application.
This means that the Kerika client-application — the bit that you actually see and use in a browser — is unnecessarily complicated, and somewhat slower, than it needs to be, because we are doing some work that IE10+, Chrome, Firefox and Safari all do within the browser itself.
Dropping support for IE9 will enable us to provide a faster user experience, with less complexity in the code.
Some of our Kerika+Box users have been complaining about the number of email notifications they get when new projects are created: this has to do with Box, rather than Kerika, but it’s helpful to understand what’s going on, and what you can do about it.
When you create a project in Kerika, Kerika creates a dedicated folder for the files that will be used in that project. This folder is shared with whoever needs access to that Kerika project.
Every Kerika user can set a personal preference: you can choose to share your new projects with your account team automatically when they are created, or just with people as and when you add them one by one to a Kerika project. By default, this is set to “share with account team” since this helps people discover new projects within their organization.
One downside of this: whenever you create a new project team, especially if it owned by a service account, a new Box folder will get created for this project and shared automatically with everyone who is part of that account.
This was resulting in way more emails than anyone wants to see, so we have made a change in the way we work with Box:
When people get added to a Box folder, through Kerika, they will no longer get an email notification.
However, the Account Owner will still be notified; there doesn’t seem to be any way around this.
One little-known feature of Kerika’s Whiteboards: if you have an image (picture) on a canvas, you can also add a link to a Website, so that anyone clicking on the picture would be taken straight to that website.
(It’s one of several little-known features that we hope will become well-known, with our recent redesign of the Canvas toolbar; we have built too many really cool features that not enough people are aware of!)
One common use of this feature is to create an external-facing page that includes a logo: you can add the logo’s image to your canvas, and then point that logo to your company’s website.
It’s simple: just select the image, and then click on the “Link to website” button on the Canvas toolbar.
