We post our tutorial videos on both YouTube and Vimeo, and get far more traffic on YouTube than we do on Vimeo.
But, as we go through a review/refresh of our website, we are switching over to Vimeo for embedding these tutorials, because Vimeo provides a cleaner look that seems to be less intrusive within our own design.
Here’s the same video, embedded from YouTube (on top) and Vimeo (on bottom):
The YouTube video has a weird grey shadow on the top part of the thumbnail, like it was deliberately trying to provide a retro, cathode-ray-tube (CRT) look.
(We are not fans of CRTs; don’t own vinyl any more…)
If you are the only Project Leader on a Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, you will know when someone joins a board — after all, you would have approved their invitation in the first place.
But, if there are several Project Leaders for a board, it might be one of the others who added somebody to your board, and they might not have discussed this with you…
So, Kerika makes sure you know whenever the project team on any board has changed in any way:
If someone has joined,
If someone’s role has changed,
If someone has left.
(After all, someone could have left the team on their own, without telling you!)
Whenever there is a change in the project team, the Board Settings button on the top-right of the board will appear in orange.
Board Settings is highlighted
Click on the Board Settings button, and you will see the Team tab is highlighted: this is Kerika’s way of drawing your attention to this particular tab within the Board Settings display.
Team tab is highlighted
When you go over to the Team tab, you will see that the new person’s name is highlighted in orange, for a few seconds. It’s a discrete yet very effective notification from Kerika, drawing your attention to the presence of someone new on the team.
Changed roles are highlighted
The same kind of notification is used when someone’s role on the team is changed, e.g. from Team Member to Visitor.
Kerika also tries to let you know when someone has left the team, by highlighting the Project Settings button in orange, and the Team tab within the Project Settings in orange as well.
Smart notifications, from Kerika — the only work management system that’s designed specially for distributed Lean and Agile teams :-)
We have added a new feature that should prove handy for a lot of folks: you can now add content — files from your laptop, images from your mobile or tablet, Web links from your Intranet or the Internet, or canvases — to a Task Board or Scrum Board itself.
If this sounds like something that was always there, maybe we need to say that differently: you used to have the ability to add content to a card, now you can add it to the board itself.
There are many situations we have encountered where we want to share content or a canvas with a team, but there wasn’t any obvious place to still it — no single card on the board that seemed like the right place to attach that content.
And that’s because the content we wanted to add was applicable across the entire board, not just relevant to a single card.
This was getting frustrating, so we decided to scratch our itch: a new button on the top-right area of your Kerika app will let you add files, Web links and canvases to the board itself:
Board Attachments
This should make some of you as happy as it has made us!
Did you know that you can embed a Twitter feed on your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s simple: just click on the “Add Web Content” button, and then enter the Twitter handle:
Adding a Twitter feed to your canvas
Kerika automatically figures out the “@” refers to a Twitter ID, and then finds and embeds the Twitter feed right on your canvas:
We have been cautiously adding animation to the Kerika app — as noted previously — where we think it helps people understand the results of their actions, and why a visual context just changed as a result of something they did.
One such place is when you add a canvas to a card: we added a “blow-up” animation effect to help users understand that they are opening up a new canvas.
To complement this, we added a “collapse” animation when you navigate up from a canvas to the card that contains it, whether you do that by clicking on your browser’s Back button or by using the Kerika breadcrumbs that appear just above the canvas:
Using breadcrumbs to navigate
This collapsing animation effect helps reinforce the idea that the canvas you just left was attached to a particular card, and now you are back up a level and viewing all the attachments on that card, including the canvas you were just viewing.
Did you know that you can embed a Google Map in your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s easy: just copy the Google Map’s URL:
Adding a Google Map to Canvas
And paste it into the dialog box that appears when you click on the “Add Web Content” button on your canvas toolbar:
Add Web Content
Kerika automatically figures out the URL refers to a Google Map, and shows you an embedded map on your canvas:
Example of embedded Google Map
You can do the same thing with card attachments, for your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Kerika shows a small thumbnail of the map in the list of attachments on your card:
As part of our work on combining tags and colors, we have been cleaning up parts of the Kerika user interface that had minor inconsistencies.
One such inconsistency — in our view — was that you were able to add people to a project team from within the card details dialog itself:
Adding people to a team
This button has been there in Kerika for a very long time, but it doesn’t really make sense to have this capability within the card details dialog: it just isn’t the best place to decide to add someone to a project team.
Instead, in our new layout the Project Settings dialog consolidates all the board management in one place, including adding people to a team, changing someone’s role within a team, and removing someone from a team:
It used to be that when you added content to a card — files from your laptop or Web content from your Intranet or the Internet, or a canvas — the newest content was added at the top of the list.
Of course, you could always rearrange them, by grabbing and dragging them up or down the list, but this it not a feature that many users discovered on their own :-(
Rearranging attachments on a card
Well, for greater consistency with how the chat and history are shown within a card’s details, we are now going to show attachments in chronological order as well — the latest files and URLs that you added to a card will appear at the bottom of the list, and the view of these will be automatically scrolled to show the latest items:
A new tutorial video, showing you how Kerika’s Chat combines the best of instant messaging and email, and lets you have very focused conversations on your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards:
With our latest update, it’s become easy to keep track of sub-tasks for cards on a Task Board or Scrum Board; here’s an example:
Using strikethroughs to keep track of sub-tasks
In the example shown above, the second item in the numbered list has been been taken care of, and so it has been struck-through, making it clear to the rest of the team that it isn’t an issue any more.
We have added the capability of marking text within card details with a strike-through, and this, combined with the easy way in which you can create numbered lists, makes it easy to track sub-tasks!
