This page is also a great example of you can create pages within pages: just click on the “Parking Directions” shape, and you get taken to another page that’s organized as a picture board:
Example of a picture board
Publishing these web pages is easy and instantaneous: just take the URL of your Kerika project page, and replace the “/m/” in the middle with “/c/” and you will have a real-time Web page that anyone can access, from anywhere, even if they don’t use the Kerika software.
(In this example, the project page is at kerika.com/m/BSxW, and the published page is at kerika.com/c/BSxW)
Want to learn more about how to create these great canvases? Check out this video.
We are now listed in the Chrome Web Store (and, hopefully, soon in the Google Apps Marketplace as well). If you are using Chrome, it’s a handy way to get it installed as part of your browser’s app.
Try it out today — even if you are already a Kerika user! (You will be sent to the account you already have.) And, please rate and review the app as well.
Our latest version includes a bunch of usability improvements, as usual, but the biggest changes are to the billing mechanism and account management:
Billing: we have updated and simplified our pricing: users told us that the old multi-level pricing was a little complicated, so we have a simpler offer of $10 per user per month for Professional users.
You can still start off with a free Standard Account which lets you share your projects with two other people, and if your team is small enough — or you are using Kerika for personal task management only where you don’t have a need to share your projects with others — you will be able to stay with the free Account.
Once your account team becomes larger, you can upgrade to a paid Professional Account which will let you add as many users as you like, at a flat rate of $10 per user per month.
If you are working on an academic or nonprofit project, you can request free service which lets you have a team of up to 10 people.
Billing is done on an annual basis (our users told us that was preferable to monthly renewals, since it was easier for businesses to make annual decisions than to repeatedly make monthly approvals), and you can cancel or reduce your subscription at any time and get a prorated refund.
Account Management: it’s easier now to see all the users who are part of your account, and to remove someone from all your projects.
Easier to manage your account
We made it easier to use templates when setting up new projects: now, you can easily browse your personal library of process templates, templates created by coworkers, and templates provided by Kerika and easily set up a new project.
Even better support for distributed teams: we made a bunch of usability tweaks to the notifications you get when coworkers make changes.
We have added more content to our website and generally improved its layout. Over the coming days we will be adding more tutorial videos, in addition to the one we already have on how to use Kerika’s unique real-time collaboration canvases.
And, speaking of the canvas, we have added some cool animation effects that will help you navigate when you have canvases nested inside each other!
Our thanks to everyone who has been giving us feedback!
Next up: Kerika will be available from the Google Apps Marketplace and the Chrome Web Store.
Kerika uses a ton of Javascript, and by the word “ton”, we mean “well over a hundred thousand lines of Javascript”. It is one of the most sophisticated user interfaces ever developed for the browser, and it delivers a fantastic, real-time, desktop-like experience right inside the browser. And it does so on Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.
The problem has always been with Internet Explorer: versions before IE9 have very poor support for Javascript and HTML5 in general. In years past Microsoft gave lip-service to the idea of supporting the (then-emerging) HTML5 standards, but their pre-IE9 versions did a very halfhearted job of supporting Web standards. Too many people at Microsoft were still fixated on the idea of maintaining a proprietary lock-in by encouraging their users to stick with the Microsoft-specific extensions that ran only on IE Server and the IE browsers. Things turned around only with IE9, spurred, no doubt, by the surprising inroads that were being made by Firefox and Chrome. Now, happily, the thinking at Microsoft has really come around to supporting Web standards!
Well, Kerika doesn’t run on pre-IE9 versions of Internet Explorer. This was a critical design decision we made when we first started coding in 2010, based on the assumption that IE9 — which was then in beta form but already looking reasonably robust — would be quickly launched and vigorously promoted by Microsoft, and as quickly adopted by the IE user base.
That doesn’t seem to have happened, at least not as far and as widely as we had hoped, and a call this afternoon with a user who was stumped trying to make Kerika work on his office PC, which still runs IE8, prompted us to look at NetApplications data on browser market share and adoption curves. The data are, frankly, dismal.
First of call, let’s look at overall browser market share, as of Dec 2012:
Browser market share on Dec 2012
Overall, Microsoft is in a position to say they are still the most common browser out there, but not by much: total market share for Internet Explorer, across all versions, is 54.77%. The following graph, however, really puzzles us: it suggests that browser market share hare remained essentially static for most of 2012, which doesn’t quite jive with anecdotal evidence we have been getting from users suggesting that Chrome is making surprising inroads among both Mac and Windows users:
Browser market share in 2012
Looking at specific versions of Internet Explorer shows some data that matches our intuition and general market understanding:
IE10 Market Share
But there’s other data that are really puzzling: why would IE6’s market share rise in mid-2012? Were a bunch of old laptops suddenly taken out of storage and donated? No new machines could have come into the market with IE6, nor could many machines have downgraded to IE6 (unless everyone has been saving their installation disks for Windows XP and decided to collectively reinstall their desktop operating systems in July…)
Browser market share in 2012IE6 Market Share
Perhaps the data aren’t so reliable after all, although NetApplications has long been the most highly cited source for data on browser market share.
We need some of those curves to start bending soon…
We should be wrapping up yet another new version of Kerika in the next few days: we have been focusing on how to make it easier for people to get to all of their projects, across all the accounts they are working in.
Some quick background: Kerika lets you create projects in your own account, of course, but also in the accounts of other people who have added you to their project teams. This means that over time you can end up creating, and working on, projects that are owned by several different accounts. Our users have asked for this to be improved in two ways:
Users want to make sure they are creating projects in the right accounts, so people want to get a little reminder of which account is being used, each time they create a new project.
Users want fast access to all of their projects, across all of their accounts.
Here’s what we are doing to help: first, make it clear to you which account is being used to create your new project. The dialog for creating a new project will look like this:
So, right up front you can see the name of the account you will be creating your new project in, and the face of the account owner. If you want to create your project in a different account, you can switch right on this dialog with one easy action.
The second big change is to create what we call a “unified inbox” view of all your projects, similar to how email clients work that let you see all your emails in one place, across all your accounts.
When you are looking at your projects, the “My Projects” link will show you all your projects, across all your accounts:
Just below the “My Projects” link are all the accounts that you have access to, starting with your own (which is always called “My Account”), and followed by the accounts that have projects that were updated most recently. This makes it easier for you to access not just all your projects, but also the accounts that are most active.
This improvement, like everything else we have done, has been driven by valuable user feedback! Next up, once we get this version wrapped up, is simpler billing system and integration with the Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Chrome Web Store.
If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.
That’s 35 years in prison for publishing taxpayer-funded research — yes, that’s right: we are talking about research funded with your tax dollars. And the farce that’s wrapped up inside this tragedy is that JSTOR, which housed the research that Aaron downloaded, has already decided to make all these documents available free to the public.
When someone screws up this badly in the private sector, he is fired, fast, and deservedly so. Why not in the public sector as well?
Google is making a huge push to get everyone to create a Google+ account, but it’s hard to see how this is going to succeed when Google+ is missing a very basic feature that every single business needs: the ability to create a custom URL, e.g. plus.google.com/kerika.
We have been updating our website and social media channels recently, and as part of that process we created a Google+ page for Kerika and ended up with the utterly useless URL of https://plus.google.com/110330426240622128664/posts
This isn’t a URL that even we can ever remember, and it certainly offers no incentive for us to publicize it. “Kerika” is a registered trademark and a registered service mark, so obviously it is important for us to use our name in all of our marketing. All other social media offer custom URLs: we have facebook.com/kerika, twitter.com/kerika, linkedin.com/kerika — even youtube.com/kerika! — but not plus.google.com/kerika!
It’s difficult to fathom Google’s foot-dragging in this matter: custom URLs don’t need to be offered to every single user — and its very difficult to manage a namespace if you tried to offer up custom URLs to hundreds of millions of people — but it is an absolute “must-have” feature for every business. All businesses care deeply about their product names: these are valuable intellectual property assets, and we cannot think of any business that would want to publicize a random 24-digit number instead of their own name.
Until Google gets this very basic feature implemented, there is no rational argument to be made for a business to take Google+ seriously…
Kerika got updated today, with around 60 usability improvements based upon feedback from our early adopters. Many of the changes are quite small, but you should notice that now it is even easier to:
Add people to projects.
See who is part of each project.
Chat about cards.
Work with templates.
Catch up on updates from coworkers.
Use Kerika’s unique canvas feature.
There’s also a simpler and easier welcome experience for new users, and improved performance with faster downloads.
And speaking of performance, that’s our next focus: we want to kick that up quite a bit, so it’s even easier to use Kerika with public WiFi networks like coffee shops.
We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika this weekend: the fruits of over 8 months of intense research and design of the only taskboard that’s designed specially for distributed teams. There’s a short video that we urge you to watch: it provides a good overview of Kerika’s new capabilities:
You can organize your work using cards on a virtual task board: the interface is easy to understand and delightful to use.
Each card can contain details of the work, and, of course, you can add content from your laptop or the Web to each card.
Each card can be assigned to one or more people from your project team: Kerika lets you see at a glance who is working on what.
Chat is integrated directly with your work: you can send messages that are attached to your cards, or the entire taskboard.
You can get started with one of our standard project templates, or create your own process templates to reflect your organization’s best practices and proprietary methodologies.
Kerika’s unique whiteboard capabilities are integrated with the new task management: you can add a canvas to each card for sharing ideas, and everything updates in real-time as usual.
And our special focus continues to be the challenges faced by teams that are distributed over different locations — it could be that you are working with people offshore, or simply working from home: Kerika makes it easy for you to see, at a glance, exactly what’s changed on each work item in each project.
We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika, with a completely reworked user interface and a ton of new features including support for iPads and other full-sized tablets.
The new UI is different enough that we have put together a 2-minute video that we recommend you watch before you sign in next; it will really help you get the most out of the new software. The interface is new, but all your old projects and data are all intact!
The new interface is part of a larger transformation we are undertaking that will add project management capabilities to our existing collaboration features: we want to provide support for Kanban-style projects, Agile/Scrum projects, and customized workflows. We have finished designing the new features and if you would be willing to take a look at our mockups and give us your opinion, it would be greatly appreciated!
Meanwhile, please enjoy the new version, particularly if you have an iPad or other full-sized tablet. To access Kerika on your tablet, just log into the kerika.com site using your tablet’s browser: there is no need to download any app because we have rebuilt the user interface to work just fine inside your tablet’s browser.
