Category Archives: Kerika

Posts about Kerika, the company and its people

Yes, we have updated our Log4J

Kerika

We use Log4J mostly in our development environment, where we write new code; less so in our test environment, where we use our new code ourselves to make sure it works well (a philosophy known as “eating your own dogfood”); and only rarely on our production environment, which is where our users are.

That reflects the normal approach to debugging: you want to find problems well before they reach users.

And we are aware of the guidance from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency about a recently discovered critical vulnerability in the Log4J software. Naturally we acted promptly upon getting that news and updated our software on all our environments!

Tablet support

Kerika, Usability,

We have added tablet support for iOS and Android devices, as you can see:

The tablet experience is like that of the desktop, not the phone.

For the phone app we had to redesign a lot of the user interface to accommodate the limited screen space, but with most tablets today there is enough screen resolution to support the more extensive desktop experience.

Easier to preview documents on mobile devices

Kerika, Usability,

We have made it easy for you to preview documents that are attached to cards or whiteboards, regardless of how you sign up for Kerika.

Screenshot showing a preview of an attached document on an iPhone
Previewing docs on an iPhone

You could have signed up using a Google ID, a Box ID, or just your email: it doesn’t matter how you signed up, nor how other members of your team signed up.

Previewing documents just became really easy.

A recent update to our mobile App

Kerika, Usability

When you click on a link to a Kerika board or card in an email, that link will now automatically open in the Kerika Mobile App instead of opening in a browser tab.

This makes it a lot easier to respond to emails sent when your team members do chat on boards that concerns you: you can either do a quick reply as email itself, or, if you need more context, click on the link to open the card inside the Kerika app and see all it’s details before deciding upon your reply.

Back up to speed (after Covid-19)

Kerika

Our development team is based in India, and starting about 4 weeks ago we started getting hit hard by Covid-19.  Eventually everyone in our India team was affected one way or another, either by falling sick themselves or having a spouse or child fall sick.

Thankfully that’s over now.  We are back up to speed.

An update to our Terms of Use

Intellectual Property, Kerika,

We had always treated our customers data as confidential, and have never shared that with anyone else.  At the suggestion of one of our users, we have updated our Terms of Use to make this a written commitment.

We have added Section VI to our Terms of Use:

“Confidential Information” means information identified by you as confidential at the time of disclosure or that a reasonable person would consider confidential due to its nature and any confidential, proprietary, or privileged information disclosed while creating or modifying the Kerika boards.

Kerika shall preserve the confidentiality of your Confidential Information and treat such Confidential Information with at least the same degree of care that Kerika uses to protect its own Confidential Information, but not less than a reasonable standard of care.

Kerika will use your Confidential Information only to exercise its rights and perform obligations under these Terms. Confidential Information will be disclosed only to those employees of Kerika with a need to know such information in connection with Kerika’s use of the Confidential Information in accordance with these Terms.

Kerika shall not be liable to you for the release of Confidential Information if such information is divulged pursuant to any legal proceeding or otherwise required by law, provided that, to the extent legally permissible, Kerika will notify you promptly of such required disclosure. Kerika agrees to promptly notify you of any unauthorized access to or disclosure of the Confidential Information.”

Update on our mobile apps

Kerika

User adoption of our mobile apps for Android and iOS has been moving along nicely; so far we have heard only positive feedback but of course please let us know what we could do better.

A small pocket of users are having trouble: those who are using Kerika with Box and have 2FA (two-factor authentication enabled).  There is a bug with Box’s mobile API that we are still waiting for them to finish (it’s been a couple of weeks now).  Hopefully that will get sorted out soon.

The Kerika Elite: a group of our most influential users.

Kerika,

The Kerika Elite is a program we have set up to improve our product strategy and gather feedback from a select group of our most experienced and influential users.

There are two main elements to this program:

    • Kerika Elite will be involved in the earliest stages of our product development: we will share with them proposed designs long before they are implemented, to get early feedback on features that we are considering building, and
  • Once new features are built, Kerika Elite users get early access them so they can provide real-world experience that can help us polish the product before it’s released to the rest of our users.

Kerika Elite users have contributed greatly to our mobile development efforts over the past year, and we look forward to their advice and suggestions for our future initiatives as well.

Can you be one of them? Sure.  Anyone can nominate another user to be part of the Kerika Elite, although the final decision is ours to make.

Kerika Elite users are not compensated in any way; they simply enjoy being in the kitchen with the Kerika Team when we cook up delicious new dishes!

You can now choose your background colors

Kerika, Usability,

A new feature that we recently introduced will let you choose a background color: one for the desktop app, and one for the mobile app. (Oops, did we just talk about the mobile app?)

To select a color: click on your user profile photo, which appears on the top-right of Kerika:

User Preferences dialog on desktop
User Preferences

Select My Preferences for this Account from this dialog, and you will land on a revamped Preferences page that now includes options for selecting a background color:

Choosing color preferences
Color Preferences

We are offering a range of light and dark backgrounds; in our own testing we found that the darker backgrounds look better on the desktop, while the lighter backgrounds look better on phones.  But, of course, that’s just our opinion — try this out and select what you like best!