We found and fixed a bug related to our Whiteboards: it turned out that when you copied a bunch of items on a canvas, e.g. some shapes, documents, etc. that you had connected together with some lines or arrows, these weren’t always getting pasted properly when you did a copy–and-paste.
Our apologies for any inconvenience you may have faced.
We found a weird bug related to the export feature for Task Boards and Scrum Boards that affected users of Kerika+Box, and it has to do with the way Box keeps track of user names that’s different from the way Google keeps track of user names.
Both Box and Google ask for your first name and last name when you sign up, but their content APIs — the programming interfaces that Kerika uses — differ in the way they provide these names to Kerika.
Google gives us the first name and last name separately, e.g. it would tell us a user’s first name is “Arun” and his last name is “Kumar”.
Box, however, gives us both names together, as “Arun Kumar”, and this presents a problem because we can’t always figure out what the last name is.
And, by the way, given the wide range of cultures represented by our users, it’s far from easy to guess which part of a name is the “last name”.
For example, consider Latin American name like “Maria Beatrice Fernandez Rosario”. Here, the last name is probably “Fernandez Rosario”, but we can’t be sure.
The bug showed up when people did exports, by appending “null” to the name — basically this meant Kerika didn’t know what the last name of the user was, and simply tagged it as “null” (which is computer-speak for “I have no idea”).
We have fixed this.
We found a scenario where your Scrum Board could end up with duplicate tags. Let’s say you had a Shared Backlog which had some tags, and you also had a Scrum Board Template that had some similar tags.
If you created a new Scrum Board using that Backlog and that Template, you could have ended up with some duplicate tags, which is not at all helpful.
We have fixed this.
When cards, or entire projects, were copied and pasted, the chat attached to them were not getting copied as well.
That’s been fixed in our latest version. One side-effect of this to note, however: if you copy a card from Project A and paste it into Project B, the chat will be copied along with the card, and be resent to appropriate people in Project B.
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!
The growing number of new top-level domains (in addition to the old familiar .com, .org, etc.) that are available is finally starting to have an impact upon us…
While we haven’t seen a lot of use of these new domains yet, a few useful websites are starting to pop-up, e.g. using the .guide top-level domain, and this has required us to abandon an old feature of Kerika that is not going to work any more.
We used to have some validation code that checked that people were entering URLs correctly, e.g when they wanted to add a Web link to a card or to a canvas.
This validation is pretty much impossible to do in the old form, because of the rapid proliferation of new top-level domains, so we are dropping that validation feature which was kind of nice to have…
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 have been doing a bunch of testing and bug fixing related to using Kerika on Android tablets.
As with iPads, you don’t need to install a special app in order to run Kerika: you can just use the Chrome browser on an Android tablet to access Kerika, and use your finger to move stuff around just as you would with a mouse.
We found an fixed some problems with the Chrome touch interface; the overall experience should be a lot better than it was before!
Note: you are almost always better off using the Chrome browser rather than the standard browser that comes with all Android tablets; that’s because Google has a lot more enthusiasm for improving their proprietary (non open-source) products than “stock Android“.
If you are wondering whether Kerika is faster than it used to be, yes, it is.
We made a change in our software architecture — the way each board would connect to the server and ask for all its cards and all the updates on these cards — that has reduced the total upload of data.
This was actually a significant improvement in upload speed: about 10x.
Since upload speeds are frequently much slower than download speeds, even on broadband connections, this should help load larger boards much faster. And on mobile connections this should help reduce the amount of data consumed.