We finally got around to adding a feature to the Canvas that we have wanted for a while, but somehow never got around to building: now, with a single click, you can change a shape on a canvas, whether it is in a Whiteboard project or attached to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board:
Change Shape
Here’s why you might need this: often when you are first creating a process flow diagram, you might use shapes — rectangles, ellipses, diamonds — in an arbitrary or careless way, which is just fine because at that time you are trying to be creative rather than meticulous.
But, as the canvas takes shape and matures, you might want to go back and standard the use of particular shapes (even if you don’t strictly follow the old conventions for drawing flowcharts, which we don’t either).
This new function makes it easy for you to select a bunch of shapes and change them all to a new shape. Previously, you had to create a new shape and put it in place to replace the old shape, which was pretty inconvenient when you had a bunch of nested canvases and a bunch of curved lines connecting all the shapes.
We have updated the toolbar for canvases to provide a better user experience for folks working on standalone Whiteboards or when attaching canvases to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
What used to look like this:
What Canvas Toolbar used to look like
Now looks look this:
What Canvas Toolbar looks like now
The Upload File and +Web Content buttons have been replaced with simple icons that take up less space.
On the left, there is a new Select All button: this function was kind of buried before, inside the old “Action” button, but now it is more visible and easier to access.
There is a new Lock button on the far right: this is a new function that we will talk about more in a separate blog post, but we can summarize it here as a way to freeze canvases to prevent people from making changes.
When a shape, e.g. a rectangle is selected, you used to see something like this:
What the Selected Object toolbar used to look like
Now, you will see this:
What the Selected Object toolbar button looks like
When a shape (or other object is selected, all the other drawing buttons are temporarily hidden, because they can’t be used. (You can’t draw a shape while you have a shape selected.) This makes the toolbar far less cluttered, by not displaying useless buttons.
A new button lets you Rename a shape. This is old functionality that you can still access by simply double-clicking on the title of an object, or by using the right-mouse button menu, but this new design makes that function more explicit and easier to access.
A new button lets you Change a Shape: this is new functionality. You can change a rectangle to an ellipse, for example, without modifying any other aspect of the shape.
A new button makes it easier to change the Appearance of an object: it’s color, fonts, etc. Again, this is old functionality, but made more explicit and easier to understand.
New buttons make it clear that you can Copy, Cut and Paste objects. This functionality was buried under the old Action button; now it is more explicit and easier to access.
And finally, a simple Move to Trash button makes it clearer how you can delete an object. This removes some confusion that Mac users would experience: on a Mac, deleting is normally done using the Backspace key, but within browsers this would take you back to the previous page because that’s how Macs work.
When you select an image that’s on your canvas, your toolbar used to look like this:
What you used to see when you select an image
Now, it looks like this:
What you now see when you select an image
This is a major improvement: the toolbar is not only less cluttered, but all the functions are more explicit and easier to access and understand, especially:
Download file: same function as before, new button. This will let you download any file on your Canvas, from your Box or Google account.
Link to website: again, an old function that let you link an image on your canvas to an external website.
DESIGN STANDARDS
For the buttons we are mainly using icons from Google’s Material Design standards because that was already in line with our styling, although in some cases we thought Google’s designs were too “blah” and went for something a little punchier.
BACKSTORY
We haven’t updated the Canvas features in a while — we had been concentrating on improving the Kanban and Scrum aspects of Kerika — but lately some of our users have been telling us about the amazing collaborative spaces they have built using Kerika (check out the folks working on the Ebola challenge at OpenIDEO) and this inspired us to try to improve the Canvas!
Other very cool users include the folks at the Foundation for Common Good, who are working on a variety of social good projects, and the teachers at the Iowa Mennonite School who have been using Kerika for art projects and other learning activities.
Maybe this isn’t obvious after all… We just realized that a long-time Kerika user (over 3 years of using Kerika on a daily basis!) didn’t know that there is a right-click menu available in Kerika!
If you move your mouse over a card on Task Board or Scrum Board and press the right mouse button, this is what you will see:
Right mouse menu
This menu is handy for selecting all the cards in a column, which you can then grab and drag over to another column or even mark as Done.
We have been working on some designs and ideas for a “Dashboard” feature in Kerika for many months now. Actually, a couple of years now.
Along the way we convinced ourselves many times that we had solved the problem in an ideal way.
At other times, we convinced ourselves that there was no way to solve a particular aspect of the problem, so our obviously ugly solution was the best possible solution.
Looking back on all these iterations, it’s very humbling to think about how easy it is to think something is perfect, until something better comes along — at which point the old thing is suddenly, unbearably ugly.
In other words, the ugliness of each design is obvious, in retrospect.
So everything we are proud of today: we will be ashamed of in a couple of years…
When you add files to your Kerika+Box projects, either as attachments to cards on Task Boards or Scrum Boards, or on canvases and Whiteboards, these get stored in your Box account.
If you have a premium (enterprise) version of Box, you can directly download these attachments, instead of having to go through Box’s preview display first: just hover over an attached file, and you will see a “download” button appear:
Directly downloading files from Box
This works fine for enterprise users of Box, but if you are using the free version of Box, you will see a Box error page, like this:
The news that Lenovo pre-installed adware on all consumer laptops sold in the US for the last three months of 2014 (yup, that would be the Thanksgiving through Christmas prime shopping season of the year) is being sadly under-reported by the mainstream press, although the tech press has a better idea of just how much mischief Lenovo did.
The really outrageous point here isn’t that adware came along with the other bloatware that all Windows users suffer from: it’s the fact that this adware was deliberately designed to undermine SSL, which underpins all security on the Internet.
Here’s how SSL is supposed to work: if you connect to Kerika, you are using a secure, encrypted connection to somebody that you genuinely believe is Kerika, Inc. of Issaquah, Washington, United States.
But how do you really know that it’s Kerika on the other end, and not someone pretending to be Kerika?
The only reliable way is to click on the lock icon shown in your browser (whenever you are on a secure SSL connection to any website), and your browser will then tell you who you are connected to, and more importantly, why the browser believes you are actually connected to Kerika and not somebody pretending to be Kerika.
Kerika SSL certificate
The image above is the actual SSL certificate shown when you connect to Kerika, and then click on the lock icon in your browser.
It says, in effect, that a company called Symantec Corporation is the one that vouches for Kerika’s identity: in other words, it is Symantec Corp. that is assuring you that it really is Kerika that you are connected to, and not somebody pretending to be Kerika.
These SSL certificates could be issued by anyone, for example Facebook relies upon a company called DigiCert:
Facebook SSL
And Bank of America relies upon a company called Verisign:
Bank of America SSL
Unless you happen to be using a Lenovo computer that you bought last Christmas, in which case there is a “man-in-the-middle” that you weren’t aware of:
Lennovo’s fake SSL
(Above image captured by security researcher Kenn White, @kennwhite)
On this Lenovo computer, an adware company called “Superfish” is the one that’s vouching for Bank of America, which isn’t right at all!
This is a classic “man-in-the-middle” attack scenario: most people would see the lock appear on the browser when connecting to a secure website, like Bank of America’s, and assume that they are safe. Instead, their communications is actually being intercepted by Superfish before it gets to Bank of America.
(And, by the way, this is pretty much how most Windows PC manufacturers make money: there is so much price competition in the Windows market that they all resort to bloatware and adware to juice up their profit margins…)
And because the same piece of adware was distributed on literally thousands of machines, the same private encryption key is being used on all of these machines, which makes it easy for people to use these bogus SSL certificates to create man-in-the-middle attacks on any number of banks and other secure websites.
We are starting to realize that a card’s status, e.g. “Ready for Review,” “Needs rework,” etc. is pretty important not just in terms of what they show about a card’s current state, but also in terms of its history.
Previously, we weren’t tracking changes to a card’s status as part of the card’s history; without our latest release, that’s now a feature, so if you are wondering who put a card “On Hold”, you can just open the card’s History and Kerika will tell you:
Kerika+Google, our integration with Google Drive, and Kerika+Box, our integration with Box, are very similar in terms of user interface, but the underlying cloud storage platforms are different in some subtle ways.
One of these has to do with the way images that are added to a canvas are named: when you add an image to a canvas, either by using the Upload button or simply by dragging and dropping the image from your desktop onto the canvas, Kerika will show a small thumbnail of the image on your canvas.
The thumbnails provided to Kerika by Google are better than those provided by Box in a couple of ways:
Box’s thumbnails are square, which can result in a cropped view of the image; Google’s thumbnails show the entire image.
Google’s thumbnails can be resized nicely on the Kerika canvas, simply by selecting it and then dragging on one of the corners; Box’s can’t.
If you rename a Google thumbnail and take off the original file extension, e.g. you rename “picture.jpg” to be just “picture”, the thumbnail still renders correctly, but Box’s doesn’t. (Because Box relies on the file extensions to detect the file’s MIME-type.)
There are some other quirks with the way Box and Google work, but most of them are going to be invisible to most Kerika users.
We have been trying out Google’s new domain management service for the past month, and we are impressed.
(Caveats: this service is in “beta”, whatever that means in Google-speak; it is available only to people in the U.S.; it doesn’t handle every one of the new top-level gLTDs — yet.)
But for all that, Google’s simplicity of UI and the overall user experience is way betterthan what we have seen from Register.com, GoDaddy, NameCheap, and a bunch of others.
In many ways this reminds us of Google in 1999, when it’s very simple search engine was a welcome contrast to the muddled portals offered by companies like HotBot, Lycos, and AltaVista.
Everything extraneous has been stripped out, and the process of transferring and managing domains has been made very clear even for non-technical people.
Folks like GoDaddy have a very short window of time to, literally, clean up their act before Google mows them down.
Google Apps has created a Bizarro World for some of its premium customers, and in the process is doing really bad things to its ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) like Kerika.
Two questions come to mind:
Do they know?
Do they care?
First, an explanation of how this Bizarro World came about…
Google Apps has a lot of free users — anyone with a Gmail or YouTube account, for example — but they also have several million business users who pay around $5 per user, per month, to get “Google Apps for Business” (which is also variously rebranded as Google Apps for Government/Education/Nonprofits…)
It used to be that any Google user could easily try out an app like Kerika that uses a Google ID for sign-in, and Google Drive to store files.
This was a pretty good arrangement, and among other things it encouraged ISVs to integrate with Google Apps — which helped Google in it’s “all your base are belong to us” goal of world domination.
Last year, however, they made a significant change: premium users of Google Apps can now only try out new apps like Kerika if their Google Apps Admin permits it.
In other words, no more experimentation, exploration, discovery…
Instead, we have the quite deliberate creation of a bureaucratic bottleneck (justified by the always useful umbrella excuse of “this is better security”?) where every user in every organization that wants to try out Kerika must first find out who their Google Apps Admin is — which is no easy task, if your organization consists of several tens of thousands of employees! — and then get them to approve the use of Kerika by everyone within the organization.
This is simple enough if your organization is small — you can easily contact your Google Apps Admin — but what happens if, say, you work in a university with 30,000 other people in that Google domain?
We have been finding out the hard way that Bizarro World hurts: the Google Apps Admin at one university has been working for over 6 months to reconcile Google’s demands with the university’s own policies.
Because…
Only the Google Apps Admin can approve use of Kerika.
The university prohibits system administrators from entering into any agreements — all licenses and agreements can be accepted only by the Purchasing Department.
No one in the Purchasing Dept is a Google Apps Admin, since this is an IT function that has nothing to do with purchasing.
Does Google know this is happening? Yes, they know.
It actually affects two large universities right now that are interested in trying out Kerika — each university has a population of about 30,000 people, so, yes, Google does know this is a problem.
And, we have
Does Google care? Apparently not.
The Google Apps Admins at these universities cannot get any kind of help from Google, and we at Kerika have directly brought this to the Google folks and not heard anything either.
Welcome to Bizarro World.
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