Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general.

Getting rid of a pesky “Mixed Content” warning

Agile & Scrum, Technology, Usability, , , , , , ,

When you first use Kerika, your browser has a reassuring sign that your connection to our servers is being encrypted:

No warning when you first use Kerika
No warning when you first use Kerika

But as soon as you open a card that contains any attachments, e.g. files stored in your Box account if you are using Kerika+Box, this reassurance would disappear, and instead you would see a warning about “Mixed Content”, which basically means that some of the data shown on your Kerika page was coming from a source that wasn’t using HTTPS.

Why there is a mixed content warning
Why there is a mixed content warning

This was because of a small bug in how we were dealing with the thumbnails we got for files stored in your Google or Box account: for faster performance we were caching these on our own Amazon S3 cloud storage (so we wouldn’t have to keep getting them from Google/Box every time you open the same card.)

It turns out that we weren’t fetching the thumbnails from S3 using HTTPS, which meant that as soon as you switched to the Attachment view of a card, your browser’s address bar would show the “mixed content” warning.

There was no real vulnerability resulting from this, but it did interfere with the user experience for that minority of users who like to keep a sharp eye on their browser’s address bar so we have fixed that with our latest release.

Now you should always have the warm reassurance of seeing the green secure site symbol on your browser when you open a card!

A mysterious grey dot

Bug Fixes, Kerika, Technology,

Here’s one of the weirder bugs we ever fixed: it turns out that there is a tiny grey dot in the middle of every canvas on a Whiteboard.

Grey dot in the middle of the canvas
Grey dot in the middle of the canvas

It’s been there for a while, ever since we introduced some animation to make it easier for people to understand that canvases can be embedded inside cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, as well as being used independently on Whiteboards.

But the funny thing is that none of our users, nor anyone on our team, noticed it because too many of us, it seems, eat in front of our computers all too often, so our screens are flecked with little bits of food debris most of the time 🙂

One of our team members finally noticed it after assiduously cleaning his computer screen, and that’s how we discovered there was an HTML element there, with a zero size and absolute position at the center of the canvas (to help with the “exploding” animation effect when a canvas is opened).

Although this element has a height and width of zero, it also has a 1 pixel wide solid grey border, which is used in the animation.

And that’s what appeared as the tiny grey dot in the middle of the screen: one pixel of grey border, not any debris from our lunch.

Making quick backups of your projects

Technology

We have enhanced our recently introduced Archive feature, so that you can now copy a current project and paste a copy directly into your Archives:

  • Go to your Home Page
  • Select the project you want to backup
  • Click on the Copy button that appears on the top of the Projects column (or use the right-mouse-button)
  • Go over to the Archive column, also on the Home Page
  • Click on the Paste button that appears on top of the Archive column.
Copying a project
Copying a project

One possible use-case for this, that some of our users have asked for, is to do quick backups that “capture current state” of important projects.

As with anything else that’s in the Archive, the copies you paste there are frozen, and can’t be changed unless and until you drag them out of the Archive and into your Projects list.

Viewing your Kerika canvas like a regular Web page

Technology, , ,

Did you know that any Kerika canvas, whether on a standalone Whiteboard or attached to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, can be viewed as a regular Web page by folks who have been given access to the board?

Kerika automatically creates a version of your canvas that can be viewed without the Kerika application: you can get this version by using the Project Info dialog, or, more simply, by just changing the “m” in the canvas’s URL to a “c”:

Web page version of Canvas
Web page version of Canvas

Every Kerika page has a URL of the form “https://kerika.com/m/…”

The URLs are randomly generated and unique: every card, every canvas, every board has a unique URL.

The first part of the URL is always of the form kerika.com/m/… There’s no special reason for using the “m”; it’s just part of Kerika’s history.

But if you change the “m” to a “c”, like in the example above where “https://kerika.com/m/SRXk” becomes “https://kerika.com/c/SRXk”, then you can view the Web page version of the canvas.

In the Web page version there are no buttons or other indications of the Kerika software: it looks and works just like a regular Web page.

Of course, security is not compromised: you cannot view the Web page version of a canvas if you aren’t permitted to access the Kerika canvas itself.

How long things stay in the Clipboard

Technology, Usability, , ,

When you copy or cut an item on a Kerika board — a set of cards, or may be some things sitting on a Canvas — these objects are placed in a special Clipboard that sits on the Kerika server, not in your browser.

This is important to note for several reasons:

  • Because the Clipboard is on the server, you won’t lose the items if your network connection breaks before you have a chance to paste whatever you cut.
  • The Clipboard will hold on to the items for 20 minutes, to give you time to think about where you want to put them. (And, to recover from any network problems you may have experienced.)
  • If you don’t paste something that you had previously cut, the Clipboard “releases” it back to where it was originally, after waiting 20 minutes to go by while you ponder. But, if you are impatient, you can reverse your cut action sooner simply by clicking on the cut items, which continue to appear in a faded (greyed-out) appearance on your board.
  • Because the Clipboard is on the Kerika Server, other team members won’t see the change until you actually do the paste. So, for example, if you have cut some cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board and haven’t pasted them yet, your project team members will continue to see the items on the old board until you complete the paste.
  • And, finally, here’s a great feature, thanks to the Server Clipboard: one of your team members can be making changes to a card while you are in the process of cutting-and-pasting it, and those changes aren’t lost. That’s because the object is stored on the server rather than your browser, making it possible for your team members to make changes even as you are in the process of doing a cut-and-paste.

Upgrading our server infrastructure

Kerika, Technology,

We had problems occasionally with our servers running reliably, and if you were unlucky you may have noticed this.

Well, it took a very, very long time but we have finally figured out what’s happening.

It turns out that the garbage collection function on the Java Virtual Machine that runs our server software (all on a Linux virtual machine running on Amazon Web Service) was having problems: most of the time the garbage collection runs just fine on an incremental basis, taking up only a fraction of a second of CPU time, and periodically the JVM would do a full garbage collection as well.

The problem we are facing is that sometimes this full garbage collection would fail and immediately restart.

In the worst-case scenario, the garbage collection would start, fail and restart over and over again, until the server basically thrashed.  And each time the full garbage collection ran, it took 5-7 seconds of CPU time (which is a really long time, btw).

We are trying to understand the best long-term solution for this, but in the short-term we can mitigate the problem in a variety of ways, including upgrading our server virtual machines to have more RAM.

One reason it took so long to debug is that we were chasing a red herring: we had noticed network spikes happening frequently, and we wrongly assumed these were correlated to the server’s CPU load spiking, but this turned out to be coincidental rather than causal.

Sorry about all this.

Avoid using these characters when you name your projects

Technology,

Some characters shouldn’t be used when you name a project — and we are going to make a change in Kerika that will rename any old projects you have to replace these characters with blank spaces — because they cause problems when you need to export the cards on your Task Board or Scrum Board.

Here’s what you need to avoid:

  • Forward slash (“/”)
  • Backward slash (“\”)
  • Colon (“:”)
  • Semi-colon (“;”)

When you do an export, the exported data are stored in a file in your Google Drive (if you are using Kerika+Google) or your Box account (if you are using Kerika+Box) and these characters are used by these cloud services as file separator characters, which means they cannot be part of a file name.

So, your export will fail (and we end up logging an error on our server, which doesn’t make us happy either)

We did make a change in Kerika a month ago that stopped new projects from using these characters in their names, but it looks like there are still a bunch of old projects out there that have these characters in their names, and now we are going to try to clean up these as well.

Search for Retrieval, Exploration and Discovery

Technology

We have been giving a lot of thought recently to how we can improve the Search function in Kerika, and in the process found ourselves thrashing between different design approaches — all of which seemed deficient in some respect.

To get a better grip on the problem we decided to put aside all of our designs and step back to think more deeply about the basic uses of Search.

We concluded that there are three trajectories of Search that we need to consider:

SEARCH FOR RETRIEVAL

When you are trying to find something you have seen before: an old card, an old project, and old chat message.

You know for sure that the item exists; you just don’t remember where you last saw it.

The goal for a Search function in this scenario is to minimize user frustration by reducing the number of clicks needed to find and retrieve it.

This assumes, of course, that the object that you are trying to retrieve does really exist: if its your memory that’s faulty, then the goal of the Search function must be to convincingly demonstrate that the target object doesn’t exist.

It’s easy to imagine examples of Search for Retrieval in the context of a Kerika user:

  • “Where’s that contract that Arun signed last week?”
  • “Where’s the card where Arun and I discussed making changes to the contract?”
  • “Where’s the canvas where Arun laid out the product vision?”

Search for Retrieval is not an important use on the Web, when you are using Google or Bing, because important items are more often bookmarked or scrapbooked for faster and more secure retrieval: if there is a Web page you need to return to often, you are going to rely upon your bookmarks more often than a new Google search.

But in a content management system like Kerika, which also integrates conversations, tasks, processes and people, Search for Retrieval is a critical use case.

SEARCH FOR EXPLORATION

Exploration differs from Retrieval in one fundamental way: the user wants to use something that exists as a starting point to discover other items that are related.

Exploration is about attacking a problem area from many different angles: you might not be  certain what content exists that’s relevant, but you are certain that some relevant content does exist.

Examples of Exploration in Kerika might include:

  • “Where are all the bugs we have fixed regarding this feature?”
  • “Where are all the contracts we have signed for this kind of work?”
  • “Who are all the people who have worked on search engine technology?”

For Exploration to succeed, we need to create moments of delight: if a user can easily find related information that they were really hoping does exist, then the experience of quickly finding this information is sheer delight — and delight is a completely different emotion than the absence of frustration.

Exploration is possible on the Web with Bing and Google: the search engines try to help you auto-complete your query, offer suggested searches, and try to cluster results by type: e.g. here are all the images that match you search, and here are all the videos that match your search.

SEARCH FOR DISCOVERY

Discovery is closer to Exploration than Retrieval, but different enough from both that we think it is worth considering as a separate search trajectory in it’s own right.

With Discovery, you are hoping to find something, but have no real certainty that anything exists.

This the crucial difference between Discovery and Exploration: with Exploration you are fairly certain something exists, but are not sure in what form the information exists, or where it can be found. With Discovery on the other hand, you are really venturing into unknown territory, with no assurance that anything might be found.

In the context of a Kerika user, Discovery might take the form of questions like:

  • “Have any bugs every been reported for this feature?”
  • “Has anyone ever looked at this issue?”
  • “Is any work happening with this client?”

With Discovery, we need to combine elements of both Retrieval and Exploration when considering the user interface: if no information exists, then how quickly can we let the user know that there is nothing to be found? In other words, how can we reduce frustration?

On the other hand, if something does exist that is worth discovering, how can we present the search results with good information scent?

CONCLUSION

It’s probably hard to support all three search trajectories equally well: we need to decide which search trajectories are most important in the current context of the user.

We could try to get clues from the user’s current view of Kerika — which project or page she is looking at, and which one she was looking at before — to try to guess which type of search trajectory she has in mind, but these guesses are not likely to be very accurate, and forcing the user to go down the wrong trajectory can be both frustrating and counter-productive.

We are still exploring these ideas, but look for a new Kerika Search in the coming weeks…

 

 

 

Exporting just a subset of a Task Board or Scrum Board

Agile & Scrum, Technology, Usability, , , , ,

A tiny change in labeling in our latest version will, we hope, make it clear that Kerika’s Export feature is actually pretty smart about managing the amount of data that you export from a board:

Exporting subset of board
Exporting subset of board

What used to say “Export cards” now says “Export the cards shown”.

“Cards shown” means just what it says: if you are hiding some columns from view, or filtering your view of the board to show just those cards that match particular colors or tags, then only the cards currently shown are going to be exported.

This makes it really easy for you to manage what information goes into an export: if you don’t want the Backlog of a Scrum Board to be included, for example, just hide the Backlog from view before clicking on the Export button.