One of our oldest features has outlived it’s usefulness…

We have something we call the “Render Server”: it’s a separate server from the rest of Kerika, and it’s sole purpose has been to create thumbnail images of Whiteboard projects.

This feature was originally built to make it easier for people who created rich, layered Whiteboards — boards where canvases are contained with other canvases, like the amazing Foundation for Common Good Whiteboard project created by Charles Fraser‘s team (in the UK, and worldwide) which looks something like this:

This is just a partial view of the top-level of a series of canvases, layered within each other to create a rich, multi-media world.

The Render Server helped people understand that some shapes on a canvas contain other canvases within them: for example, if you hovered your mouse over one of the circles on this canvas, you could see — somewhat dimly — a thumbnail of the canvas that was contained within that page:

This feature was also used when you added canvases to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: the card details dialog would show a thumbnail of the canvas, like this

This feature was cool, and made for great demos, but it was ultimately not all that useful in a practical sense.

(And that’s true for a lot of cool ideas: things that make for great demos don’t always provide great utility in regular use.)

The thumbnails were too small to be of much use on Whiteboards, and when shown on card details for Task Boards and Scrum Boards they just took up too much space.

So, it’s buh-bye to the Render Server: a cool idea, whose time seems to have passed.

(No, really: we didn’t shoot the dog! We promise!)