We try to be consistent in our use of colors and shades throughout the application, although it is easy to slip up from version to version, particularly since we do so many releases a year.
One recent diversion we corrected was in the use of the color blue: we have a specific shade we call Kerika Blue (#0099CC) which is used to indicate the concept of “new”:
Kerika Blue
Kerika Blue is more muted than the regular blue that you might find elsewhere: we generally try to keep our color scheme muted, so that the decoration of the Kerika app doesn’t compete with your data — after all, your data are far more important to you than anything we do in terms of decorating your screen ;-)
All of Kerika’s servers, which run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), operate within a Virtual Private Network (VPN), so they can be configured to only listen on local ports, e.g. ports like 10.0.0.1, etc.
This means that they cannot be accessed directly from the Internet: instead, all connections are routed through an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which is a special kind of AWS server that handles connections from all users.
The ELB is very secure: it implements SSL 2.0, and when vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and POODLE are discovered, it is relatively easy for us, with Amazon’s help, to quickly ensure that the the ELBs are patched. Patching the ELBs quickly gives us breathing room to patch all the other servers involved, particularly if vulnerabilities are found at the platform level itself.
But, running a VPN isn’t enough: while it blocks people outside the Kerika server environment from directly accessing our database, there is still — at least a theoretical possibility — that an attacker can find his way inside the VPN, and then try to connect to our database server on a local port.
To avoid this scenario, we use SSL within the VPN as well, so that the connections from the load balancers to the database servers are also authenticated and encrypted.
Many of our users work in globally dispersed teams; our own team is spread out between Seattle and India.
With multiple timezones, particularly when they are widely spaced apart, commitments like “I will get this done today” become a little tricky to understand.
If someone in India says “I will get this done today”, is that India time or Seattle time? Well, that depends upon where you are, when you log into Kerika.
Kerika automatically factors in differences in timezones when showing due dates: someone who commits to getting something done “today” in India is actually committing to get it done by 11:30AM Pacific Standard Time, now that the US is in Daylight Savings Mode.
So, the due date is shown in a way that’s relevant to the user’s local time: our Seattle folks see an Indian’s commitment like this
Local time due date
These timezone differences automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time: there’s nothing you need to do to see when a commitment is actually due.
Except, perhaps, notice that the item is now overdue, as indicated in red in the example above…
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!
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 are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards! (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))
Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:
Example of Workflow View
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Selecting a View
Your new viewing choices include:
Next 3 days: this will show you everything that’s Due Today, Due Tomorrow, Due the Day After, and beyond
Next 3 weeks: everything that’s Due This Week, Due Next Week, Due the Following Week, and beyond.
Next 3 Months: everything that’s Due This Month, Due Next Month, Due the Following Month, and beyond.
Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.
Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:
Example of 3-day View
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
All cards without any due date are shown first, in the Not Scheduled column.
Next, any Overdue cards are always shown in a special column by themselves, so they can be easily rescheduled.
Beyond this are columns for Today, Tomorrow and the Day After.
And finally, there is the And Beyond column, which summarizes all the cards that have due dates beyond the day after tomorrow.
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Example of 3-week View
Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.
The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:
Example of 3-month View
All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date. As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:
Smart drag and drop
Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:
Where cards are in your Workflow view
Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:
Navigating the Planning Views
As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!
Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).
Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…
Using Kerika with Safari in “Private” mode can result in some odd behavior, and that is entirely due to the way Safari works — it’s pretty much out of Kerika’s control :-(
The underlying problem is that Safari doesn’t allow Web apps to use local storage (cache) when the browser is in “Private” mode.
Since Kerika relies upon local storage to provide a smooth, real-time effort, this can compromise the user experience if you use Safari in Private mode.
Rating Kerika (and other apps) on the Google Apps Marketplace used to be a lot simpler than it is now.
Google changed a bunch of things in the Google Apps Marketplace that now restricts rating of apps to Google Admins.
If you are the Google Admin for your organization, we would love to get your review and rating of Kerika on the Google Apps Marketplace!
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to rate Kerika (and any other app) on the Google Apps Marketplace:
1. Start off on the Google Admin Screen
Go to admin.google.com, and then click on the “Google Apps Marketplace” link on the right:
Click here to get to the Apps Marketplace
2. Search for Kerika
Search for Kerika
The Google Apps Admin for your organization (hopefully, you — if you are reading this blog post!) will need to install Kerika from the Google Apps Marketplace.
If Kerika is already installed as an approved (authorized) app for your Google Apps domain, you will see a “Rate It” button:
Click here to rate Kerika
4. You need to have a Google+ Profile
As with rating Kerika on the Chrome Web Store, you need to be signed into your Google+ profile in order to rate Kerika (or any other app from the Google Apps Marketplace):
Make sure you have a Google+ Profile
Assuming you are signed into Google, here’s how you can rate and review Kerika:
Rating Kerika
Click on the stars to rate Kerika, but what would be even better is a short review — even a couple of sentences would be great!
We would love to get your feedback on the Kerika app; one way, of course, would be to contact us directly at support@kerika.com, and an even better way would be if you could post a review of Kerika on the Chrome Web Store.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to posting a review of an app on the Chrome Web Store. (Of course, it’s going to be useful only if you use the Chrome browser, not if you use Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox.)
