https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ACOBCJyepk
A new tutorial video on using Kerika with Google Docs
Welcoming European University Institute to our community of Academic users
We have added European University Institute to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @eui.eu email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
Welcoming Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora to our Academic Users community
We have added Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil) to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @ufjf.br and @facc.ufjf.br email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
Welcoming Alpena Public Schools to our Academic Users community
We have added Alpena Public Schools to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @alpenaschools.com email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
Welcoming Georgia Tech to our Academic Users community
We have added the Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech) to the list of organizations that automatically qualify for free Kerika Academic Accounts. Anyone signing up with a @gatech.edu email will be able to have up to 10 people working on their projects.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
Fixed: issue with showing thumbnails of pictures
With our most recent update (which was yesterday), we have fixed a problem with thumbnails of attached images not showing correctly. (Not always, but sometimes.)
Here’s what the problem used to look like:
As you can see, this card has two images attached. The first one doesn’t show a thumbnail properly (it has a standard “missing image” icon instead) while the second one works fine.
The underlying cause for this was a mismatch in the duration for which Kerika was caching the thumbnail of an attachment after it had first been retrieved from Google Drive, and how long Google Drive was keeping the thumbnail around.
So you never saw the problem when you first attached an image, but if you went back to the card after 30 days you would see the “missing image” icon instead.
We have fixed this. You may still see this if your browser is caching old thumbnails; you can completely eliminate the problem by clearing your browser’s cache, which would force Kerika to request new thumbnails from Google.
Why our new mobile app is taking so long to build
We have been working for months now on our new mobile app, and it has been a tough slog! We are building it entirely using React (a Javascript framework) to make it possible to have a single code base across both desktop and mobile devices, and across all operating systems.
We took some time learning to be good with React: previously we had used Polymer, and before that we used JQuery, so there was some learning curve to traverse while we figured out the right way to code in React. But we are beyond that now.
For the past couple of months, it is really performance that has been our bugbear. In the spirit of “eat your own dogfood before trying to sell it”, we are using the emerging mobile app for our own work on a daily basis.
The trouble is: our main Kerika board is huge: it has usually around 600 cards, and 26 columns. This isn’t best practice, by the way, and we are not recommending you create boards like this, but we are talking here about our main board that tracks many different ideas and initiatives, not just product development.
So, when using our mobile app for our own board, we hit performance problems that few of our users are likely to encounter. We could, of course, have written us off as an edge case and ignored the performance issues, because for smaller boards (e.g. with around 20-30 cards), these performance problems completely disappear.
But, we decided to bite the bullet and get our mobile app to be good even with boards that are as wide and deep as our main board. And we have learned a lot from that experience: for example, it wasn’t the number of cards, but the number of columns that had the bigger performance impact.
We have another board with over 2,500 cards in just 2 columns (essentially a historical record of old work items) and we didn’t experience performance problems in the same way as we did with 500-600 cards over 26 columns. In fact, we found that 2,500 cards in 2 columns was much easier to handle than the latter case!
So, a lot of our efforts over the past few months have been trying to handle performance for scenarios that are out of the norm.
We are doing our testing on both iOS and Android at the same time, to catch browser-specific issues early. (We have been less diligent about Firefox testing, to be frank, but we expect clearing iOS and Android issues will effectively cover Firefox as well, making our final testing easier.)
Our end goal is a single code base that runs on any device. Right now that’s not true: our desktop experience is still using (mostly) Polymer, while our mobile is entirely in React, but we are trying to make sure we design all of the new code to work well on the desktop as well, so that we can slowly replace parts of the desktop code as we build the new mobile app.
(It’s not that our desktop code has any problems today — we are very confident about the quality of our desktop user experience — it’s just that we are too small a team to be able to split ourselves into multiple sub-teams to support every platform.)
Here’s a composite view of what our mobile app looks like now: in “zoomed-in” view, in “zoomed-out” view, and card details:
Onwards!
Welcoming the Grŵp Llandrillo Menai in Wales
We have added Grŵp Llandrillo Menai to the list of institutions that automatically qualify for free Academic Accounts: anyone signing up with a gllm.ac.uk email can have a project team of up to 10 people.
Grŵp Llandrillo Menai is an umbrella organisation to oversee the operation of the three member colleges: Coleg Llandrillo, Coleg Menai and Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, all in Wales (United Kingdom).
What happens when you need to increase your Account Team?
A Kerika Account can own an unlimited number of boards, of any type, and each board can have it’s own team consisting of Board Admins, Team Members, and Visitors.
Users with a Professional Account have a defined size to their Account Teams, directly related to the number of subscriptions they have purchased so far.
Some users prefer to buy a few more subscriptions than they currently need to provide an extra buffer to make it easier to quickly their project teams. Others try to buy just as much as they need, and no more.
If your Account has unused subscriptions, then it’s easy for any Board Admin to add someone to their board, simply by inviting them to join a particular board.
This uses up one of the free subscriptions in that Account, and the Account Owner is notified.
If there are no free subscriptions, Kerika doesn’t immediately block the Board Admin from adding someone to their team. Kerika allows for the new person to join immediately as a new Team Member, but the Account Owner is immediately alerted that they need to buy an additional subscription. This alert comes as email, and as an in-app message:
This starts a 30-day grace period to give the Account Owner time to process the purchase; some organizations have complex approval processes even for something as inexpensive as Kerika!
If the Account Owner doesn’t complete the purchase within 30 days, the newly added Team Member is demoted to Visitor: this means they can still have real-time access to their board, but they can’t make any changes or be assigned any work items.
Clicking on the BUY SUBSCRIPTION button will bring up this dialog:
If the Account Owner is expecting a bunch of these notifications in the future, they can buy more than the one subscription they have been prompted for; they can also decide whether they want to automatically renew their subscriptions when they expire.
A confirmation screen is shown, with tax calculated based upon whether the buyer is located in Washington State or not, and the Account Owner is given the option of either completing the purchase online, using a credit card that is processed by Stripe, or paying offline.
(Not: Kerika never sees any credit card details. All of the online payment processing is handled by Stripe.)
In larger companies there may be restrictions on who can make online purchases (or even who has access to a corporate credit card), and to accommodate these customers we offer the option of requesting an invoice.
If you choose an invoice, you get a confirmation like this:
And within seconds the invoice will land in your email Inbox, and those of anyone else who has been specified as a Billing Contact on your account. Kerika invoices look like this:
We spent months, earlier this year, designing and building this system trying to make sure we offer all the flexibility that our customers may need. Since we have users around the world, that was an interestingly tough challenge!
If you have any suggestions on how we could improve this, let us know.