Giving real thanks, this Thanksgiving

Kerika, Technology, Usability

This Thanksgiving holiday, we have good cause to be grateful to all the folks who gave us detailed feedback on our new task management software, and helped us identify about 25 different improvements that we plan to make over the next week covering areas such as:

  • Eliminating any confusion that might exist regarding project privacy;
  • Making it easier to edit card titles;
  • Making it easier to chat on individual cards;
  • Improving the emails that are sent when people are added or removed from projects;
  • Improving the overall performance, by at least by 50%;
  • Simplifying the experience for new users;
  • Simplifying the use of canvases and whiteboards;
  • Adding helpful hints throughout the product; and
  • Eliminating references to “Kanban” which some people find confusing (without eliminating any functionality).

We will be updating Kerika next week, and will continue to release new versions every two weeks, and over the next month we plan to market and publicize the software more.

Task management comes to Kerika

Kerika, Technology, Usability

At long last, task management comes to Kerika!

We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika this weekend: the fruits of over 8 months of intense research and design of the only taskboard that’s designed specially for distributed teams. There’s a short video that we urge you to watch: it provides a good overview of Kerika’s new capabilities:

  • You can organize your work using cards on a virtual task board: the interface is easy to understand and delightful to use.
  • Each card can contain details of the work, and, of course, you can add content from your laptop or the Web to each card.
  • Each card can be assigned to one or more people from your project team: Kerika lets you see at a glance who is working on what.
  • Chat is integrated directly with your work: you can send messages that are attached to your cards, or the entire taskboard.
  • You can get started with one of our standard project templates, or create your own process templates to reflect your organization’s best practices and proprietary methodologies.
  • Kerika’s unique whiteboard capabilities are integrated with the new task management: you can add a canvas to each card for sharing ideas, and everything updates in real-time as usual.
  • And our special focus continues to be the challenges faced by teams that are distributed over different locations — it could be that you are working with people offshore, or simply working from home: Kerika makes it easy for you to see, at a glance, exactly what’s changed on each work item in each project.

As usual, we look forward to your feedback! (Contact us by email.)

A new user interface, with much improved usability

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We are launching a brand-new version of Kerika, with a completely reworked user interface and a ton of new features including support for iPads and other full-sized tablets.

The new UI is different enough that we have put together a 2-minute video that we recommend you watch before you sign in next; it will really help you get the most out of the new software. The interface is new, but all your old projects and data are all intact!

The new interface is part of a larger transformation we are undertaking that will add project management capabilities to our existing collaboration features: we want to provide support for Kanban-style projects, Agile/Scrum projects, and customized workflows. We have finished designing the new features and if you would be willing to take a look at our mockups and give us your opinion, it would be greatly appreciated!

Meanwhile, please enjoy the new version, particularly if you have an iPad or other full-sized tablet. To access Kerika on your tablet, just log into the kerika.com site using your tablet’s browser: there is no need to download any app because we have rebuilt the user interface to work just fine inside your tablet’s browser.

How to tell if a file has been updated

Kerika, Technology

The first version of Kerika was written as a peer-to-peer (p2p) application, so one challenge we faced was detecting when files that are being shared as part of a project were changed by a user, so that we could send the latest version to everyone else on the team.

Our first attempt at a solution was to simply examine the Last Modified time for files. However, this proved to be very unreliable for a rather odd reason: whenever you open a spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel, it automatically updates the Last Modified time to be the current time – even before you had made any changes.

And when you close Excel, without having made any changes, it resets the Last Modified time back to its original value. So, whenever you opened a Excel files for viewing, we would erroneously identify it as an updated file.

We then tried looking at the size of files, to see if these had changed since we last examined them. We knew, of course, that this would be error prone in its own way: if you change some text within a file such that it contains the same number of characters as before, the overall size of that file would not change.

But this approach failed for another reason altogether: Microsoft Word allocates disk space in chunks at a time, rather than as exact amounts. This means that any edits to Word files that do not require Word to grab another chunk, or give up a chunk, would never be reflected in the reported size of the file.

Eventually, we decided to take the MD5 hash of files, which is a more reliable way of detecting if a file has been modified. We were concerned about how much CPU overhead this would take, but it proved to not be a problem after all.

Kerika isn’t written in Indonesian. (And Google Docs isn’t in Vietnamese either…)

Ephemera, Technology, Usability

An odd problem that we cannot quite figure out: every once in a while Google’s Chrome browser will tell the user that the application is written in Indonesian, and then offer to do a translation.

We cannot figure out what’s going on with this: all of the code is written in Javascript and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), so why would Chrome consider it to be an Indonesian page?

The problem must lie with Google Chrome itself: now, we are noticing that it will sometimes report that Google Docs is written in Vietnamese, as this screenshot shows!

When techies turn libertarian, neither Democrats nor Republicans will win

Ephemera

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page contains a bemusing article called Keeping the Spirit of Steve Jobs Alive that concludes that

Thanks to Washington, the liberal politics of Silicon Valley may now be tilting toward the libertarian right.

The WSJ is, of course, a Republican mouthpiece, which probably explains the writer’s smug assumption that when techies turn libertarian, they will all start voting Republican, which is absurd on two counts:

  • It is based upon what is essentially “non-news” in the first place: many techies have long tilted libertarian in their political views because of the very nature of their profession: information technology itself is based upon the free flow of information, so respect for the First Amendment runs deep within the tech world, and the business itself is relentlessly meritocratic and brutally disruptive, which supports neither the collective approach of the left, nor the deference to authority of the right.
  • Libertarianism may be to the “right” of liberalism, but in its emphasis on personal liberty, it could just as easily be described as being to the “left” of conservatism. In any case, libertarianism forms a 3-D point with respect to classic liberalism and conservatism, so any mapping of a 3-D topography of political views to a 2-D spectrum will necessarily be misleading.

And because libertarianism confounds the simple soundbites and clear definition of the “enemy” that both Democrats and Republicans find convenient, neither party would really welcome libertarians in their midst.

If the WSJ had understood the difference between Republicans and libertarians (with a small “l”) in the first place, they would have noticed a long time ago that a lot of techies are social liberals and economic conservatives…

Our latest version: better integration with Google, and more UI coolness

Kerika, Technology, Usability

You will have a new version of Kerika tomorrow, with a bunch of great new features. One big improvement is in Kerika’s integration with Google: we are upgrading to Google’s newer, better authentication system, so you will be asked to sign-in through Google again as if you were a brand new user — but don’t worry, none of your old projects or data are affected in any way by this change! The new sign-in process consolidates in one place all the permissions that Kerika requests with respect to your Google account; they include:

  • Access to your basic information: name, email address and photograph, which we use to make sure your Kerika account is set up properly. Now, the photo you use on Google will be used automatically for your Kerika projects as well.
  • Access to your Google Docs account, which, as before, we use to store the files you upload to your Kerika projects. Now, when you upload files to a Kerika project, they will be stored in the Google Docs account of the Account Owner. This makes it easier for Account Owners to manage all the content assets related to their projects.
  • Access to your contacts: this will be used in our next release (look for it in a couple of weeks) which will have auto-completion of names and email addresses when you invite people to join your projects.

There’s a long list of benefits that come with the new version of Kerika:

  1. When you add a URL to a Kerika page, that web site will show up as an embedded page within your Kerika page (i.e. as an IFRAME): you can customize the size and the display, so that only the content you are interested in is shown. Which means that Kerika lets you literally cut-and-paste the Internet.
  2. When you add Web content to Kerika pages, the system automatically gets the title of the Web content, so you don’t have to enter that by hand. And, of course, you can always rename it if you like.
  3. When you upload files to Kerika projects, they will now be stored in sub-folders within your Google Docs that are named for the Kerika projects. This means your Google Docs account doesn’t get cluttered with files in the same way as it did before.
  4. If you use Google Drive, you will find that your Kerika documents are available across all your computers. Kerika is well integrated with Google Drive.
  5. When someone joins a project that already has a bunch of Google Docs, they won’t get a bunch of emails any more from Google letting them know that they have access to each of these files. (These emails were kind of annoying ;-)
  6. If someone is removed from a project team, they will no longer have access to the Google Docs that were part of that project.
  7. On Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE9), you will see thumbnails of the documents on your Kerika projects, which makes it easier for you to quickly distinguish between several files.
  8. When you make a project open to the public, its documents are available only to people who know the URL of the documents. We feel this is a better approach to privacy when you considering making a project open to the public.
  9. When you are uploading a large file to your Kerika project, you don’t have to wait for the uploading to finish in order to do other work inside Kerika.
  10. When you copy a project, or use someone’s public project as a template, you will get your own copies of all the documents in that project.
  11. Switching between different Kerika pages is now much faster since images are now retrieved from your browser cache instead of from the server.
  12. A long-awaited bug fix: when you have images (pictures) on your Kerika pages, they will be shown properly on Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. (We had to fix a problem with the way these browsers dealt with Google Docs.)
  13. Text blocks can now have a border color as well.
  14. The emails sent when you invite people have been improved.
  15. And, finally, the thumbnails of Kerika pages — which you can post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. — are much improved.

Thanks for your continued support of Kerika, and for providing feedback on how we can improve the product. There’s more good stuff coming your way, so keep collaborating…

Running Java on the Lion operating system

Ephemera, Technology

Having gotten a new Mac laptop that came packaged with Apple’s newer Lion operating system, and having successfully moved all files from an older laptop running Snow Leopard, we learned the hard way that Lion doesn’t come with Java bundled in by default!

The problem surfaced when we tried to run the Kerika server software on our new laptop: since we wrote all of the backend/server code in Java, we can run the entire Kerika software on pretty much any computer. So, with our new laptop all set up, apparently configured with everything we need once we got our SuperDuper backup restored, we tried to build the Kerika source code using Maven.

That’s when things went in a surprising direction: running “mvn -install” generated error messages about Java not being found. We followed the symbolic links for the Java executables, which had been copied over to the new laptop along with everything else from the SuperDuper backup, and found that there was nothing there: no Java to be found on the machine.

OK, so we need to get Java installed. No problem, we will just run the Mac Software Update: maybe something got missed along the way.

No good: Mac’s Software Update didn’t pull in Java.

Finally, we talked to Apple and found out that they deliberately don’t include Java (or Flash) with Lion. The ostensible reason is that Java programs (and Flash programs) take up too much battery power. This argument sounds rather dubious: Flash’s excessive power consumption is well known, but Java…?

We think a truer explanation might be that Apple views Java programs as a long-term competitive threat to their App Store, and are therefore starting to subtly discourage its use without actually banning it – which would create a huge stink.

If this sounds like Microsoft’s deliberately crippled support of Java on Windows XP, Apple should perhaps pause and consider how well that strategy worked out for Microsoft…

Meanwhile, here’s the download link to get Java for Lion!

A new version, with more goodies..

Kerika, Technology, Usability

We have released yet another version of Kerika, packed with useful features and bug fixes that will improve your experience with the product.

A lot of the improvements we made are “under-the-hood”, but here are a few changes that you can benefit from directly:

  • Snap-to-grid will make it easier for you to lay out shapes, documents, pictures, etc. on your Kerika pages. You can turn this on or off as you like, and adjust the size of the grid spacing, by setting your preferences: while you are using Kerika, click on your picture near the top edge of the browswer window and you can get to your user preferences.
  • Google Docs will always open in a new browser tab: this change makes for a more consistent and better user experience for everyone. Different browsers handle Google Docs differently, so to provide a more consistent experience for everyone your Google Docs will now alway open in a new browser tab rather than inside the Kerika canvas.
  • Easier ways to invite people: based upon very useful feedback from one of our users, we have added an “auto-acceptance” feature to invitations, and also redesigned the emails that get sent when people are invited to join your projects. These changes make it easier for you to invite people, and handle situations where the invitation emails get caught up in spam filters.
  • Custom colors: mix and match colors as you like, if you don’t like the 84 colors that come with the Kerika palette. If you need to use specific colors, e.g. to match your company’s branding, you can use hex codes to get the exact shade you want.
  • Faster tab switching: we improved this in a several ways, and one of them is to make sure your tabs show the page exactly as you had been viewing it previously before you switched to another tab.
  • The old “Magic Plus” button is now split into two: separate buttons to add Web content and to upload files from your computer. These buttons remain as magicky as ever, in terms of figuring out what kind of content you are adding to your Kerika pages and taking care of all the details, but now the buttons are separated out to improve usability.
  • Upload multiple files with the Upload File button: you could always add multiple files to your Kerika pages by dragging and dropping them onto the canvas; now you can grab multiple files using the Upload File button as well.
  • Merging cells in tables: a cool new feature allows you to merge cells within tables that you create. This makes it even easier to create great-looking content on your Kerika pages, with our text formatting tools.
  • Select multiple cells within the same column and apply formatting to all of them: another cool new feature for those of you who like creating formatted tables. You can select multiple cells within a text table by simply dragging your mouse across them. And, then, you can apply formatting (e.g. text color) to all of them with a single action.
  • Removing multiple rows and columns is easier: drag your mouse across several rows and columns of a table and remove them all with a single mouse click.
  • Easier to navigate large Kerika pages: if you want to drag something into a new part of the canvas, away from the current view, the canvas scrolls automatically to give you more space.

Thanks again for all your useful feedback; we have tons of improvements and new features coming up: our next version will include a number of improvements to our integration with Google Docs.

An easier way to share Web-versions of your project pages

Technology

Our new version will have an easier way for you to share Web-versions of your Kerika project pages.

“Web-versions” are automatically generated for every Kerika page: they can be viewed as regular Web pages, and easily embedded inside your own website or blog.

For a great example of how an embedded Kerika page can look inside your own website or blog, check out Ogden Murphy Wallace’s “Startup Action Kit” which provides an online resource for entrepreneurs interested in starting healthcare IT ventures. This page contains a Web version of a Kerika page that has been inserted into OMW’s microsite as an IFRAME, something that’s easily done by using the “Share!” button inside Kerika:

How to embed your Kerika project inside your website or blog
How to embed your Kerika project inside your website or blog

 

With our latest version, getting the URL of the Web-version of your project pages is easier than before: just click on the Share! button, and when the dialog box shown above opens, you can grab the URL from either of the two places indicated above.

An even easier way to get the URL of the Web-version of your project: all Kerika project pages have URLs of the form “kerika.com/m/XYZ“; just change the “m” to a “c”, as in “kerika.com/c/XYZ“, and you have the Web-version of your project.

Remember: the Web version gets updated in real-time as you update your Kerika project pages, which means you are publishing on the Web in real-time!