Sometimes you have to admit that your bright ideas just didn’t turn out as well as you liked…
One such bright idea was to have Idea Pages show thumbnails of their contents when viewed from their parent pages. Here’s an example of this works in practice:
How thumbnails of Idea Pages used to look
A great idea in theory; not so great in practice…
The original goal was two-fold:
To let users know quickly which items on an Idea Page contained other pages;
To give users a quick visual sense for what was contained in those pages;
In practice, however, the effect of these thumbnails showing through all the time was a splotchy, rather ugly effect. To remedy this, we are adopting a new mechanism that we hope will continue to meet our two goals: with our latest version, any item on an Idea Page that contains another page will appear with it’s text/label underlined, like this:
What thumbnails look like now
As you can see, items that contain pages now appear with their text labels underlined. If you move your mouse over a shape that has underlined text in its label, you see a thumbnail appear as before:
A thumbnail appears on mouseover
Selecting the shape now provides a green “+” button: this lets you open the page contained within that shape.
Thumbnail on selection
This new green “+” button also appears on shapes that don’t contain any pages within them: in that case, clicking on the “+” button lets you create a new page that is contained within that shape.
In effect, the old double-click mouse operation has been replaced with a green “+” button that appears when you select a shape with a single mouse click.
We hope you find these changes helpful; we earnestly seek your feedback!
We have been toiling away for the past 4 weeks on our latest version of Kerika, with the vast majority of time consumed with a complete rewrite of the Text Block feature. This is the feature that lets you place blocks of richly formatted text, including Web links, pictures and tables, onto your Kerika page. (What we termed, in an earlier post, “glassbox documents”.)
Here’s a simple example of a text block:
A simple example of a text block
Having realized just how important this feature is for our users, we decided to do a complete rewrite of all the code, abandoning the open-source library called Whyzziwig that we had been using previously in favor of our own implementation. We did all this work because it was clear that we needed to be in greater control of this particular feature’s destiny: something that’s impossible when you are using an open source library. As a result of all our hard work, you will now have a bunch of great new functionality!
An Undo button: at long last! We still need to create a broader Undo function that works across all of Kerika’s operations, but this particular button works nicely when you are editing a text block.
A strikethrough button: great for marking up requirements and discussions.
A new color picker: a simple palette of 84 colors with a cleaner user interface. Along with this comes an easier way to set the font, highlighting and background colors.
More options for numbered lists: including using alphabetic and Roman numerals.
More options for bullet lists.
A clear formatting button: this can be particularly helpful if you are importing content from Microsoft Office. (See our earlier post on just how much junk HTML is carried over if you copy material from a Microsoft Office document.)
Easier ways to add, edit and remove Web links: we have considerably simplified the user interface for attaching a Web link to some text (or to a picture that you have embedded inside your text block).
Easier way to embed pictures in text block: a simpler, cleaner user interface.
We also have reatly improved capabilities for creating and managing tables: this was where the bulk of the work was done! We have added a number of features that our users asked for, such as:
Setting Cell, Row and Column Properties: you can set horizontal and vertical alignment, as well as the background (fill color) for a single cell, an entire row, or an entire column.
Resizing column widths by dragging: something that we have wanted for a long time, and which took a lot of effort to build… Now you can re-size a column simply by dragging its edges, as you would with Word or Excel.
Copy and Paste: you can now copy and paste a single cell, an entire row, or an entire column. Great for moving stuff around inside tables!
Border color: easier to set, with our new Color Picker. And, to improve the usability and appearance of tables, we automatically make the outer border of tables twice as thick as the inner borders (that separate individual cells).
That’s not all that’s new in this release, but this particular blog post is long enough, so we will talk about other goodies in our next posting… Here’s a Kerika page that shows these changes: it’s open to the public to visit, so come on over!
Not many startups seem to think that having a registered trademark, or a patent for that matter, can help real, tangible assets for the company. Most entrepreneurs seem to think that getting a “.com” domain name is all that’s needed to create their company’s identity.
While getting a “.com” domain name for your new company is undoubtedly valuable – and we don’t believe a “.net” or “.biz” or any other variant is nearly as worthwhile – getting a registered trademark, a registered service mark (if appropriate), and patents are all very important for startups.
Early on we registered “Kerika” and our distinctive flower logo as registered trademarks and registered service marks. Getting the registered status for a trademark is more expensive – although not prohibitively so, in our opinion – and certainly more time-consuming than simply slapping on a “TM” after your product or company name, but there are very valuable benefits from having the registration.
One simple benefit is that you can claim your registered trademark on social media platforms even if you weren’t the first to register that particular name. For example, we weren’t the first to register “kerika” as a username on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but we were able to get these usernames assigned to us because the word is a registered trademark, and that’s a very powerful lever to use with third-party companies.
There are other benefits, of course, particularly if your company or product name is a “made-up name” – which, incidentally, makes it a lot easier to get registered as a trademark or service mark – such as making sure that your competitors don’t try to get cute by using similar names. (Remember Jobster?)
And once you get a registered trademark, you need to remember to file additional paperwork after the first 5 years, and that’s what we finished doing recently. The US Patent & Trademark Office have improved their processes in recent years, so that when you file for an extension after 5 years of using a registered mark, you can apply for a “declaration of incontestability”, which gives you even greater rights to your product or company name.
(We just received our “declaration of incontestability” for registered trademark and our registered service mark.)
There’s a lot of value in getting a patent as well, although the cost of this can be very significant. If you have been truly innovative, and have really invented something new, you should get it patented. A patent reflects the hard work you put into your innovation: it isn’t granted lightly by the US Patent Office – despite what you may read in the press about “thousands of junk patents” being issued everyday. In our case, getting a patent for visual templates took years of waiting, hundreds of hours of effort, and cost a bundle.
But, we feel it was well worth the time and effort! If a competitor tries to copy Kerika, we will make our displeasure known!
Our next release will primarily focused around the text block feature, which is turning out to be perhaps the single most popular feature of Kerika.
When we first built Kerika, the ability to put formatted text on Idea Pages was viewed as an incidental feature: we figured that people would want to draw flowcharts, and in doing so they would need to put small bits of text on the canvas to use as labels and markers. Nothing more.
So, we considered a variety of open-source programs that provided HTML editing capabilities for our initial versions of Kerika , before settling on Whyzziwig which appeared to have more functionality than we thought we would ever need…
However, as we started using Kerika ourselves, and talked extensively to our helpful users, we slowly realized that text blocks were a very helpful feature indeed: perhaps the most important feature in Kerika’s bag of tricks.
We have dubbed this the “glassbox documents” phenomenon: if you are sharing user requirements or collaborating on a design, you don’t need the full capabilities that come with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Instead, what you really need is the ability to quickly write relatively small bits of text, perhaps a few paragraphs long, with a table or some links and pictures, and use these to mark up an Idea Page.
Here’s an example of how we used these text blocks for developing the next version of Kerika, which will contain a hugely improved text block feature:
Example of using Kerika to design a user interface
This picture shows an Idea Page that we used to share ideas between the designers, users and developers about how the text block feature could be improved.
In the middle of the Idea Page, we have a mockup of a new text block toolbar, to replace the existing Whyzziwig toolbar.
Above it are various pages that define the working of each button: inside each of these sub-pages we have small blocks of text that provide the detailed requirements for a particular button, as well as design notes from the developers and test data from the QA team.
Towards the bottom you can see a larger text block contain additional notes about the design.
Using text blocks in this manner, to capture and share our ideas and designs, we have reached that ultimate state of perfect collaboration: even though the Kerika team is distributed between Bellevue and Issaquah in Washington State, and Gujarat and New Delhi in India, we have zero emails being sent within the team!
This is the power of a glassbox document: the ability to sharply increase productivity and shared understanding of requirements and design, by putting text directly on an Idea Page instead of hiding it inside a conventional document (which we would call a “blackbox document”).
People using Kerika love the text block feature – the one that lets you create richly formatted text blocks on a Kerika page that contain pictures, tables, lists and links – but all too often they try to create these text blocks by copying and pasting text from a Microsoft Word document.
The problem with doing this is that Microsoft Word produces a gigantic amount of HTML junk, even with the simplest text.
Here’s an example: create a new Microsoft Word document and type in the words “Hello, World!”. That’s it: just two words, a total of 13 characters including spaces and punctuation, using your default font. Nothing fancy – no colors, bold or italics, no lists, nothing at all. Just two words.
Now try to copy and paste this text into something that will display the HTML generated by Microsoft Word. One option is to paste this text into a Kerika text block, and then use the “View as HTML” option to see all the HTML that comes with these two words, but we will be temporarily removing the “View as HTML” feature in our next version as part of our rewrite of the text block feature. (More on that later…)
You will find that Microsoft Word produces an astonishing 1,287 words, which add up to 18,008 characters of HTML, just to represent a total of 13 characters of content. In other words, your simple bit of Microsoft Word text exploded by a factor of 1,385.
(If you look at the HTML, you can see, of course, that this expansion factor doesn’t stay constant: a lot of the HTML is simply a dump of a lot of styling information that wouldn’t change proportionately as you increased the size of the original Microsoft Word content, but still…!)
Here’s how you can say “Hello, World!” using 1,287 word of HTML:
We recently talked about a shift within Google Docs that resulted in their using a new domain name – googleusercontent.com – to store images that users upload.
The way Google stores images on various sub-domains of googleusercontent.com is a bit of a mystery to us: it isn’t just that when you upload images to your Kerika pages they get stored by Google in some seemingly-random sub-domain of googleusercontent.com, but that the location may change from day to day!
This is making it very hard to run the Chrome browser with the “Disable third-party cookies” preference turned on, because you may find that each day some of the images on your Kerika pages are not being displayed because they have suddenly shifted to a different sub-domain of googleusercontent.com – one that you haven’t previously whitelisted.
Firefox used to have a very simple way of whitelisting domains for which you were happy to get cookies, but that disappeared several versions.
Chrome doesn’t offer any easy way of whitelisting domains either, presumably because Google is strongly in favor of third-party cookies since these underpin so much advertising. There’s an extension for Chrome called “Vanilla Cookies” that supposed to allow you to whitelist domains using wildcards, but it doesn’t seem to solve the whack-a-mole problem with googleusercontent.com as far as we can tell.
Now, your only options appear to be:
Disable all third-party cookies, which means that images you upload to your Kerika pages are not shown because they are being stored somewhere on googleusercontent.com, which is a third-party since it is neither kerika.com nor google.com, or
Allow all third-party cookies which means all sorts of junk can find its way onto your computer.
Some numbers out today from comScore suggesting that Google+ users are spending just 3 minutes per month using the service have grabbed a lot of attention, mostly because of the direct comparison being made to how much time users spend on Facebook (6-7 hours per month). No word on how many hours people are spending on Lamebook.
Unfortunately, these numbers sound about right. Fellow entrepreneurs who were initially psyched about G+ seem to have turned much cooler about the service, and we think it may be because of our own bewilderment that businesses were banned from creating Google+ profiles when G+ launched.
To use a wonderfully succinct comparison of social media, startups sell donuts:
Source: douglaswray on Instagram
Google made a strategic error in actively prohibiting businesses from creating Google+ pages last summer when the service launched. (To quote a Google manager, “we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profile.” In other words: get lost.)
So, what lies ahead? Not necessarily doom and gloom, if Google sticks with its long-term strategy as described by Bradley Horowitz in the Wall Street Journal today:
Google+ acts as an auxiliary to Google services — such as Gmail and YouTube — by adding a “personal” social-networking layer on top of them.
This comment is consistent with what we have heard from the Google rank-and-file as well in recent months; to quote one local Googler: “Now that we have built Google+, we need to rebuild Google around Google+.”
As of now, the WSJ article has approximately 1,000 Facebook “likes”; 337 G+s; and 3,210 Tweets. Go figure.
Smartmoney.com, the personal finance website that is owned by Dow Jones (i.e. by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) offers a singular example of how one can design a website so that chrome, fluff and advertising overwhelms the content.
Here are some screenshots from a single page of a SmartMoney article today: we needed 6 screenshots to show you the page because it is around 3,900 pixels in height.
Screen captures of a single Smartmoney.com page
One might assume that a page that long would be filled with content, but in fact, it is filled with advertising, page design elements (also known as “chrome”), links to various News Corp services and other pages (i.e. “fluff”), and even just blank screen space.
To get a better idea of just how much crap there is on this screen, consider this color coding of the page, with purple denoting advertising, yellow denoting chrome or other fluff, and white indicating blank screen space:
The same Smartmoney.com page, color-coded to show what it contains
You can see at a glance just how little of the page is actually devoted to the article. In fact, by counting pixels we figured that just 15% of the page is devoted to the article:
What's on this single Smartmoney.com page
This is not entirely accidental, of course: Smartmoney.com relies upon advertising, so it will try to stretch out an article over multiple pages so that it can show you more advertising as you plow through page after page.
(This particular article has been stretched over 6 separate Smartmoney.com pages, each of which contains the same pitiful 15%, or even less, of pixels devoted to actual content.)
Yet, even if advertising is the laudable goal here, one simply can’t overlook the bad page design: the largest component of this page (54%) is either page decoration or other fluff – a desperate attempt to get people to stay on the site. And considering that more than half of the crap is “below the fold”, why would Smartmoney.com even expect users to wade through it?
“We really look at the service delivery with the case. Was there anything we can learn about what happened? It’s not necessary to see what went wrong, but how were services delivered. Is there something we can learn?” said Sharon Gilbert, deputy director for field operations at Children’s Administration, which is part of DSHS.
No, let’s not.
Let’s not view the horrific murder of two children as a SLA problem with a contracted vendor. Too much blood has been spilled to take such a bloodless view of “lessons learned” about “service deliveries”.
Most browsers allow third-party cookies, by default. And, most of the time, these cookies are used by advertising networks to track users as they move across different websites.
Some folks take the trouble of disabling third-party cookies, which can be done using your browser’s “Preferences” settings: the actual mechanism varies based upon which browser you are using.
If you do turn off third-party cookies, you may find that images that you upload to your Kerika pages do not appear correctly. That’s because all files that you upload to your Kerika pages are stored in your own Google account, so when you are viewing a Kerika project page, some of that content is coming from your Google Docs account.
Recently, Google has started storing images in a new domain, called googleusercontent.com. This domain is used for a variety of purposes, including cached copies of websites visited by the Google search engine, but the general purpose of this domain appears to be to store static content: i.e. content that is not expected to change.
So, if you have turned off third-party cookies in your browser, you may find that images are not shown when you visit your Kerika page. And, the whole process may be something of a mystery to you, although our latest version includes a new warning message when we detect that this problem might exist.
It’s easiest to spot this problem if you are using the Google Chrome browser because that shows you, at the far right end of the address bar, that there is a potential problem with cookies on the page you are currently viewing. Here’s an example:
Cookie warning from Google Chrome
The address bar shows a broken cookie image, and when you click on that cookie image you get a dialog box that tells your page is having problems with cookies. When you see this, click on the “Show cookies and other site data…” button
Click on this button
And this will then show you details of the cookies that are being allowed, and the ones that are being blocked:
Blocked cookies
You need to allow cookies from googleusercontent.com in order for your images to show up correctly on your Kerika pages.
Unblocking individual cookies
However, the problem with googleusercontent.com may not end here: when you enable cookies from somewhere.googleusercontent.com, you are only permitting cookies from that particular sub-domain! In the example above, we are allowing cookies from doc-0k-0c-docs.googleusercontent.com.
Allowing cookies from somewhere.googleusercontent.com doesn’t mean that you have also allowed cookies from somewhere-else.googleusercontent.com: in other words, allowing cookies from one sub-domain of googleusercontent.com doesn’t automatically mean you are allowing cookies from all other sub-domains of googleusercontent.com.
And this can cause repeated problems when you are using Kerika, because when you upload images to your Kerika page, Google may place these on entirely different sub-domains of googleusercontent.com. We have no control over which sub-domain Google chooses at any point, so you could have one page show images correctly – after you have permitted cookies from that sub-domain – and another sub-domain get blocked when you navigate to another Kerika page, even a page that’s part of the same Kerika project.
It’s a tricky problem, and the solution doesn’t lie in our hands since it is entirely up to Google as to where they choose to store your documents within the hundreds of domains and the thousands of sub-domains that they control. The easiest bet, of course, is to allow third-party cookies – which you may already be doing, unless you have changed your browser defaults – but if that’s not acceptable to you, you might want to look at using the Chrome browser and watching out for that broken cookie image in your address bar.
UPDATED NOV 11, 2016:
A reader, Carey Dessaix from Australia, offers a better solution to just allowing all third-party cookies:
Adding “[*.]googleusercontent.com” is a solution.
Just go to Chrome settings > Advanced Settings > Privacy > Content settings.
Click “Manage exceptions” and add the following as allowed which will allow allow subdomains including the actual domain as well.
