We fixed a problem that was stopping embedded videos from resizing on Kerika’s Whiteboards.
You can add any video, from anywhere, to a Kerika Whiteboard and then resize it by simple dragging it’s corners:
Bug, fixed: embedded videos on Kerika
Tag Archives: Whiteboard
Guarding against XSS/code-injection
It’s possible to copy-paste text into a Kerika Chat message, and there are legitimate use-cases for this: for example, a developer may ask a question to a coworker who replies with a code snippet.
Kerika handles code in chat messages by storing two versions of the message: as plain-text, and as the original format. When a chat message is displayed, the original format is used but not executed, which means the embedded code is visible, but doesn’t run in the browser. This makes it easy and safe to share code snippets through chat messages.
While making this improvement, we went through all the places where a user can type in text, Card Title and Description, Board Name and Description, Tag, Attachment Name, etc. to make sure we are guarding against malicious code injection.
How files are managed when you sign up with your email
Most people sign up as new Kerika users using a Google ID or Box ID, but an increasing number of folks are opting for direct signup: this means signing up with your email (any email will do).
For these folks, here’s a quick tutorial video that shows you how your files are stored and shared.
An updated tutorial video on how Whiteboards work
As part of our continuing series, we have produced an updated tutorial video on how Whiteboards work in Kerika, both as standalone project boards, and when attached to cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards:
Embedding a Twitter feed in a Kerika Whiteboard
Here’s a feature that we suspect most people probably don’t know about: you can embed a live Twitter feed on any Kerika Whiteboard.
While working on a Whiteboard, click on the Add Web Content button that appears in the left-hand toolbar, towards the bottom:
You can reference Twitter feeds with a simple “@” symbol: you can add Kerika’s Twitter feed just by typing in “@Kerika”.
The Twitter feed appears as a live object on your Whiteboard:
You might find it convenient to rename the URL to something more descriptive: you can do this by selecting the object and using the right-mouse button to get this menu:
Showing the names of documents when they are referenced inside Kerika
We added a feature recently (or did we actually a bug?) for our direct login users: when you reference a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, canvas or board, from another place in Kerika — e.g. another card’s details or chat — we now show the file’s name instead of just the URL.
This makes it easier to cross-reference file attachments from within different Kerika cards or boards, where different work items or conversations refer to the same shared file.
Here’s an example:
We have added support for Google Team Drive
We have long had a deep, excellent integration with Google Apps: you can sign up with your Google ID and have all your Kerika-related files stored in your own Google Drive, where you can access them independently of the Kerika app.
We are now taking that one step forward, with seamless integration with Google Team Drive.
Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.
Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.
Team Drives is available on G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business, or G Suite for Education editions.
You don’t need to do anything different: the integration is built-in with the latest version of Kerika (and, since we are software-as-a-service, everyone always uses the latest version of our product!) and the integration is seamless.
Managing multiple versions of files just got a lot easier
With our latest update we have made it much easier to manage different versions of files, across all your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards.
(This was inspired by our recent fix to a bug that didn’t properly download the latest version of a file attached to a card or canvas; while fixing this we started thinking deeper about how to make file management even easier for our users.)
Here’s how file management works now: when you hover your mouse over a file attachment, a new action called +NEW VERSION is available:
Clicking on the +NEW VERSION button will let you pick any file from your computer that’s of the same type, and Kerika will add that and track the file as a new version of your old attachment.
This is possible even if the new file has a different name altogether, as long as the two files are of the same type.
For example, a filed called Budget.xlsx can get a new version that’s called Plans.xlsx — both are tracked as different versions of the same file, even though they had different names.
This makes it even easier to manage all your files using Kerika!
Bug, fixed: downloading the latest version of a document, for direct sign up users
Thanks to our users at Oxbow Farm, we have found and fixed a bug that affected users who signed up directly with Kerika: clicking on an attachment in the card details was downloading the original version of a file, not the latest.
Here’s what was happening: when you add a file to a card or canvas, Kerika checks to see if that file was already being used on that particular card or canvas. If so, Kerika automatically handles your latest upload as providing a new version of the old file, so you see just one entry in your card attachments view:
The bug that we recently discovered, and fixed, resulted in Kerika downloading the original version of the file when you used the download option that appears after you select an attachment from the list of attachments on a card.
If you clicked on the attachment’s thumbnail to open a preview of the file, Kerika was correctly opening the latest version of the file. The bug was only in the download action, and that’s been taken care of now.
A bunch of bug fixes
We have been busy through the holiday season, as usual, but there isn’t a lot of stuff to show you yet since the big new thing we are working on — a more automated and efficient account management and billing system — won’t be ready for a while.
Meanwhile, we have been working through bug fixes on a regular basis; many of them obscure and probably unnoticed by anyone but the Kerika team itself, but we don’t like to have known bugs sitting around so we knock off bugs fairly quickly even if no one has complained (yet).
Here are some of the bug fixes we have done recently (in no particular order):
- A problem that affected direct sign up users who wanted to preview their documents, but didn’t allow third-party cookies to be set in their browsers.
- An obscure situation where someone who owned a board, but wasn’t part of the board team, shared it with another user: in some situations the second user didn’t see this board listed correctly in their Shared With Me tab of their Home page.
- Another obscure circumstance in which a board owner’s face wasn’t shown correctly in the Shared With Me tab of other users.
- Helping a user restore access to a board that had gotten corrupted somehow in the database: this wasn’t the user’s fault and we wanted to make sure no work was lost.
- Some improvements to labels used in My Preferences to clarify (better) the user’s choices.
- Fixing at least one situation where someone wanting to sign up with their Google ID (as a Kerika+Google user) was getting endlessly redirected by Google and never reaching Kerika. (For some reason everyone who reported this problem is located in Norway; don’t know why…)
- A problem affecting direct sign up users: they weren’t seeing thumbnails of their files in their Kerika cards and canvases.
- Some situations where a browser left running Kerika overnight didn’t refresh itself automatically the next morning, and required the user to manually refresh the view.
- A bug that kept cards with Critical priority from showing up correctly in the What Needs Attention View.
- Decided to spell “synch” as “sync” in the Calendar dialog, although we still don’t agree that “sync” is a better spelling than “synch”.
- Numerous updates to our website: our product’s functionality keeps expanding so fast that we need to remember to update our website every few months!
Happy New Year!