Tag Archives: Whiteboard

About Kerika’s Whiteboards and Canvases.

We have added support for Google Team Drive

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , , , ,

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

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , , ,

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:

Uploading new version of document
Uploading new version of document

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

Bug Fixes, Technology, ,

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

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):

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Another obscure circumstance in which a board owner’s face wasn’t shown correctly in the Shared With Me tab of other users.
  4. 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.
  5. Some improvements to labels used in My Preferences to clarify (better) the user’s choices.
  6. 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…)
  7. A problem affecting direct sign up users: they weren’t seeing thumbnails of their files in their Kerika cards and canvases.
  8. 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.
  9. A bug that kept cards with Critical priority from showing up correctly in the What Needs Attention View.
  10. Decided to spell “synch” as “sync” in the Calendar dialog, although we still don’t agree that “sync” is a better spelling than “synch”.
  11. 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!

It’s easier to change lines and arrows on Canvases

Usability,

If you are working with Kerika’s unique Whiteboards, you will appreciate a new feature we have added: you can select any existing line or arrow on a canvas and change it to a different style of line or arrow.

We had previously added similar functionality for changing a shape from one form to another, e.g. a rectangle to an ellipse, while preserving all the other properties and content of that shape; now this is possible with lines and arrows as well.

Usability tweak: reordering Board Attachments

Agile & Scrum, Technology, , , ,

We have made it easier for you to re-organize all the Board Attachments on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can grab any of these and drag up or down the list to re-order them:

Drag handles on board attachments
Drag handles on board attachments

Use the drag-handle shown on the left edge of the attachment to drag it up or down.

Dragging board attachments
Dragging board attachments

(And, by the way, this feature is also available for Card Attachments.)

More options to add Google files to your Whiteboards

Technology, Usability, ,

We have added more options for you to add Google files to your Whiteboards.

We used to have a quick way to create, name, and add a new Google Doc to your Whiteboard:

Old options for adding content
Old options for adding content

As part of our big redesign earlier this year, we added more options for people to create Google documents from within Task Boards and Scrum Boards; now we have the same flexibility for Whiteboards:

Google document options
Google document options

With this new functionality you can create a larger variety of Google Documents from within your Kerika Whiteboards:

  • Google Docs
  • Google Sheets
  • Google Slides
  • Google Forms

After you name your new document, it is automatically added to the canvas you are working on, while the new document itself is opened in a new browser tab for you to start working on.

Enjoy.

Updating the look-and-feel of our Whiteboards

Technology, Usability,

Something that we didn’t finish as part of our year-long redesign of Task Boards and Scrum Boards: moving to Material Design-style icons and dialog box layouts for our Whiteboards.

Well, we are caught up now: the Whiteboard toolbars and dialog boxes have been redesigned to be conformant with Material Design guidelines.

The basic toolbars for Whiteboards used to look like this:

Old Canvas toolbar
Old Canvas Toolbar

This is how it looks now:

New Canvas toolbar
New Canvas toolbar

The old table formatting toolbar used to look like this:

Old Table toolbar
Old Table toolbar

Now this looks cleaner and more modern:

New Table toolbar
New Table toolbar

The larger icons and buttons make for a more touch-friendly user interface as well.

Bug, fixed: handling situations where drag-and-drop of content won’t work

Technology, Usability,

The easiest way to attach files to a Kerika card, canvas or board is to simply drag and drop it onto Kerika, like this:

Dragging and dropping files onto cards
Dragging and dropping files onto cards

This works with nearly all kinds of files, but we sometimes hit a limitation, like we discovered when a user tried dragging and dropping an email directly from his Outlook onto Kerika.

This operation used to fail, but in a confusing way: Kerika made it look like it was possible to drop the email onto a card, but the email never showed up.

We have fixed this by checking the kind of content that someone is trying to drop onto Kerika, and if the content isn’t something that can be directly dropped, we don’t show the “drop zone”: the yellow area in the image above that encourages you to drop something onto a card.

And, by the way, if you need to attach an email to a Kerika file, here’s a good workaround: first drag and drop the file onto your computer’s desktop.  That will create a regular file out of the email, which you can then drop onto Kerika.