With our newest update to Kerika, it’s become easier to organize the details of each card (i.e. the card’s description), in multilevel lists, like this:
This is done simply by using the Tab key to create an indented sub-list within an existing numbered list, and using the Back-Tab to “outdent” the list.
This also works with text blocks on canvases.
Here’s one of the weirder bugs we ever fixed: it turns out that there is a tiny grey dot in the middle of every canvas on a Whiteboard.
It’s been there for a while, ever since we introduced some animation to make it easier for people to understand that canvases can be embedded inside cards on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, as well as being used independently on Whiteboards.
But the funny thing is that none of our users, nor anyone on our team, noticed it because too many of us, it seems, eat in front of our computers all too often, so our screens are flecked with little bits of food debris most of the time 🙂
One of our team members finally noticed it after assiduously cleaning his computer screen, and that’s how we discovered there was an HTML element there, with a zero size and absolute position at the center of the canvas (to help with the “exploding” animation effect when a canvas is opened).
Although this element has a height and width of zero, it also has a 1 pixel wide solid grey border, which is used in the animation.
And that’s what appeared as the tiny grey dot in the middle of the screen: one pixel of grey border, not any debris from our lunch.
Did you know that any Kerika canvas, whether on a standalone Whiteboard or attached to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, can be viewed as a regular Web page by folks who have been given access to the board?
Kerika automatically creates a version of your canvas that can be viewed without the Kerika application: you can get this version by using the Project Info dialog, or, more simply, by just changing the “m” in the canvas’s URL to a “c”:
Every Kerika page has a URL of the form “https://kerika.com/m/…”
The URLs are randomly generated and unique: every card, every canvas, every board has a unique URL.
The first part of the URL is always of the form kerika.com/m/… There’s no special reason for using the “m”; it’s just part of Kerika’s history.
But if you change the “m” to a “c”, like in the example above where “https://kerika.com/m/SRXk” becomes “https://kerika.com/c/SRXk”, then you can view the Web page version of the canvas.
In the Web page version there are no buttons or other indications of the Kerika software: it looks and works just like a regular Web page.
Of course, security is not compromised: you cannot view the Web page version of a canvas if you aren’t permitted to access the Kerika canvas itself.
When you copy or cut an item on a Kerika board — a set of cards, or may be some things sitting on a Canvas — these objects are placed in a special Clipboard that sits on the Kerika server, not in your browser.
This is important to note for several reasons:
Here’s all the stuff we built in 2014, as far as we can remember…
January
February
March
April
We pondered integrating with Box. Pondered and pondered…
May
June
We got really serious about integrating with Box…
July
August
September
October
October was a really busy month.
November
December
Most users work on private projects: i.e. projects that are accessible only to people added to the project team.
But some folks find it useful to have their projects viewable by everyone, typically because they are working on nonprofit causes, like WIKISPEED.
WIKISPEED publicizes its projects because it helps attract new volunteers to their cause, and this is actually a pretty smart way for nonprofits to showcase their work.
Kerika has always had an option for people to have all their projects made viewable by the public, but even nonprofits, for example, may have some Kerika boards that they don’t want to share with the rest of the world.
Well, with our newest release, it is possible for the Project Leader (or Account Owner) to make individual projects open to the public to view.
A project can be easily switched from Private to Public, and back again, using the Project Info button that’s available on the top-right of every Kerika board:
The privacy choices are as follows:
When a project is made Public, all the documents contained within it — on all the cards and canvases that make up that board — are also made viewable to the public.
This means, for example, that if your Kerika+Google Whiteboard or Task Board is made available to the public, all the documents in that board’s Google Docs folder are also made viewable by the public.
(And Google indexes all public Google Docs, the project could be found in more than one way, depending upon who is searching for it.)
One caveat: users of premium Google Apps, e.g. Google Apps for Business, cannot make their projects open to the public, because of limitations imposed by Google.
Did you know that you can add a Prezi presentation to your Kerika canvas, just like any other Web content?
Kerika figures out that you are adding a Prezi item, and shows it beautifully in the canvas…
Kerika’s canvases can handle over 250 sources of online content: pictures and videos and more.
Here’s an example of adding an Instagram photo: just add the URL from Instagram like any other URL…
And Kerika figures out how best to show that picture!
You may know already that Kerika’s patented canvases are a great way to share your ideas and content, like drawing process flow diagrams, flowcharts, etc., and these canvases can also include content from your laptop or the Web.
For example, you can drag-and-drop a file from your desktop, and it will get added to your Kerika canvas, and stored and shared automatically with your team members using Box or Google (depending upon whether you are using Kerika+Box or Kerika+Google).
When you add Web content to a canvas, Kerika is pretty smart about figuring out what that URL is that you just provided.
So, for example, Kerika makes it really easy to add a Twitter feed: all you have to do is click on the “+Web Content” button on your canvas toolbar…
You can add a Twitter feed simply by using the user’s Twitter handle, e.g. “@kerika” would give you Kerika’s Twitter feed right on your canvas:
And that’s all it takes!
Kerika has had a “Max Canvas” mode for a while: if you click on the green square button at the top of a task board, your view of the board would expand to take up the full browser space:
This was handy when you wanted to work on just one board: your view of that board filled up the available browser space, and you weren’t distracted by the rest of the Kerika “chrome” (i.e. the application’s menus and buttons).
What we found, however, is that most of our users work on several boards at the same time: they have boards that they created for themselves, e.g. personal Kanban Boards, as well as Kanban and Scrum Boards that their colleagues had created.
So, in reality, most people need to achieve several goals simultaneously:
To make all of this possible at the same time, we have improved our Max Canvas view, by adding a button that makes it easy to switch between different boards (including your Home Board):
To the left of the Max Canvas button is a new Tab Switch button: clicking on it shows you a list of all the currently open Kerika boards, and this lets you quickly switch to another board without having to leave the Max Canvas view.
This view is smart: if a board has unread updates, it’s entry shows up in orange, consistent with how we let you know that you have unread updates anywhere in Kerika.
And if a board has overdue cards, it’s entry shows up in red, as with “Sprint 43” in the example shown above.
The Max Canvas view also has a Search button built into it, so you can do searches without existing the Max Canvas view:
All of this makes the Max Canvas view of Kerika much more useful than it was before, and it’s all part of our grand strategy to make Kerika more useful on iPads!