Tag Archives: Whiteboard

About Kerika’s Whiteboards and Canvases.

A major new release: snapshots of pages within pages!

Kerika, Technology, Usability

The latest version of Kerika, hot off the presses, contains our biggest innovation yet: if you have pages contained within pages, these will now show up as small snapshots.

Here’s an example of a set of projects, as viewed from the My Projects page of an Account:

A thumbnail view of a project page
A thumbnail view of a project page

Projects can now be viewed as little thumbnails: this lets you see, at a glance, what’s inside a particular project!

This feature extends all the way inside a project that consists of a series of nested pages. Take, for example, the Product Management page shown above: if you open it up, you will see that it contains some sub-projects within it, and these sub-projects – which have their own pages – can also be viewed as thumbnails:

A subproject also shows up as a thumbnail
A subproject also shows up as a thumbnail

This feature is probably the coolest innovation ever! It took a really long time for us to build, since we were working on this while doing all the other usability improvements, bug fixes and new features we have delivered over the past few months, and we think it will improve the overall usability of Kerika in a very big way.

There are all sorts of side-benefits to this feature:

  • Now, you can upload a snapshot of the project to LinkedIn and Facebook along with your comments; the picture will contain a live link to your project.
  • We have made it possible for you to embed a snapshot of a Kerika page in your own website or blog, using the Share! button that’s now more powerful than ever.

These snapshots of pages are automatically updated whenever a member of your project team makes a change to the project: we wait a couple of minutes after the last change has been made before producing a new snapshot to avoids sending you a flurry of new images.

There are also two new ways for you to embed either a Kerika page, which you can use as a regular website page, or the entire Kerika application, in your own website or blog. (This is a big enough topic to deserve it’s own blog post.)

And there’s more to our latest version!

  • You can see the page URL of any project at any time (unless you are using Internet Explorer which continues to lag in its support for the HTML5 standard.)
  • When you upload documents to a project page, they are now stored in your own Google Docs account, not the Google Docs account of the Project Leader. This is a big change, but one that was necessary to allow the use of the same document in multiple projects. Previously, we passed ownership of the document to the Project Leader, but this meant that ownership could pass through several people’s hands if the same document was used in multiple projects.
  • The browser’s Back button (and the keyboard backspace key) work now! Yeah, it took us a while to get this working, but there were some serious hurdles that we had to overcome first, relating to the way different browsers support HTML5. More on this in a subsequent blog post.
  • We have added a new diamond shape to help you draw flowcharts. We are not keen to add a lot of shapes; we want to keep the Kerika user interface clean and uncluttered, but we felt that a diamond shape could really help with flowcharts so we have added our first new shape in six months!
  • Pages now automatically refresh if the application detects that there was a problem connecting to the server. The old dialog box that used to pop-up asking you to refresh your browser – which we found as annoying as you did – has gone away.
  • You can now add a Twitter feed to a page by just providing “@name” as the URL. Adding Twitter feeds to Kerika pages is becoming more popular with our users, so we made the process of using the Magic Plus button simpler: just enter “@kerika”, for example, when you use the Magic Plus button to add content from the Internet and you will get our Twitter feed added to your Kerika page.
  • Speaking of which, the Magic Plus button got even more magicky: now you can add content from dozens of third-party sources to a Kerika page. (You can see a handful of them listed on our website, but don’t be shy: just add any kind of URL and see if Kerika can’t automagically figure out how best to show it on your project pages.)

We also spent some time improving our text blocks, after seeing just how popular this feature was becoming with our users:

  • We have better icons for the buttons; the old ones weren’t as intuitive as they could have been.
  • We have added a new background fill color so that you can have even fancier text blocks.
The text block feature has better buttons and a new background fill color capability
The text block feature has better buttons and a new background fill color capability

We have done a ton of usability improvements and bug fixes, as usual, and we will continue to do so in the future…

  • One usability improvement was to “undo” a previous improvement: we had made a change in our last version that we thought was a good idea, but it turned out that everyone liked it, even us, so we have taken that out. Now, when you resize an item on your page using the grab handles, the item resizes in just one direction rather than in all directions.
  • We made it easier to add large (high-resolution) pictures to your Kerika pages. Previously, high-res pictures would appear initially with full resolution and crowd out everything on the canvas. Now, pictures appear with a maximum initial size of 640×480 pixels, and you can, of course, resize it to be larger if you like.

Finally, we have revamped our website completely and would love to get your feedback. We are featuring sample projects on our home page, and the Example pages.

We want to feature your work on our site! Create projects that are open to the public, that show your skills and share your knowledge, that related to open-source, advocacy, political action, interests in hobbies and sports… It’s all good.

Kerika adds Social Media Links

Technology

Finally… yes, we know we should have done this a while ago, but we were busy making the core Kerika software more robust and polishing away some of the usability friction that users had reported, but now we have done it: we added social media links to Kerika!

The old “Share!” button at the top of the Kerika UI is still there:

The Share! button
The Share! button is on the toolbar, just above the canvas

Clicking on this button brings up a whole bunch of new possibilities:

The Share! options for a project that's open to the public
The Share! options for a project that's open to the public

The first option, from the left, is the “People” action: you can use the Share! button to quickly add people to your project team. (This is an alternative to using the Team button to manage your project teams.) Here’s how you can add people using the Share! button:

Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team
Using the Share! button to add someone to the project team

You can also use the Share! dialog to:

  • Post to your Facebook wall
  • Tweet about your project. (Your tweet will include a link to the project page.)
  • Post it as an update to your LinkedIn profile page. (That will include a link to the project page as well.)
  • Share it with your Google circles by doing a Google +1 on the page.

And, you can simply grab the URL of the page it you want to share it with someone:

Grab the URL for your project page
Grab the URL for your project page

And, finally, you can email a friend or coworker about the project, and include a link to the page in your email message.

There’s more to come: in the near future we will be making it possible for you to embed a picture of your project page in your own website or blog!

Our latest version, and then some!

Kerika, Technology, Usability,

In the immortal words of Jim Anchower: “Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya.”

Our apologies for not posting blog entries for a while, but we have the usual excuse for that, and this time it’s true: “We’ve been incredibly busy building great software!” It’s going to be hard to summarize all the work that we have done since June, but let’s give it a shot:

  1. We have curved lines now. And not just any old curved lines, but the most flexible and easy to use drawing program that you are likely to encounter anywhere. You can take a line and bend it in as many ways as you like, and – this is the kicker – straighten it out as easily as you bent it in the first place. There’s a quick demo video on YouTube that you should check out.
  2. We have greatly improved the text blocks feature of Kerika. The toolbar looks better on all browsers now (Safari and Chrome used to make it look all scrunched up before), and we have added some cool features like using it to add an image to your Kerika page that’s a link to another website. (So you could, for example, add a logo for a company to your Kerika page and have that be a link to your company’s website.) Check out the nifty tutorial on YouTube on text blocks.
  3. You can set your styling preferences: colors, fonts, lines, etc. Previously, all the drawing you did on your Kerika pages was with just one set of colors, fonts, etc., but now you can set your own styling preferences, with a new button, and also adjust the appearance of individual items.
  4. We have improved the whole Invitations & Requests process. Now, when you invite people to join your projects, the emails that get sent out are much better looking and much more helpful, and the same goes for requests that come to you from people who want to join your projects, or change their roles in your projects. Check out this quick tutorial on how invitations and requests work.
  5. We have made it easier for you to personalize your Account. You can add a picture and your own company logo, which means that when you use Kerika your users see your logo, not ours! Check out this quick tutorial on how to personalize your Account.
  6. We have hugely increased the kinds of third-party content you can embed on your Kerika pages. The list is so long, we really should put that in a separate blog post. We have gone way beyond YouTube videos now; we are talking about all the major video sites (Vimeo, etc.), Hulu, Google Maps, Scribd and Slideshare… The mind boggles.
  7. Full screen view of projects. There’s a little button now, at the top-right corner of the Kerika canvas: click on it and you will go into full-screen mode, where the canvas takes up all the space and all the toolbars disappear. This makes it easy to surf pages that contain lots of content, or work more easily with your Google Docs.
  8. Full support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). Not as easy as you might think, given that Microsoft has historically gone their own way, but we have sweated the details and now Kerika works great with IE9. As Microsoft continues to converge around common standards, this should get easier for us over time.
  9. Full support for all desktop platforms. OK, so this isn’t really a new feature, but since we are bragging we might as well emphasize that Kerika works, and is tested, to work identically on Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7, Mac OSX and Linux.
  10. Literally hundreds of usability improvements. Yeah, okay, we should have gotten it all right in the first place, but our focus over the past few months has been very much on working directly with our early adopters, observing them use the product, and noting all the tiny friction points that we could improve upon. We are not saying that we have all the friction removed, we are just bragging about the hundreds of tweaks we have made in the past 3 months.

Since June, we have had two major releases: one at the end of July that had nearly 150 bug fixes and usability improvements, and one this week, with over 120 bug fixes and usability improvements.

The product is now in great shape from an infrastructure perspective: the core software has been well debugged and is now very robust. Performance is great: you should get sub-second responsiveness when working in an environment with decent broadband wireless, where you see updates to your project pages in less than one second after a team member makes a change. (We test this with users in Seattle and India working simultaneously on the same project.)

Having this robust infrastructure that’s been well debugged and tuned makes it easy for us to add new features. In the coming weeks, look for more social media hooks, a revamped website, an extensive collection of public projects (that you can use as templates for your own work), and more. Much more. After all, if “less is more”, just think how much more “more” could be 😉