2023 is wrapping up, but we couldn’t let the year end without another major Codecks update! This is our 8th major release this year.
Hero Cards
Since their introduction in 2020 Hero cards have become a core component of Codecks and with we’re looking to make them even easier to handle.
- Our own game dev team at Maschinen-Mensch has grown to over 20 people (🤯) and we’re seeing hero cards with dozens of sub cards now. With so much going on, it can feel a bit overwhelming. To help manage these, we’ve experimented with different approaches and have found one that works great. From the sub card sidebar you can now group sub cards by different dimensions (Priority, Deck, Owner and Milestone) in addition to being able to lay them out manually as before. Of course, drag’n’drop and quick-add functionality is fully supported. This will let you see at a glance how many sub cards of a hero card were done in each milestone, or how the effort is distributed across different people or work areas.
- When creating a new card, you can select its hero card right away without having to save the card first.
- The hero badge shown on top of an opened card now shows the overall hero card progress bar too.
- We added the hero card ID and title to the time tracking report.
Table View
We love cards! But when you’re dealing with large decks containing several hundred cards (your bug deck 😭) sometimes a super-streamlined view that allows you to quickly scan lots of cards would be nice. That’s why we’re introducing Table View for our Pro Plan!
Find the new view option in the sort panel to the left. The table view supports all the swimlanes and drag’n’drop feature that you already love. Using the ⭐ button you can also set this view as the default view for decks.
This has been suggested on our lovely discord server by Junuh and Wattosan. Thank you!
You ask, we deliver! Most of these new features in this release are the direct result of conversations with our discord community. 💜
🚀 Card Quick Settings
The new Quick Settings panel allows you to change multiple card properties with just a few keystrokes. Trigger it by simply clicking the effort icon on any card and use the arrow keys to effortlessly update priority, effort, deck, milestone, or owner of a card.
Pending changes will be marked with a dot next to the property tab. Pressing return will commit your changes to the card. Pressing Esc closes the panel without any changes.
Redesigned Text Editor
In our quest to enhance your writing experience, we’ve completely rewritten our text editor. This allows us to bring you a bouquet of new features.
Our smarter completions for lists or block quotes will save you time, and the ability to indent with tab / shift + tab makes structuring your thoughts a lot easier. The new monospaced font offers more clarity in recognizing indentation levels, too. We’ve also added slash commands (type /) and a floating action bar, to make our editor and markdown features more discoverable.
Can never get the card editor size perfect on your screen? Regular mode is too small, wide mode too wide? Now you can freely resize the card editor!
We have spent the last weeks completely revamping our whole text editor. The resizable window is just a first glimpse at the new capabilities that we’ll be sharing very soon cough focus mode cough.
Here are all the changes for this release:
Flexible Wide Mode
You can now drag the container for an opened a card (or journey step) to your preferred width. 🤯 This width is remembered on your browser, so you can use different settings if you use Codecks across multiple computers with different displays.
Milestone Overview
The calendar has gotten a big extension! It now offers an “Overview” button which allows you to inspect and compare high level stats over all your milestones.
You can reach the calendar via the expand icon at the top right of the timeline within the Milestones tab.
The overview offers to either use card count or effort as your metric. You’ll find the distribution of completed vs uncompleted work across priorities and owners.
This will be a big assistance in making milestones more comparable and thus more plannable.
Hold onto your hats folks! We’re back from GDC and we bring you some exciting changes to Codecks!
Import CSV
We’ve made it easier than ever to jump onboard with our new CSV import functionality. Say goodbye to the headaches of switching between project management tools, because now you can import your projects straight from any tool that supports CSV exporting. You may of course also access our existing Trello and HacknPlan import tools.
And there’s more! Re-import a CSV that is based on an export of your Codecks cards, to update the data of these cards in place. This could be used to perform complex updates using spreadsheets.
Happy new year, dear Codecks users! We’re excited to see the games and projects you’ll be releasing in 2023. To help you with that, we have a biiig update ready for you to use.
Organize cards with Zones
When you have a lot of cards inside a milestone or deck, it can be hard to maintain a clear overview, even with the various sorting options that are already available. In this release, we’re adding “Zones”: they are custom card groups that you can add when you’re in the “Manual” sorting order. Zones are shared across the whole team.
Default Inbox Decks
Every user can now set a default inbox deck: when creating a new card from the Hand or Milestones tab, this deck will be automatically pre-selected. You can pick your default inbox deck in the the top bar of an opened deck. Hovering over the button will also show you who else is currently using this deck as default inbox.
You might use this to default your cards towards a specific work deck that you tend to work in (e.g. the “Code” deck if you’re a programmer). Or you might use it to default your new cards towards a project inbox from where they are then moved into fitting decks.
Doc Cards
A lot of us are using Codecks to not only track tasks, but also game design documents and other reference material. With $-links and backlinks you can already build pretty complex wiki structures. To support this use case even more, we’re adding a new card type: Doc Cards.
Turn any card into a doc by clicking the new Doc icon on the bottom right side of an opened card (or use the bulk action bar to convert multiple cards in one step). A Doc Card is like a regular card but does not have workflow states, priority, or effort. This means no more accidentally setting document content to done and archiving it.
