Changelog

Quick fix: consistent validation for adding and editing project tags. . is now a valid a tag constituent.

• new tutorial project for new users
• nicer loading animations for not yet loaded mini cards and for card detail view
• clicking on milestones wihtin the calendar lets you edit them

A new release with plenty of improvements!

All new milestone inspector

The old way of browsing and inspecting your next milestones always felt a bit clunky.
So we thought of something new!

You now are able to visualise your milestones in a simple time line. A much nicer representation of time. This also gave us enough room for displaying all the cards of a milestone below.

You can access the old calendar view from your deck library.

More features and fixes

• 30% less javascript loaded to open a url for a card - resulting in a faster load time
• Nicer looks of the search panel
• you now can attach a file to a card by dragging the file onto the mini card
• conversation notification emails will now actually be sent within 10 minutes
• much less jank with those sticky boxes while scrolling
• restyled settings panels and much nicer design for the subscriptions tab
• should you not be able to connect to the server or should the app crash, we’ll let you know
• and a lot more

• Make IE useable again!
• Reopen websocket for real time updates once they’ve been closed by a (typically) 60 minute timeout

Such excite! After almost 2 years of work, we’re very happy to finally be able to release Codecks to the public.

Here’s the last batch of changes:

Fancy Metrics

Micha, our designer, is definitely worth the little money we pay him! The charts and graphs now are a lot nicer to look at!

Move user invite into user management

One less button on the dashboard by moving user invitation to a place where it makes just as much sense.

You’ll be receiving an email shortly to celebrate the moment. 🎊

Account Dashboard

• Much prettier and hopefully more useful project tiles!
• Put projects and user activity view side by side (given your screen is big enough)
• User activity entries are now grouped by user and time intervals
• Card title within the activity entries are colour coded by a card’s current state

Others

• A lot of confirmation messages got a unified UI and are shown as blue overlay messages in the bottom left.
• Deck and milestone inspector got a prettier header
• Prettify the deck selector when moving cards to a different deck
• When performing a search, the active search pills is shown directly on the card panel, not in the header
• Milestone calender got a fresh look as well 🍸

• Optimistic updates: certain actions like creating and updating cards and decks should feel quicker, since we now don’t always wait for the server to send us all the data. This also means that dismissing notifications now should be a more pleasant affair!
• Redesigned the search box to show up in an overlay rather than a panel to get rid of some glitches related to scrollbars. A more polished design is already prepared by Micha, so stay tuned!
• Metrics: The burndown chart and cumulative flow diagram now are always up to date and you won’t need to wait up to 6 hours no more.
• The milestone overview now moved to the left and is collapsible. We’re also very excited about much broader changes to the milestone section. More on that soon!
• The color extraction algorithm now prefers colourful colours over gray and especially white! 🌈

• Improved layout and copy within your subscription settings
• Welcome messages for new accounts
• Improved copy of invoices
• Bug fix: Notifications didn’t open the corresponding card when in deck library
• Don’t unsnooze card if you move it to a different deck or assign milestone

The Big One

Oooof. No, we weren’t sleeping on the job (well, not all the time) – we were just doing a lot of behind the scenes work to prepare our release 1.0 (public) 😱 which is now a matter of a few weeks.

Subscriptions

tl;dr subscriptions are not live yet, but most of the code necessary is implemented, still needing some design tweaks

The bulk of the work we did was implementing all the subscription and payment related code. It was a mammoth task, and we’re relieved that it’s finally in.

We’ve already spoken about how our subscription model will work and if you missed it take a look at our post on this topic. We’ll also have a complete FAQ on this very soon.

As admin of an account you can find all necessary information in the header bar of the account dashboard with some extra information on hover.

Oh, and as a sign of our appreciation, all beta users will start off with a gift of €100 🎁

Just to be crystal clear: we’re still a few weeks aways from release 1.0 and until that happens nothing will be charged against your starting gift credits.

Media Library

We introduced a media library so you can manage all your uploaded attachments. You can access it from your Deck Library (click on the paperclip icon). Note that we also moved the Conversations view in there as well.

With a storage allowance of 1GB/user, it’s unlikely you will hit your limit anytime soon but should you ever want to make space the media library is the way to do some housekeeping on your files. As a side note, we plan to increase storage allowance in the future.

Digest and Conversation Mails

Any unseen comment made in a thread in which you are participating will result in a mail sent to you. We’ve added some thresholds to prevent spamming you too much and batch several messages posted within a short amount of time.

Moreover we’ll send you a digest email once a day should you have some unseen notifcations from the last 24 hours.

Both types of mail can be disabled from within your user profile. Please let us know how we could improve both these emails.

Improved User Management

We made some design and functionality changes to improve user management. This should make it easier to manage larger teams. And as admin you can now disable or delete users from your account. Bread and butter stuff to manage your costs.

Bits and Bobs

• You might have noticed that you were logged out. This is not a bug. We rewrote our authentication logic to e.g. be able to cancel any active session in case you request it, and do more advanced stuff in the future.
• We remember your preferred card ordering accross sessions. We’ve now increased the granularity by remembering your preferences per deck, rather than one order for all decks
• The slide in menu activated via the joystick icon looks more… dapper?
• You can now delete your account. Yes, you can say goodbye for good. Yes it will break our hearts but that’s ok :)
• The milestone icon (small diamond) shown on mini-cards had become too much visual noise. So now we only show the icon if the milestone attached to a card does NOT match the milestone attached to a deck. This also means that we do not show it in the milestone view (since all cards have the same unique milestone).
• Less auto-scrolling. We’re still not quite satisfied, and we will find a really nice solution at some point!

Right. With such a big update we might have let some bugs slip through, please let us know if that happens.

Back to work!

Small release while were fiddling with subscriptions and VAT and all that jazz in the background:

• Newsletter Option: Newsletters! Newsletters! Everyone loves Newsletters. Everyone should get newsletters! We’ve tried to come up with the most attention grabbing ways to grab your attention for you to subscribe to our newsletter love. Go ahead. You know we need you to need it!
• Some subtle fixes to get rid of exceptions when clicking on the wrong areas within a card 🤓
• Clicking on card content to edit the card will put your edit cursor to the end of that paragraph (again).

✨💖 Emoji support 💖✨

Were people ever able to communicate properly without them? We don’t think so. This is why you now can use emojis for cards, decks and comments. Just hit : and type to select all those emoji you’ve always wanted 🍭

This change also led to a complete rewrite of the content edit area. Tags, and mentions and card references now have nice highligting. Thank you Draft.js 🙂

Conversation view

When on your hand you can find a new button in the action strip to the left. This toggles the Conversation view which allows you to see all currently ongoing conversations within your project. Grouped by thread type (blocked, review, comment) and separately listing all conversations you are involved in.

• fixed bug which prevented dismissing some notifications
• adding cofirmation messages when moving cards away from their current context

• Cards in decks can now be ordered by changes. This will give you a more detailed overview of which changes hide behind your undismissed notifications. If you click on a deck notification (the one that contains changes for several cards), this “order by” option will be temporarily enable until all changes are dismissed.
• Projects can now be archived or deleted.
• People that got invited to one of your accounts now receive clearer instructions for what their “name” is useful for.

• preparations for daily digest mails (i.e. right now they are only sent to Manu and Daniel so we can tweak them)
• groundwork for much more granularity for your settings. Soon you’ll be able to set account-wide settings, overwrite those for specific projects and even set user-sepecific ones (like e.g. color blind mode).

Milestones for cards

This is quite a big one!

• Single cards now can have a milestone. Set them via the card’s side panel, bulk selection action or drag them into a deck with a milestone
• Decks still can be associated with a milestones. This will automatically assign the deck’s milestone to all cards within this deck (and all cards created in or moved into this deck)
• Milestone inspector: when clicking on a milestone in the calendar, a milestone inspector will open showing all cards associated with this milestone
• added “order by milestone” option as well as expanded search to include milestones

More stuff

• (hopefully) improved scrolling behaviour when closing cards, jumping to decks etc.
• pin your favourite milestone directly from the header
• and more stuff I better not mention here (like bugs, ugh!)

New release versioning system.

Major version, minor version and patch version didn’t make too much sense in this context. So let’s just go with a Major version (0 = closed beta, 1 = post closed beta) and a minor version incrementing for each new release.

Quality of life features

• power to the tags! The # symbol in the action strip now allows you to select cards by tag.
• we’ve rethought the workflow area on the card detail view. Featuring less wasted space and less clicks. Also being less explicit about naming the card’s current status. Let’s see how this works out in practise!
• quick move your cards into another deck. Just hit the “Move” button at the top of a card detail view

Order your decks via drag’n’drop

• Before: first show subscribed decks, then sort the rest alphabetically
• After: DIY ordering! Move decks around the way you like it. This order is specific to you, i.e. everyone in your team can create their own order.

• Shortcuts! You can see which one are available by either clicking the bottom left button or hitting ? on your keyboard. (Hint: most shortcuts are currently available when inspecting a card)
• using nicely styled confirm boxes when deleting cards or decks
• those sticky boxes that stay where they are when scrolling should be much more robust. (Thank you Mr. MutationObserver)
• deleting milestones now mean they are deleted everywhere

Quickfix: make sure tutorial items can be checked.
(i.e our extended markdown syntax now supports checkboxes in numbered list via 1. [] do this first)

Getting ready for the CLOSED BETA!

• fixed some search issues
• cleaned up the dashboard
• using the same hamburger-based navigation everywhere, now with a joystick icon

Polishing time

• beautiful decks
• you can now drag all cards into the deck tab to (re-) assign it to a deck
• improved menu (the one opened via the hamburger icon). This one should hopefully be more usable!
• Much more polished project settings screen. Split up into two sub-categories. More to come!
• and lot’s more

Notification improvements

New logic for conversation notifications:

• once you write a comment the notification bubble disappears
• all conversation notifications are now dismissable!
• once all notifications are dismissed by everyone, even though the conversation was not closed, it enters a snoozing state.
• after 36 hours of snoozing, all participants receive a notification to do something about this conversation

Group “watch notifications” by deck:

• Once you receive more than one notification for a deck you’re subscribed to, they will be grouped in one convenient notification bubble, to allow for a quick overview and easy dismissal.

Bulk selection

Here comes mouse click killer number 1! Select single cards or even whole swimlanes or even multiple cards in multiple rows! (hint: try and use shift!). Modify them! All at once!
Wow.

New navigation layout

Spacy! We felt the new approach reveals our navigation logic a whole lot better. Plus having a header helped a lot in creating a more game-like HUD feeling. Let us know how you like it!

Minor fixes

• Milestones now can have arbirary long titles. Down with the 4 character limit!
• searching by status now returns the correct results
• when creating new cards or editing existing ones, the textarea now looks much more like a textarea
• and actually quite a lot more of small fixes found via user tests from last week

Bug-Fix

Submitting a comment should work properly again

Metrics

Party hat time!

This is the first iteration on offering a first set of pretty graphs and metrics to help you understand the state of your project.

You can access metrics from the sidebar from either your hand, the deck library or the deck inspector. The resulting metrics will be scoped to its context and can be filtered down even more by using the search.

Each chart features a question mark which should be a good start for helping you to understand what messages could be extracted!

Minor Fixes

• when the checkbox “create new card after this one” is active, the next card keeps effort, priority, owner and tags of the previous card as initial values
• smoothing out some rough edges around card content editing

Minor things

• saner dismiss mechanism for notifications
• adding back “add cards to hand” button for search

Search Integration

rather than putting search on a separate screen, the search panel is now located within it’s context.

• to trigger the search, click on the corresponding icon in the top right, or hit the / button
• you close the search panel by hitting esc or clicking the close button (hint: you won’t lose your search results when closing the panel.)

Minor Fixes

• Access control picker for managing guest access now also shows up on Firefox
• Show a loader before app is fully loaded
• Subtle fixes for the swimlane headers

• Junk food time! To open the menu from within a project, you’ll find a hamburger icon instead of our logo. This should be a much better fit to match people’s expectations. This is not to say we’re done with our navigation. It’s still something we feel can be much improved, so stay tuned!
• New drop-zones for moving cards from the hand to a deck or moving cards from a deck to the hand. Now with much less confusing overlaps!

Introducing guest access

• when inviting new users you can assign them to one of these roles: admin, staff and guest.
• admins and staff have access to all the projects whereas guests can only see and work with the projects you explicitely gave them access to.
• these roles and project access settings can be changed anytime by admins via the manage users section from the home page

Minor fixes

• cards won’t snooze if comments were made recently
• fixed glitchy interface for adding people to a new conversations via the + button

Notifications

We’ve made some important changes to notifications, one of which may force you to unlearn a bad pattern we had introduced…:

• clicking on the round icon to dismiss the notification was a weird interaction. The icon tends to be the place where the mouse first goes and the most likely intent is to open the card, rather than dismissing the notification. So we swapped the click zones: clicking on the icon opens the card, clicking on the info text dismisses it
• new type of notification: we’ll now let you know if a conversations started on a card you are observing. (before you only got a notification if you were added as participant in the conversation, now you’ll always get a notification!)
• conversation notifications always show the beginning of the latest comment. This should help you remembering what’s going on, without having to open the card.
• more graceful animation for when you get rid of all notifications within one category
• blocked state is now denoted via a ! symbol, reviews via ?. This is more consistent with the icons we use in our workflow, and it feels really nice to be able to easily differentiate them when they are sitting in the queue.
• clicking on a converation sends you straight to the relevant conversation or history entry

Smaller fixes

• allow horizontal scrolling if necessary, especially useful for small screens
• save cards/card content changes via ctrl/cmd+enter
• cancel edit mode of a card is now much easier (clicking outside the edit window/hitting esc)
• when attempting to edit the contents of the cards, you don’t have to aim that carefully anymore: now clicking most of the white area leads you to editing the card. Also the cursor is now placed at the end of the clicked paragraph.

One more thing

• authentication to our discussion board got much simpler. Once you’re logged in to codecks, you’ll be able to use the board without having to create an additional account.

• clicking on card id results in copying card’s URL to clipboard (rather than just the id)
• pasting full card URL into another card’s content results in displaying the short form
• hovering over such a reference opens a preview, clicking it sends you to the card (you can use the browser back button to get back to the original card)
• adding basic autocomplete for cards when typing $<something> into card content

• improved look and feel of attachment panel
• now retina screens get what they deserve: crisp attachment previews
• improved support for .svg images in attachments
• uploading files with very long or strange file names won’t cause any more issues for the preview

Revamped history and conversation panels

• OMG! So much hawtness!
• But it’s not just looks. Scanning card history is much easier, with a cleaner, less cluttered look.
• Closed threads now stay in the conversation panel. The opening and closing events are still registered in the history panel in the timeline.
• Header filters enable you to restrict your focus on a certain type of change or thread. You can also see at a glance how many times a card has been under review or blocked.
• When closing a thread, you are prompted to mark a card as done or update the card content to capture the outcome of a thread. Yes. We. Did.
• Next-up: updating the attachment panel with this new look.

minor fix

• after card content was changed via clicking on a todo-checkbox, editing this card will now result in updating the correct version of the card content

• restyle deck inspector header
• improve error logging
• fix exception when receiving new notification in real time

• much improved milestone picker for decks.
• more consistent styling of the side bar buttons in the card detail view
• soften hard-coded assignment notification icon

• sharpening the axe: the asset build chain should now be state of the art. This should result in faster load times due to better caching strategies.
• user names containing a - are now fully supported.
• changes on attachments will be notified instantly (did only work on browser reload before)
• conversations notification now contain the face of the creator (unless there are unseen comments inside – then you see the faces of these commenters)

• bug fix: if you edited a card twice without closing it, you saw stale content

Notification queue

• If one of the categories (e.g. cards you own) is empty, it will disappear. Out of sight, out of mind, and inbox zero achieved!
• Tweaked styling of categories to make it more obvious how they are grouped, and better distinguish a category from an actual notification
• Card title moved to top of notification message
• Improved utility of comment / review / blocked notifications: you can now e.g. distinguish who made the last comment(s), as well as how old an open thread is

Tell us what you think! There will ne more tweaking to come.

Card commenting

• Made some styling changes (pruttier) and reclaimed some space so that there’s more breathing room for text
• More to come, as the design is still a bit too busy and boxy :)

Other stuff

• Quite some work got done on cards from the visual offenses deck. You may not notice it, but Donald Trump has lost some weight!

Bug fixes

• user auto-complete on cards is fixed

• fix breaking home page when tags are used within comments

Milestones!

• you are now able to create and manage your milestones via the button in the action strip
• there are two types of milestones: project specific and global ones
• within the decks panel you can add milestones to a deck
• you’re also able to pin/highlight a milestone for yourself such that it’s date or a countdown is right in your face within the action strip

more information can be found in this screencast by Manu!

(also we’ve moved servers, but ideally this shouldn’t have any effect on you!)

• fix deck title edit

• card creation and card edit now look and work similarly. Especially with respect to attachments.
• fix notifications for mentioned users
• nicer icons for unassigned and mentioned notifications
• also show comments within user activity feed

• Notifications won’t be stacked, they are always right in your face, wanting you to act on them. So either put them on your hand, make a comment or dismiss it.
• New wobbly ways to indiciate that there’s an unread comment
• New release message is visible from everywhere now. Should you happen to have the tab still open when the release is happening, codecks will kindly ask you to refresh the page.

• hide occasional scrollbar showing up in textareas in FF
• refine the design of deck bookmarks (those little colourful things that stick out from a deck from time to time) and decks itself (imply size of deck via it’s displayed thickness)
• some small visual and functional glitter thrown arround here and there

• better representation of form state (pending/success)
• allow to edit project tags

• faq fixes
• general overhaul of all those flexboxes leading to a more or less consistent layout accross all major browsers (yes, even IE11!)
• password reset feature
• nicer error messages when failing to log in

• fix layout issues with IE 11 and Safari (and thus also Chrome on iOS)

• add releases page
• notify users of latest release on account’s home page

• add release mechanism
• display current release’s version in footer