Changelog

Here’s some presents from us for some merry holidays:

• Animations: Reworked the underlying animation engine to prevent stuttering animations.
• Archived Cards: Non-done cards that got archived get a dedicated color so they’re easier to differentiate from their non-archived counterparts.
• Attachment Viewer: Now includes the title of the images.
• Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket Integration: You can now mark multiple cards as fixed by including e.g. Fixed $123, $124, $125 as part of your commit message.
• User Management: An updated look and improvements for bigger user lists.

A few fixes for you:

• 1,2,3 shortcuts: The hover-and-hit-a-number feature for updating a card’s priority and effort now also works for the card detail view. To avoid accidental tab navigation, we changed the 1, 2, 3 shortcuts for switching to the Hand, Decks and Milestones tab with Shift+1, Shift+2, Shift+3.
• Time Tracking: Improved behavior when hitting the + and - buttons in the timer widget at the bottom. You can also reset the timer to zero when hitting the - button often enough. (By the way: did you know you can keep the buttons pressed for faster updates?)
• Tooltips: Tooltips that would open close to the bottom of the screen sometimes led to scrollbars appearing. Not any longer!
• Auto Archive: We no longer auto-archive done cards with open comment threads.
• Deck Picker: The cover images disappeared! But we found them and put them back into their place.
• Stability: The last release led to crashes on Safari and Edge Browsers when trying to open overlays, this was fixed.

This release contains all necessary changes to migrate away from our existing CRM provider (Mailchimp) to a self-hosted solution. This means your data will be shared with one service provider less. (Leaving only our payment provider Stripe and our hosting solution.)

Big performance update 🚀🚀🚀

After adding and refining a lot of features, we felt it was time to focus once again on one of our major core values: A snappy and responsive interface. Teams with a lot of cards and decks might have recognized that it might take a second or two to load the deck library in a new tab. Same for opening a deck for the first time.

So we took the time to put our profiling goggles on and to look for all cases in which the browser is doing more work than it should. We found a lot of opportunities for improvements and updated our card, deck, deck library and notification components with performance improvements in mind. We feel it’s been well worth it! Loading up the deck library in a new tab has been sped up by a factor 3 to 4!

Notification updates

Before this update, notifications were generated on the fly, in your browser by checking all relevant card changes. This approach led to some performance issues for projects with a lot of activity. So we improved it significantly by generating notifications on the server instead. This should speed up a lot of interactions that could potentially generate notifications.

But this update did not only improve performance but came with a lot of new features as well:

• Dismiss all: a.k.a. declaring notification bankruptcy 📉. By holding down the dismiss button in one of the three notification groups (cards you own, cards you’re subscribed to, conversations) you can remove all notification at once.
• Snoozing conversations: Previously this notification wouldn’t show up if some conversation participant still had an open notification for this conversation. Not ideal if one of the participants wouldn’t check (and dismiss) their notifications on a regular basis. Now it’s always shown to all participants after some inactivity on the thread.
• Subscribing to cards: You’re automatically subscribed to a card if you’re the card creator or if you’re mentioned on a card. (Yes, we’ll definitely plan on adding an interface to let people know who is subscribed to a card and allowing them to unsubscribe.)
• Notifications for mentions in cards: This is actually more of a bug-fix. Before, you would only receive a notification for being mentioned on a card if you were observing it (via deck or card subscription). Now you’ll always get a notification if you get mentioned in a card’s content.
• Group notifications by milestone & deck: When multiple cards are moved to a new milestone or deck, it’ll generate a single notification pill instead of one notification pill per card.
• Last participant notification: If everyone left a conversation except you, you’ll now get a notification.

Further improvements and fixes

• Owner & deck picker: Will now show reasonable defaults again, based on your history.
• Time tracking widget: Clicking on the card title now opens the card in your current context and doesn’t always jump to the hand.
• Mini cards: Allow to set priority and effort by hovering over the icon and hitting a number from 0-3 or 0-9 respectively.
• Milestone inspector: Switching from one milestone to another doesn’t remove the currently active search filter
• Prop panel: fix layout issue when scrollbar is present
• Card content updates: No more crash when updating content close to an emoji 💥
• Password reset: we added a password reset form on our homepage in case you forgot your organization’s domain name.

Export cards as csv

Once you start selecting cards, you’ll find a download icon in the right part of the selection bar. Here you may pick the desired fields to export and download a csv file right away!

Time Tracking

We’re super stoked to announce that this release introduces time tracking!

Open up the Mission Control and navigate to Organization Settings > General and look towards the bottom for the relevant settings. Time tracking comes in two flavors: Manual mode and Real-time mode.

Manual mode allows you to enter your time manually via a card’s history panel.

The Real-time mode allow you to manually enter your time as well, but comes with a lot more power: it will be tracking your time whenever you start a card.
This basically means, if a card a blue, you’ll be tracking time. To reduce any confusion this also means that a single user can’t have more than a single started card. So you might have to adapt your workflow if you want to activate this feature. But we strongly believe it’s worth it as a blue card will be a strong signal to your team that you are actually currently working on this card.

A timer widget at the bottom of the screen allows you to quickly stop and restart a card that you are currently working on.

Once any of the two time tracking modes is activated, you are able to find a Time Tracking Report in the Mission Control. Here you can inspect everyone’s tracked time and filter and sort it by date, user and project. To give you full flexibility you may export the report as a csv-file. This file not only contains the tracked time for each card but also most of a card’s properties so you can do all kinds of analyses and reports yourself if you so wish.

We also introduced an icon to the mini cards giving you a quick overview who worked how much on a card already as well as allowing you to group your cards by time worked on them.

Further Updates

• Mini card redesign: After sticking with pretty much the same design for more than three years, Micha our designer, decided it was time for an overhaul. The new cards look even more card-like and quite a bit cleaner, allowing to display more of a card’s title than before.
• Card cover images: Part of the redesign was the ability to add cover images to a card. Upload an image to a card, and look for the eye icon on the attachment panel to see it in action!
• Font adjustments: We finally got around to take a look at the most upvoted bug on our discord channel. It frequently happened that the descenders of our font (e.g. the lower part of the g letter) was cut off. We revisited our web fonts and this should now be resolved.
• Stability improvements & bug fixes: effort and property shortcuts now work properly again, x key reliably dismisses notifications on a card, preventing double submit for new conversations and comments, fix error when attempting to edit commands on discord, and a few more.

• Milestones: When displaying the amount of days left, we now use actual working days. They default to Mo-Fr, but can be customized in your organization settings.
• History panel: Changes to your card content now result und much improved diffs in the history panel.
• Drag and drop: When ordering by project tags and drag and dropping a card into a new swimlane, the tag won’t be appended to the card’s content. The project tag will directly be applied instead.
• Performance: Whenever you performed an action, all your and your team mates’ Codecks browser tabs received a message to fetch fresh data at the same time. This meant that the database had to reply to a lot of request simultaneously, leading to a performance bottleneck. This has been changed such that messages to other tabs are now deferred and spread out such that the tab performing the action gets a quick response before other tabs request fresh data.

This release also allows us to start testing the next two big features internally already: time tracking as well as an all new design of the mini cards (including cover images)!

Bug fixes and small improvements:

• Card editing: clicking - [] checkboxes on cards with card references would open the “Card not saved” dialog. This is now fixed.
• Card editing: The preview missed padding and quotes are no longer squashed in long cards.
• Card content: Firefox users now also enjoy some extra padding at the bottom of a long card.
• Card milestone panel: The panel would offer no milestone to pick from if the card’s milestone was from the previous year.
• Card duplication: When duplicating a card from within the milestone view, the card’s milestone is being copied by default.

This time there’s a lot of Quality of life improvements:

Independent scroll areas

We noticed that long cards and long conversations could lead to frustrations at times. While sometimes less is more, that’s probably not always true for the amount of scrollbars. We tried to live with only one main scrollbar for a long time, but now that we’ve added scrollbars to long cards and the side panel, we’re already asking ourselves how we could have lived without!

Wide mode

We understand Codecks to be more than just a list of tasks. We’re moving towards becoming a great place for your knowledge base and design documents. As a next step, we introduced Wide mode to cards. This will make it much more pleasant to create, edit, and read large amounts of texts. To activate it look out for the ↔️ arrows or hit w on your keyboard.

There’s more:

• Attachments: There’s a download button now!
• Card content: Referenced cards (via $cardid) now get a background color according to the referenced card’s status. So if you create an overview card referring to lots of sub tasks, you can now see at a glance how far a certain feature has come.
• Side Panel: Once a side panel has been opened, it’ll stay open when browsing through other cards. This avoids the situation of reshuffling the mini cards whenever different cards led to opening or closing the side panel when clicking on them.
• Archived cards: They received a redesign and look more like normal cards. Because most of the time they’re just completed cards and not much different from non-archived completed cards. Especially for milestone reviews this has been somewhat irritating.
• Card Detail View: When jumping from card to card or when clicking a checkmark, the “unsaved content” message sometimes showed up for a second. This is now fixed. Also the spinning animation has been improved, leading to less erratic behaviour.
• Mobile view: We made some improvements to the core views and interactions. While we can’t focus on a great mobile experience yet, it definitely feels much less broken now!
• Keyboard shortcuts: The keyboard shortcut button went missing at some point! You can now find it again at the bottom left. (Or hit ? to open it.) Note that it’s context dependent and shows different hints depending on what part of the app you’re currently in.
• Card Selection: The selection header now displays the total effort of all selected cards.

Strong Customer Authentication for Payments

To comply with new EU regulations starting on September 14, 2019, we reworked our payment systems.
To ensure that all future payments will be accepted by your bank, we removed payment information stored on Stripe and their references on our side. This means that you need to enter your credit card details again, should you apply a new top-up or start a subscription. Existing subscriptions should not be affected.

Your balance and subscription costs are now always shown as net amounts without VAT

In case we’re applying VAT to your invoices (this affects mostly our German customers), we’ve always treated the paid-in VAT as part of your balance. This made the accounting hard on our side and led to strange edge cases.
One example: should a non-German EU-Business enter their VAT-ID, they we were eligible for a VAT-free invoice. As our initial gift of 50€ should be treated as a a gift worth 10 person months, we had to change the gift amount along with a customers VAT rate. Any directly paid in money and bonuses should not be affected however. This led to the weird effect of changing your gift-portion of your balance whenever your VAT rate changed.

This is why we decided to simplify the balance system by only showing net amounts. Any VAT paid will show up on your invoices but not in your balance. On the other hand we’ll also only subtract the net amount per user and month from your balance without applying any VAT rates. (I.e. VAT is only considered when you actually pay in money and not when we deduct money from your balance at the end of a billing cycle.)

Should you have any questions feel free to get in touch with hello@codecks.io!

Pick a deck when creating a card

When you create a card on your hand or a milestone you now are able to select which deck this card should belong to without having to create it first. This should make a lot of workflows a lot simpler. You can still decide to not put it into any deck to create this card as a private card.
When creating a card in a deck, you can now also choose to add it to your hand on creation. Check the top right area of the card creation panel to find it!

• Content Editor: Fixed infinite-loop issue when opening suggestions panel via @, # or $, sometimes leading browsers to crash 💥.
• GitHub Integration: Some users weren’t able to set up the GitHub integration, this should now be fixed.

• Deck Selector: Decks are now grouped by project.
• Card Content: Card references within a card are proper links now, so you can e.g. cmd-click them to open cards in a new browser tab.
• Card Content Editor: When opening the content editor, it’s always auto-focussed. No matter if it contains content or not.
• Conversations: Adding back an opted-out person by mentioning them works again.
• Discord Integration: Fix double posting of leaderboards under some circumstances.
• [BETA] Card Creation: Allows you to pick a deck when creating a card in your hand or a milestone. When creating a card in a deck, you may choose whether to also add this card to your hand. Currently only for beta-testers. Should be out for everyone in a few days.

Archived Card Improvements

• For milestone reviews it’s often useful to also display archived cards. For easy access, we moved the “include archived cards” button from the search dropdown to the left of the search field. For consistency’s sake we also applied it to the deck inspector.
• The setting for the “include archived cards” button within the Milestones section is remembered as reviews tend to involve jumping around decks and other milestones and it seems preferable to keep the option active
• Archived cards are displayed differently, revealing their state a card was in, once it has been archived. This makes it a lot easier to differentiate between “done” archived cards and “not done” archived cards.

Smaller fixes

• Mission Control: Add tooltip to user number in Mission Control to clarify that this refers to the amount of users that are being billed this billing cycle.
• Payments: Improve top up form to clarify that top up bonuses are only applied to net amounts. Also displaying the correct VAT amount to the per-user cost.
• Card History: Some history entries have not been shown since the last release. This is fixed now.

More Discord improvements

• Don’t post leaderboards if nothing has changed compared to the last one.
• Instead of mentioning the author of a leaderboard entry, the leaderboards links to the original message, making it a lot easier to add an reaction.
• Don’t consider all reactions as valid reactions. (For now we only consider the reaction configured in the settings)
• Fix card-history issue when people have been upvoting.
• Add link to original Discord message within card content when card was created by reaching a reaction threshold.

Some Discord Integration Improvements

• Multi Server support: you can now add more than one Discord Server to your Codecks organization in case your communities are spread across several servers.
• Smaller Fixes: Card Creation Commands now work with @everyone role, Leaderboard doesn’t show Cards that are done.

Discord Integration - Beta Release

Oooh, we are very excited about this one! We’ll release some more concrete information soon on our home page.
I can share that much already, however: it’s gonna be awesome for both, managing your team and your community on Discord!

Bug fixes

• Milestone default swimlane order is not saved on a per-milestone basis anymore. I.e. if you order by “owner” in one milestone, this will be the default order for all milestones.
• Fixed card count in search overlay within the “Decks” Tab.

Fix metric graphs

Both, the metrics performance optimizations in May, as well as the project refactoring for the 2.0 release introduced some issues that made a lot of graphs unusable. This release fixes those.

Improvements & Fixes

• Global milestones and searches in the Decks tab are now only showing cards of the projects you’ve selected in the mission control.
• The activity feed now also includes deck creations and movements from project to another.
• You can dismiss a conversation notification via a button below the conversation itself.
• Mark a seen release as actually seen. (Also some minor improvements on the release page itself like pagination).
• Calendar moved from the Decks tab to the Milestones tab. (Check the “Expand” Icon at the top right.)
• Fixed search being unresponsive sometimes when typing more than two characters.
• Comments weren’t reliably updated in real-time. This should now be fixed.
• Fixed issue when closing or reopening conversations.
• Fixed pasting card urls into a card’s content. It’s now correctly pasted as a $reference.
• You now can open cards in the conversations overview page again.
• Conversation notification mails sometimes displayed comments in a wrong order. Also fixed.

Several Fixes

• Fixed removing cards from your hand.
• Clicking on notifications from hidden projects now also works in the deck view.
• Fixed some more exceptions.

Mastering Multiple Projects in Parallel

So much has been improved in this release! To give a you good overview we created a blog post outlining the most important changes.

For you convienience, here’s a quick summary:

• Don’t treat projects as silos. Instead, allow to select and deselect the project you’d like to work on via the new Mission Control.
• Deck-less cards now are also project-less and are now fully private to the creator of the card.
• Activity Feed can now be found as a button next to the deck library, deck inspector and milestone inspector. You may now also view the full activity history.
• The Mission Control now contains all non-project specific links as well as an overview and warning for your account status
• you can now order and search cards by their project
• Lots of UI Changes, like e.g. a new design for the tabs.
• Personal tags moved from Project settings to your profile
• Reminders and hints went to different locations (most notably the “new release” announcement is now much less intrusive)
• lots of performance improvements
• Source Control Integrations like e.g. Github don’t require to specify a project anymore. Referencing cards now works across all projects.
• Warn if you’re about to discard cards from your hand that are not in any deck
• You can now use search within the conversation panel

Breaking Changes:

• Cards without a deck are now truly private and there is no way for someone else to see their contents. We therefore updated those cards if they were on someone else’s hand, if they had an owner different from the creator or ongoing conversations. We’ll send out an email detailing all the changes if some of your cards were affected.
• Some project settings are now applied account wide: effort scale, priority labels, snoozing & auto-archiving intervals. We lookged for the most recently changed settings and applied it to your whole organisation. Please double check whether this is what you actually prefer in your organisation settings.
• Card ids and URLs have changed. Before a card’s id (and thus URL) was specific to a project all starting with 111. We needed to change this to make card ids organisation specific. All references within carsd (via $ID) have been automatically updated. We also will be redirecting old URLs to their new version for the time being.

Database Refactoring

This release serves mostly as a preparation for the next release: instead of using sequentual numbers for database ids, we’re now relying on globally unique uuids. This helps us for moving certain accounts to different databases for e.g. alpha testing purposes.

If you’ve been using the codecks api directly, make sure to now accept strings as ids.

Search Improvements - Full Text Search!

Phew. Quite a bit has happened here. First, you’ll probably notice that the design has changed.
Making it look like an input will hopefully make it more approachable. We also decided to forgo the real-time search as you type. This became a big bottleneck for larger projects. We also moved currently active filters into the search component since they make a lot more sense in here! Makes it also quite easy to delete via backspace.

The most important addition probably is Full Text Search. I don’t think there’s much to explain. Just type whatever you’re looking for and it’ll show the relevant cards. You still are able to search by title though as well.

Smaller Fixes

• Dragging cards won’t crash in the ‘last updated at’ order.
• No more invisible cards when opening the conversations tab or when ordering by tags.

Big performance improvements for metrics view

For some teams the metrics view has become unbearably slow, so a few fixes were made that had a very big impact on performance. One important change was to not consider the full history of a deck or milestone but only look at the past 3 months.

Slack Integration is approved

It took a bit longer than expected. But it’s finally there!

Last but not least

You now have access to your notifications from the milestone tab.

Lots of quality-of-life improvements this time:

• Replacing this weird !D no-deck icon with a much more pleasant to look at icon. 👻
• The milestone preview on the top-left now has a helpful mouse-over info box.
• Said milestone info box now also shows your effort progress and visualises it with a bar.
• Adding zoom controls to the attachment viewer.
• Clicking on a #tag within a mini-card simply opens the card rather than filtering for all cards with this tag.
• Fix creating cards from presets.
• The metrics screen now won’t crash if there’s only a single card.

Improved Slack integration

Due to new permissions you need to head to the slack integration settings to (re-)activate it.
(Depending on the approval process of Slack it might take a few hours until it’s available).

• Allows you to pick which project sends notifications to what Slack channel.
• Support for Slack Actions.
• Allows to connect one Slack team to more than one Codecks account.

Smaller Fixes

• Search by card creator. (Type a team member’s name to see the corresponding search option)
• Trello importer didn’t work for attachments. This is fixed now.

Improved stability of text editor

You might have noticed that especially large texts behaved funky sometimes while editing them. This release refactored most of the editor logic. While it pretty much looks like before (with some subtle improvements though), it should now be considerably more stable.

And more

• Slight performance optimizations for mini-cards that might be noticeable with lots of cards on your screen.
• New look and feel for the three tabs (Hand, Deck, Milestones). They never looked like Micha designed them since trapezoid shapes with borders are surprisingly hard to do with HTML and CSS. Daniel eventually found some time to tackle those using inline-svgs.
• Your uploaded images will be shown as webp if your browser supports them. This tends to reduce file size by 20% - 50% so you should see them sooner.

This release is quite packed. Let’s get it started:

Trello importer

Go to your account settings to find it. It allows you to import any Trello board you have access to including its cards, attachments and check lists. You can chose to either import it into a new Codecks project or add the cards into an existing projects.

Attachment viewer

Rather than opening the original file in a new tab, you can now view and browse attachments in an overlay.

Smaller fixes

• There’s now an effort overview next to the swimlane labels telling you the total effort of a swimlane and how many cards have no effort assigned yet.
• New engine for extracing colors from deck and project cover images. Faster and with support for webp and svg images. (Although svgs are not really recommended for deck images as they messes with blur effect.)
• The Dashboard now features real falling cards in the header. ✨
• Hitting Esc should now close the most sensible (i.e. most recently opened) thing.
• You can now paste cover images from your clipboard when creating a deck or project.
• When viewing a global milestone, you only see cards of the current project rather than cards from all projects you have access to.
• Draft indicator on the “create card” button now also present when creating (and not saving) a card in decks and milestones.
• Many more subtle fixes.

Refactored Billing logic

Not too much happened that was user-facing (except prettier invoices), but the billing logic was cleaned up and typed via typescript, resulting in much more maintainable code.

Fixes

• Sometimes dismissing notifications did not work or required a browser refresh. This should now be fixed.
• Stop sending some digest emails twice.
• Scroll to the correct place when opening a deck.
• Some forms were lacking visible feedback for their progress or success state.
• Several further adjustments.

Beginning of Server Migration from ruby to node

The backend has been developed using ruby. A solid choice back in 2015. But time and work on related projects has shown that a switch to node would be worthwhile decision. Both, in terms of performance as well as in terms of maintanence when paired with type-safe code via typescript.

This release marks the first step and should hopefully be a notable one already. All data fetching requests now run over the new node backend. Benchmarks in our staging environment have shown that the maximum number of requests per second went up from ~20 to ~200. While we’re still not near this kind of load yet, benchmarks have also shown that median latency went down from ~70ms to ~30ms. This should be enough of an improvement to have a perceivable effect on Codecks’ responsiveness when loading new data.

Creating and changing data still runs through the old ruby-based system. The corresponding endpoints will be migrated piece by piece as the respective parts of the code base are being worked on in the upcoming months.

Multi-Card Drag and Drop

You already could select multiple cards and make bulk changes via the selection header. This update allows you do perform drag and drop operations with all currently selected cards.

New Animation Engine

The Mini Cards and Deck Library are now powered by a new animation engine. Codecks already is a fairly complex web-app so it was necessary to come up with a performant way of dealing with animations. The FLIP Technique was chosen as the underlying basis.
While not perfect yet, it will make it fairly straight forward to add more helpful animations at the right places in the future.

Smaller Improvements

• You can now create cards from within the Milestone Inspector.
• Use the j and k keys to navigate from one open card to the next one.
• Fix buggy behaviour when a project tag was overwriting existing user tags.

• Allow to re-open closed conversations.
• Clicking on the attachment icon on a Mini Card will automatically open the attachment tab in the Card Detail View.
• In previous versions you were able to archive a card with unresolved conversations. If you attempt this now, Codecks will ask you if you wan’t to close any open conversations before archiving them.
• Lots of smaller UI adjustments around conversations.

• When assigning a milestone to a deck, it will overwrite all card-specific milestones. We now added a confirmation message to warn you about this behaviour.
• Guests were seeing some buttons to change settings they were not allowed to change anyway. Those are now hidden for them.
• Don’t show disabled users when suggesting comment thread participants.
• When creating content for a new card and closing it without saving, there’s now a visual indicator on the “Create Card” button, telling you that unfinished business is awaiting.
• The deck inspector’s header now is sticky.
• Mini cards stay visible when you need to scroll a lot due to a long card or a long conversation.
• Some smaller fixes.

• You’re now able to paste images and other files from the clipboard into your cards!
• Performance improvements when displaying lots of cards.
• Fixed issue when saving Project Settings for new projects
• Reduced bundle size further for fast loading times. (Down to 318KB from 357KB)
• Lots of internal refactoring like modernizing the build-pipeline and most dependencies.