Judge a Card by Its Cover

2024 has been our biggest year at Codecks so far—and, as such, we wanted to make sure we’d end it with a bang!

In case you missed it: we recently reached a total of €1m in funding, thanks to a significant EU grant, which will allow us to deliver even more exciting features, at an even faster pace. With that in mind, 2025 promises to be huge… but 2024 isn’t over yet. 

To finish the year in style (quite literally, in this case), we’re happy to introduce you to our newest release, which includes: Card Cover updates, which will allow you to customize your Cards and Decks more than ever, Time Tracking improvements, and more. Have a look below!  

Card Covers

As you know, with our tool we’re on an eternal quest to make project management more playful, fun and efficient. An important component of that is adding ways in which you can beautify your Codecks to look as amazing as the art in your game.

Our new updates to Card Covers are a big step towards that. Here are a couple new features this release brings that will make your cards look even nicer:

• Cover Images on Open Cards: You can now add and view cover images directly on open cards, enhancing their visual appeal and clarity.

• An image button allows you to directly open the cover image settings and lay them out perfectly on the card.

• We reworked the behavior for hero card cover images to have priority for all sub cards. This makes sure that you have a nice image across all sub cards as well.

• While working on the cover images, we moved the Hero bar to hover above the opened card. This leaves more room for seeing your new nice cover images on the card.

• We also enabled animated cards and golden bars for all users.

Time Tracking Improvements

Our real-time tracking option was tied to the state of the card, which resulted in a few side effects:

• You couldn’t leave a card started while not actively working on it. That prevented marking multiple cards in-progress and removed a way to easily see which cards were already started VS seeing which cards hadn’t been worked on so far.

• While in blocking or review state, you couldn’t real-time track additional time spent working on the card.

• People that weren’t the owner could only use the bulk time editing feature in the history sidebar, but couldn’t use the real-time tracking widget to add time to a card.

Now, we’re fixing all of these gaps by promoting time tracking to its own button! You’re now free to real-time track time on a card, independent of its current state or ownership! We also added some automation, like setting the card to started when the owner tracks time for the first time, which will make migration easier and consistent with old behavior. 

This will also affect snoozing behaviour. Previously, a card went into a purple snoozing state when the tracker stopped automatically after a certain amount of hours. With this new release this wouldn’t work anymore if you’re tracking a card in review, for example, so we re-instated the same snoozing behavior we use when time tracking is disabled: cards with no activity in 72 hours (customizable in your org settings) will snooze. Any activity (making a comment, changing content…) will unsnooze it.

Run Chart Enhancements

We love our run charts (found in the sidebar of your runs), and we’re making them even better with several improvements:

• The run chart now features a burn up projection line to let you know how close you are to the ideal work rate in your run.

• Cards in Review are now shown as part of the chart to give you a better idea how many cards are “almost” done VS done cards.

• Sprint charts now use the same effort calculation as the total effort summary, including hero cards with their own set effort values.

• We improved how time tracked is attributed to runs. Now when tracking time on a card in the next run, the time will still be attributed to the current run instead of the next run.

Other Improvements

That’s not all! Here are couple of additional improvements that you will find in this release:

• Streamlined Conversations: We’ve redesigned the conversation flow, drawing inspiration from our Guardians feature. The wording around opting out of reviews has been changed to the idea of “approving” work, representing our best practices about how to use reviews more clearly.

• Text Editor Improvements: Handling images in the text editor is smoother, allowing easier cursor movement above or below images.

• Checkbox Checks: Cards with unchecked checkboxes now ask for confirmation before being marked as done.

• Tag Descriptions in Table View: We recently added the option to add usage descriptions to tags. These descriptions are now also supported when using table mode.

• Guardian Badge: Decks with guardians now display a guardian badge in the deck overview.

• Education Plan Application: We offer Codecks for free for educational usage, and we now added a simple form to streamline the process for applying and approving for these educational accounts.

• Calendar Days: Weekdays will now show in the calendar too. 

• Hero Adjustments: Hero Cards can now be placed in their owner’s done pile, like normal task cards.

• Search Improvements: We’ve added the option to search for cards in someone’s hand or not in hand.

Fixes

• Hand Assignments: Adding a card to the hand and assigning it to someone else will no longer reassign it. The card will stay in the correct hand and retain the original owner.

• Timeline Scroll Fix: Fixed scrolling issues when initially opening the timeline view.

• Journey Step Editing: Opened journey steps and card templates now feature an edit button, even if the “Quick Edit” setting is disabled. Focus Mode will now respect the Quick Edit User Setting introduced last release.

• Improved Suggestions in Editor: When using @ or # in the editor, suggestions now prioritize matches at the beginning of user or tag names.

• Beast Token Adjustment: Doc cards no longer display beast tokens.

Uff, and that’s it! Our last release of 2024!

We want to use this opportunity to thank you for being part of the Codecks journey, and for letting us be part of your journey, too! We’re thrilled to bring you these updates and can’t wait to show you what’s in store for 2025. Until then… have a happy holiday season, for those celebrating it, and see you next year!