No Kahuna

Bye bye user filtering

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:39:00 -0400

Sometimes the best thing the makers of a website can do is remove a feature. It’s certainly uncommon in this age of software bloat and it can be painful if some of your customers have grown accustomed to the feature. The pain, though, is often worth it because it helps to ensure that the site stays lean and is remarkably simple to use.

A few months ago, we introduced a new way to look at your tasks by allowing you to filter the tasks by user. We were thinking that the filter would simplify the view and help our customers to see only the tasks they needed to see.

The reality is that my own tasks are the most important thing to see when I click a category. And seeing other people’s tasks grouped by each user underneath my own tasks is actually much more useful than we realized. An extra bonus is that removing the user filter area of the sidebar makes the page even simpler. This was a case where we think our first instinct was actually right.

We’re pretty thrilled about the change and we hope you like it as well.

We have a number of exciting improvements for No Kahuna coming soon in the next few weeks. We’re planning on making some significant performance improvements and we’re designing a simple way for tasks to be tagged which will allow you to slice and dice tasks in ways we can’t even foresee.

Task Sorting Just Got Better

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:21:25 -0400

The project managers out there will certainly appreciate the improvements we’ve made to task sorting. Previously, the task sort order was based on the category *and* the user. So each user could see the order of their tasks for a particular category.

Now, it’s only based on the category. This allows you to sort all of the tasks in a particular category without regard for who the task is currently assigned to. Much better!

We now have the ability to filter the task list by user. This...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:15:45 -0400

We now have the ability to filter the task list by user. This cuts down on the noise and helps you to only look at the stuff that really matters.

File Attachment Improvements

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:17:00 -0400

When we originally added the ability to attach files in No Kahuna, we chose to make it a separate event, it’s own thing on a task or message. We were thinking that this made things simpler.

The reality is that it confused many customers because they’re accustomed to attaching files to comments, tasks, and messages. It’s unconventional to have a separate event for attaching things. In addition, most folks followed up the attachment with a comment describing the attachment.

Therefore, we deployed a nice adjustment today. Now we can attach files to tasks, messages, or comments when those things are created.

We’ve got a ton of improvements coming soon!

If you’d like more frequent updates about all things No Kahuna, you can check us out on Twitter: http://twitter.com/nokahuna

A handy little feature went out last week - we now have events...

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:07:07 -0400

A handy little feature went out last week - we now have events for when project members become subscribed/unsubscribed to tasks and messages. It’s nice to know when folks started listening in on the conversation.

You can now mark a task as done AND add a comment in one go.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:23:19 -0400

You can now mark a task as done AND add a comment in one go.

Feeling like not doing a task? Now you can…

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:32:32 -0400

Feeling like not doing a task? Now you can…

Message subjects

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:07:33 -0400

Most ticketing/issue tracking systems force users to specify a title and a body for a given task. For most tasks though, we find that having a title is unnecessary and often annoying. Therefore, No Kahuna doesn’t have task titles. It’s an example of how we’re trying to simplify things and allow the site to get out of your way so you can get work done with your team.

When we added support for messages awhile back, we thought we’d do an experiment to see if the subject of messages was overkill as well. It turns out that having subjects for messages does provide value. While most tasks are short and don’t require a summarizing subject, most messages end up being longer and do benefit from a subject.

Therefore, this morning we deployed message subjects. We hope you like them!

New pricing for No Kahuna

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:54:14 -0400

We have been rolling out a ton of new features and improvements over the last weeks.

One such update is a much simplified pricing: No Kahuna projects can be either public or private. Public projects are free and you can have as many as you like. For private projects you need an upgrade. That’s really all there is to it.

You still get unlimited users on every project but now you also get unlimited tasks and messages. And our new entry level plan starts at only $7.

If you or your company needs privacy from the start – no worries: Every subscription plan comes with a free 30 day trial now – no strings attached.

And thanks to Spreedly (our payments partner) it was easy for us to make these changes and still allow our current customers to keep their plans and conditions for as long as they like.

Finally, if you had a private project on your free account you’ll find that we decided to upgrade it for free.

Coming soon!

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:35:43 -0400

Coming soon!

API support to see your projects

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:05:57 -0500

Today we heard a question from customer:

I have an API question. How do you get the projects in an account? … This would be a really cool feature.

We agree! This is a feature that’s been on our list and we had planned on adding support for it next week. We decided to change plans though and implement it today instead. You can check out the details on our wiki.

We also heard from the same customer:

I am writing a series of iphone apps to integrate with project management tools… your app is on my list too.

This is great news and we’re quite excited to hear when customers start using the No Kahuna API.

Hide inactive projects

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:39:00 -0500

Today a customer told us that he found it hard to quickly select projects from his ever growing list and that it would be nice to somehow hide inactive projects from the interface.

We liked the request so much, we thought we’d do something about it right away. So if you have any inactive projects you would like to keep without cluttering up your interface you can now simply hide them via the configuration tab.

Are you missing anything from No Kahuna? Sometimes an email and a day is all it takes!

Coming Soon - Messages

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:53:00 -0500

When people collaborate on a project, two forms of communication generally happen - actionable and non-actionable. Actionable communication occurs for things someone is responsible for, for things which are eventually marked as done. Up until now, No Kahuna has been quite focused on the actionable items for your projects. Soon though, we’ll have support for the non-actionable communication in the form of messages.

Why should this communication happen in No Kahuna rather than in email? Well, many of the reasons for having tasks in No Kahuna apply to messages as well. It’s important:

to have centralized communication related to a project rather than random email threads all over everyone’s inboxes.
to have messages that can be commented on.
to know who is subscribed to a given message.
to be able to unsubscribe from a message.
to search old messages and know that everything you find is related the project you care about.
to allow new people on the project to see the history of communication.
to know that your data is backed up.
to easily categorize messages.

We’re excited about this upcoming feature and we’ll let you know when it’s available.

Some Performance Improvements

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:55:22 -0500

I’ve been noticing that the site hasn’t seemed quite as responsive as it once was. Up until this point, we have spent basically zero time thinking about performance and how to make the site faster.

Today I started thinking about some possibilities. I considered various caching options and then decided to look at the database. I started by adding one index to one of our database tables. This index has had a pretty significant impact on the performance.

Before the index:

The show a task page:

3.5 requests per second
285 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

1.5 requests per second
656 milliseconds per request

After the index:

The show a task page:

5.3 requests per second
188 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

4.5 requests per second
220 milliseconds per request

There’s certainly plenty more work to be done to speed up the site. We’re excited though that one database index could have such an impact. More coming soon!

No Kahuna API

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:26:34 -0500

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve started releasing parts of the No Kahuna API to allow developers to programatically interact with No Kahuna. We can’t wait to see how folks start using it.

We’re still adding additional API calls. If you contact us with your needs, it will help us prioritize the next steps we take.

You can now attach files up to 50 MB each to a task. We...

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:23:00 -0500

You can now attach files up to 50 MB each to a task. We still like using skitch for sharing screenshots but that is mac only and occasionally work requires more than just sharing screenshots :)

Leading up to the dashboard release we have also improved the way activity is presented on No...

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:52:23 -0500

Leading up to the dashboard release we have also improved the way activity is presented on No Kahuna. Event lists are now more distinct from task lists and the information is much easier to parse. They are also better integrated into the various contexts on the site. Old vs New:

The new dashboard lets you quickly see what happens across all your projects and teams. Some...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:04:00 -0500

The new dashboard lets you quickly see what happens across all your projects and teams.

Some projects need a lot of your attention, some need it only once a week. You may work with people in different time zones or just across the hall.

The new dashboard shows you the projects with the most recent changes at the top and you can see at a glance who has done what - all so you can decide what to do next.

Re-shuffling the interface so it can accomodate the exciting...

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:29:00 -0500

Re-shuffling the interface so it can accomodate the exciting things we are working on. First step to go live today: The all new configuration tab!

Browse completed tasks.

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 08:01:00 -0500

Browse completed tasks.