Hi hacknplanners!
This milestone has been affected by some unexpected incidents that made us not fully complete all the tasks we planned. I’m talking about the decision that Braintree (payment gateway provider) took about not giving us service after being fully integrated with them and already receiving payments. I won’t go into details now, but it’s not a recommended service for startups. This incident made us leave everything else and work hard to replace it with another service, so we could enable the pre-orders again. We finally integrated the popular provider Stripe and everything is working like a charm now. Kudos to them.
Login with GitHub
Despite that incident, we managed to add some interesting features both for Personal and Studio users. Let’s check them out!
Features and improvements
GitHub authentication:
You can now register into the application using your GitHub credentials, and also link your existing HacknPlan account with your GitHub one. This link will be necessary for Studio users in the future when the GitHub integration is complete and the commits are listed on the activity log, among other features.
The task display configuration popup
Category visual customization (Studio):
The users of HacknPlan Studio can now add their custom icons and colors to categories. This will make them stand out and be more recognizable at a glance. This also comes with an update on the boards: the category selector on the left side of the board displays icons only, making it smaller in width and giving out more space to task cards. The same applies to the category metrics. You can also see how the task cards show the icon instead of the name, being really easy to differentiate them now.
Task card customization (Studio):
Another announced feature for Studio users that is already here is the customization of task cards. This allows you decide which information you want to see on the task cards for each project. Do you prefer simple cards with a title and nothing else? Now you can. Do you want a progress bar for the sub-tasks instead of numbers? No problem. Don’t you like the design element there? You can hide it.
Design element picker on task creation and edition:
Lightweight task display using colors and progress bars
We have replaced the existing ugly list of design elements on the task creation and edition with a popup that allows you select an element in a more structured and formatted way.
Markdown editor fullscreen and autosave:
When you were working on your GDM or a task and adding a lot of content, it was a bit annoying to do so using a small text editor and also being forced to be constantly saving and reopening it. In order to alleviate your pain, we have added fullscreen support to the editor and also an “autosave” mode that saves the changes as they are made, preventing you from losing your work by accident.
Documentation:
We’ve been working on documentation this week. There’s still a lot to do, but we have published some chapters as an introduction to the application you may find interesting. We’ll keep working on it during the next iterations. You can read the documentation here.
Bug fixes
- We have fixed the responsiveness and performance of some actions, like the assignation of users, which was slow and also allowed you to trigger the action more than once, getting errors.
- We thought we fixed them, but problems with email notifications kept happening. They are working properly now.
What’s next?
We plan to work on the activity log to bring it to life as soon as possible. This is a huge task that we already started some time ago, but it requires quite a lot of backend work. The activity log will display a list of the actions performed on a task or element. This will be the base of other features coming soon too, like time logging, GitHub commit activity and more. We will also write more documentation and work on performance to improve the user experience.
Happy planning!
It’s amazing to be a part of this product’s journey. Keep working guys, it’s great.