Hi hacknplanners,

I hope you are all healthy and safe and enjoyed the holidays. We are back with a small but necessary update focused on stability and performance, and we also took the chance to fix plenty of bugs.

Performance

Regarding performance, we have focused on the Game Design Model this time, which was causing some issues with big projects with a deep and long structure of elements. We have optimized loading times from the server (up to 3x depending on the scenario) and also rewrote some parts of the UI to be rendered faster and in a more progressive way. Those who have big models will see a noticeable difference when working with all the folders expanded; what used to be a bit slow and clunky is now as fast and responsive as the rest of the sections.

Additionally, we made improvements to all the places where long lists of complex elements (tasks, user stories) are rendered, which should make the experience smoother when dealing with boards and lists with hundreds of items.

We will continue working on performance regularly, there’s still a lot to do, and the next step is rebuilding the Gantt Chart with performance in mind, which is currently poor when big projects with a big design model and many work items are displayed.

Other features

Besides the improvements in performance, we also worked on a few other features that you’ve been requesting:

• The notifications about comments and mentions now include the text of the comment for reference, so you get the content without having to follow the link to the application.
• Links to external sites are now opened in a new tab by default.
• We have improved the security of the attachment files: file links have now an expiration of 1 hour, so if you share those links with someone and, for some reason, they fall into the wrong hands, the links will most likely be already expired.
• We added an Invoice email field to the billing information of the subscription, so you can have new invoices sent to an alternative address.

Bug fixes

We also fixed plenty of bugs you’ve been reporting, some of them were released in small bug patches during the last weeks, others have been included in this one:

• The RTF files were not downloaded, the browser opened them instead, but were not properly displayed.
• Images could not be opened in a new tab, they were automatically downloaded.
• Filter lines for the Creator field were not properly saved.
• No confirmation dialog to cancel the creation of a design element with content.
• Attachment files were not correctly removed after removing a task.
• The template displayed on the Modules section was incorrect (only visually, module configuration was correct).
• Filters were not correctly reset when moving from Studio tier back to Personal.
• The design element breadcrumbs below the title were not properly updated after moving it to another tree branch.
• Tasks were not removed when removing boards with the “Include tasks” option.
• Changing the project in the work item creation dialog didn’t refresh the available boards.
• Fixed issue about some work items not displaying the correct Board information (always showed Backlog).
• Pressing up and down on the keyboard did not move across work items grouped by design element.
• Inline elements still selectable while one of them was in edition mode.
• The progress of the design element was not being updated after adding an item.
• The avatar on the work log element was not properly aligned.
• The font of the markdown quotes was too big.

What’s next

Besides our continuous commitment to improve the performance of the application and fixing all the known issues, our next release will be focused on the file system. We will allow reusing project files from different items and elements, will create a new Storage Manager with search capabilities, sorting, tagging… you will be also able to upload files to the project directly without attaching them to any work item or design element. And, on top of that, we are also releasing a new subscription add-on to add extra storage to your workspace at a very affordable cost. We also plan to release a new update of the API with fixes and some new endpoints.

Happy planning!!