Hey Codeckers! Whether you’re navigating through sidebars, organizing your Journeys, or fine-tuning your Runs, we’ve got some big improvements that will make your workflow smoother and more magical.
🔍 New Sidebar Behavior
We’ve given one of the core elements of Codecks a significant upgrade! The sidebars now slide in as overlays rather than displacing content. Here’s why that’s awesome:
- More Space: With the sidebars no longer cramping the content behind them, we’ve widened them, giving you more room for your conversations and attachments.
- Less Distraction: Dive deep into specific card details without those background cards begging for attention.
- Minimal Card Reshuffling: We’ve been on a quest to reduce disorienting card layout reshuffling, and this change is a big step forward, complementing our previous side panel improvements.
You have been asking for them for a long time: This release finally brings our own support for Runs (a.k.a. sprints)! And on top of that we have a ton of usability improvements making you go even faster. 🚀
Runs
You can now add Runs. These are automatically recurring milestones — in other tools often called sprints or cycles. The term ‘sprint’ comes with a bit of implied baggage and since we wanted to create our own interpretation, we decided to use a different terminology, inspired by sprints and dungeon runs. 🏃🏽
In this release, we focused on improvements for milestones and for tracking work. This is part of a bigger initiative to improve big-picture planning and tracking within Codecks. We’re excited to bring you more tools to plan your project from start to finish.
Milestones
New Milestone View
The milestones tab now features a redesigned, sleek, dark-themed area. We’ve switched to a week-based timeline scale so you can see more upcoming milestones at once. Calendar and milestone overviews are now easily accessible via two new buttons in the top right corner and appear as overlays. The calendar sidebar now also displays week numbers.
We’re starting 2024 strong with a big update! A lot of these come from direct feedback that we’ve heard from long-time users. We’re working hard on making Codecks even better for you. And of course also for all the new Codecks users that have discovered us recently. Great to have you with us! 👋
Spaces
In the past, we’ve recommended creating multiple projects per game to improve the structure, but that is not necessary anymore. You can now create spaces to group your project decks.
While working on the decks tab, we’re also introducing the following:
2023 is wrapping up, but we couldn’t let the year end without another major Codecks update! This is our 8th major release this year.
Hero Cards
Since their introduction in 2020 Hero cards have become a core component of Codecks and with we’re looking to make them even easier to handle.
- Our own game dev team at Maschinen-Mensch has grown to over 20 people (🤯) and we’re seeing hero cards with dozens of sub cards now. With so much going on, it can feel a bit overwhelming. To help manage these, we’ve experimented with different approaches and have found one that works great. From the sub card sidebar you can now group sub cards by different dimensions (Priority, Deck, Owner and Milestone) in addition to being able to lay them out manually as before. Of course, drag’n’drop and quick-add functionality is fully supported. This will let you see at a glance how many sub cards of a hero card were done in each milestone, or how the effort is distributed across different people or work areas.
- When creating a new card, you can select its hero card right away without having to save the card first.
- The hero badge shown on top of an opened card now shows the overall hero card progress bar too.
- We added the hero card ID and title to the time tracking report.
Table View
We love cards! But when you’re dealing with large decks containing several hundred cards (your bug deck 😭) sometimes a super-streamlined view that allows you to quickly scan lots of cards would be nice. That’s why we’re introducing Table View for our Pro Plan!
Find the new view option in the sort panel to the left. The table view supports all the swimlanes and drag’n’drop feature that you already love. Using the ⭐ button you can also set this view as the default view for decks.
This has been suggested on our lovely discord server by Junuh and Wattosan. Thank you!
You ask, we deliver! Most of these new features in this release are the direct result of conversations with our discord community. 💜
🚀 Card Quick Settings
The new Quick Settings panel allows you to change multiple card properties with just a few keystrokes. Trigger it by simply clicking the effort icon on any card and use the arrow keys to effortlessly update priority, effort, deck, milestone, or owner of a card.
Pending changes will be marked with a dot next to the property tab. Pressing return will commit your changes to the card. Pressing Esc closes the panel without any changes.
Redesigned Text Editor
In our quest to enhance your writing experience, we’ve completely rewritten our text editor. This allows us to bring you a bouquet of new features.
Our smarter completions for lists or block quotes will save you time, and the ability to indent with tab / shift + tab makes structuring your thoughts a lot easier. The new monospaced font offers more clarity in recognizing indentation levels, too. We’ve also added slash commands (type /) and a floating action bar, to make our editor and markdown features more discoverable.
Can never get the card editor size perfect on your screen? Regular mode is too small, wide mode too wide? Now you can freely resize the card editor!
We have spent the last weeks completely revamping our whole text editor. The resizable window is just a first glimpse at the new capabilities that we’ll be sharing very soon cough focus mode cough.
Here are all the changes for this release:
Flexible Wide Mode
You can now drag the container for an opened a card (or journey step) to your preferred width. 🤯 This width is remembered on your browser, so you can use different settings if you use Codecks across multiple computers with different displays.
Milestone Overview
The calendar has gotten a big extension! It now offers an “Overview” button which allows you to inspect and compare high level stats over all your milestones.
You can reach the calendar via the expand icon at the top right of the timeline within the Milestones tab.
The overview offers to either use card count or effort as your metric. You’ll find the distribution of completed vs uncompleted work across priorities and owners.
This will be a big assistance in making milestones more comparable and thus more plannable.
