This release is a mix of “quality of life” improvements (read: we cleaned up the UI) and some heavy lifting under the hood for Vision Boards. We also made a significant change to how our billing works to make it more standard for companies.
Let’s get into it.
🧹 The Spring Clean (UI Updates)
Over the last few years, we’ve added A LOT of features. We know many of you value how Codecks puts all this power into a friendly interface. To preserve that, we spend a lot of time arguing about every single new button we add.
That said, we felt that looking at the overall current state a few too many buttons slipped through our rigorous checks, making the interface feel a bit “stuffy” (as one of you kindly put it). So, with spring rolling up in Europe, we took the time for some extensive cleaning. We consolidated buttons and cleared up the view so you can focus on what matters: your work.
- The “Start” Button: We realized the timer button and the start button were basically doing the same job—triggering one often triggered the other. We merged them into a single “Start” button that handles both the workflow state and the timer. This fixes those accidental cases where you’d hit start intending to track time, but just changed the status instead. If you actually want to remove the STARTED state, there is now a dedicated option in the secondary menu. (All of this is only relevant to you if you have the time-tracking feature enabled)
- Secondary Actions: We moved the secondary actions (Archiving, Deleting, Bookmarking, Watching, Convert to Doc) from the bottom right into a new ”…” menu. This cleans up the default view but still lets us add more tools later without cluttering the precious card view.
- Properties Panel: This panel had over a dozen buttons. We wanted to keep the speed of setting properties without the visual weight. But we ditched the dedicated ‘None’ buttons and you can now just click the active option to toggle it off. It makes the panel much more glanceable since we only highlight what is actually set.
- Hand Button: We moved the Hand button into the main card header. Now you can access all key actions right from the top instead of hunting for buttons on different “islands” around the card.
- Highlighting Blockers: The locked state on cards (due to dependencies) is now highlighted in red. It’s much harder to miss, so you won’t waste time trying to start a task that isn’t ready.
- Done Pile: We heard you loud and clear: you weren’t big fans of the streak counter. We replaced it. The done pile label now shows the count and total effort of done cards for the week (for you and your teammates). We still track the streak in the background for your Open Decks pages to show communities you are active, but it’s gone from your daily view. Let us know if you actually miss it! 🔥
- Hand Tab Cleanup: We moved the “Show Snoozing” button to the right, next to “Show All.” It fits better logically and stays out of the way when you just want to focus on active conversations.
- Hover-Only Info: Effort and time tracking info in swimlanes now only shows up on hover.
- Card Tabs: The property toggles had a similar outline style to the main sidebar actions, which made opened cards feel a bit “caged in.” We switched to a tab style to let the cards breathe a bit more.
- Journey Buttons: We think Journeys are one of the best parts of Codecks, they handle the asset pipeline process that is unique to game dev. But the feature was hidden behind a small ‘scroll’ icon that was easy to miss. We made the button much more pronounced in the deck headers.
👁️ Vision Board Upgrades
Our goal for Vision Boards is to go beyond simple moodboards. We want you to build custom interfaces and dashboards for your production data. We added some quality-of-life improvements to make that easier.
- Public Vision Boards: You can now share a Vision Board as your Open Decks page instead of the standard deck view. This lets you curate exactly how your community explores your roadmap.
- Performance: We improved scroll speed and changed how we handle image-heavy boards (using low-res proxies until you zoom in). It feels much snappier now.
- Smart Widget Search: You can now pop out the search view for Smart Widgets.
- Table View Power: You can now use bulk selection and shortcuts directly within the Table View widget.
- New Toys: Added a Number Widget for simple KPI tracking and a Zoom Lock to keep your view steady.
- Locking: You can now set a lock state for the board to prevent accidental edits. You can switch between ‘Open’, ‘Owner Edit’, and ‘Readonly’.
- Online Status: Since Vision Boards rely on real-time connections, we added a status display to let you know if there is a hiccup with the server connection.
- Fixes: Overlays now work correctly in full-screen mode, and we’ve improved the offline handling so you don’t lose work if your connection drops.
💶 Billing & Administration
- Seat-Based Pricing: We moved away from the “top-up” credit model to standard seat-based pricing. You can also now switch to a Yearly Plan (and save some money/hassle). This should simplify things for your accounting department.
- New User Invite Flow: We’ve simplified the invite modal so you can invite multiple users by email in a single step.
🔧 Fixes & Polish
- Search: Better support for non-Latin scripts (e.g., Chinese characters).
- Parent Card Selector: Now grouped by “Existing Hero Cards” and “Potential Hero Cards” to make linking easier.
- Timeline: Improved layout for when you have a pile of milestones clustered close together.
- CSV Importer: Fixed an issue where empty columns were breaking imports.
- Upvotes: These are now opt-in for new projects to keep things clean by default.
- Focus Mode: Fixed a navigation issue when creating cards and ensured changes save properly when hitting ESC.
If you haven’t done so already, make sure to join our discord and let us know what you think of all the changes!
