UI Tweaks, and What’s Coming

by Nate on September 7, 2009

Happy Labor Day to our United States users! We’ve been hard at work, and we just pushed an update to the site that improves a few things.

Changes to Editing

We made a few changes to editable fields throughout the application:

  1. All fields are now editable by a double-click instead of a single click. This means that text is more easily selectable, and links within editable fields are clickable.
  2. Story cards now support Markdown, meaning you can add rich formatting to cards’ display on your board, not just to the details field. Project descriptions now support Markdown as well.
  3. You can now edit cards from your board by double-clicking the text! To expand the card (displaying the toolbar), just click the header of the card.

Here’s an example of the Markdown support on story cards:

markdown-cards

New Support Portal

We’ve gotten some very positive feedback about our customer support, but email has gotten a little difficult to handle. To improve even more, we’ve launched a new customer support portal. When you click the feedback link inside Zen and send us a message, you’re now creating a new ticket inside our support system. This will help us ensure that every user gets a prompt response to every question or issue.

The support portal is powered by ZenDesk, a great support service. Despite the name similarities, there’s no affiliation between our products except in spirit. :)

Bug Fixes

We’ve also corrected some minor nagging UI issues that users have found.

Work in Progress

We’re working on a few things that we hope to get pushed out this week:

  1. The ability to attach files to stories, which is the most-requested feature at the moment!
  2. Support for task lists inside of stories.
  3. Moving the add stories shade to be horizontal, so you can keep your backlog panel open as you add stories. This will also pave the way for some upgrades to the work screen that we have up our sleeve. :)

Thanks again for your feedback, and please keep it coming!

  • i'm desperately waiting for story cards to be commentable/discussable by collaborators...
  • ed
    I'm loving the improvements, it's quite the tool.

    How are the plans for an internally hosted version coming on?
  • Cory Wagner
    Great work, Nate! I continue to be impressed by the quality of the product and your responsiveness to requests.
  • Can we get a list of what part of Markdown you support? There are a several variations, so it would be great to have a running list of what's available, maybe even on the dashboard.

    Thanks!
  • Awesome stuff, Nate.

    I appreciate the added flexibility. People will really be able to customize to their specific needs.
  • Nate,

    How did you get the nicer code formatting?
    Every time I add code (prefixing with a tab) I get the basic grey formatting and syntax colouring for SQL.. I write in C# so it looks really nasty when pasting code snippets in..

    I've googled but can't see anything that suggests a way to colourise for C'#/etc.

    Unless you converted to HTML and then pasted the HTML in?
  • agilezen
    We use an automatic code formatter. It tries to detect the language that
    the code is written in and format for it. It should support C#... if it
    shows up grey, try refreshing the page and see if it shows up formatted.
  • pauleastabrook
    Loving the light touch improvements - will make a positive difference to what is already an elegant solution. Thank you Nate!
  • Excellent job Nate!

    To reiterate other comments - every one of these are great!
    Great stuff on the WIP list too!

    Appreciate the hard work and ability to pick good updates from the feedback! ;)
  • Every single improvement is a welcome one! Thank you!
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