Message subjects

Most ticketing/issue tracking systems force users to specify a title and a body for a given task.  For most tasks though, we find that having a title is unnecessary and often annoying.  Therefore, No Kahuna doesn’t have task titles.  It’s an example of how we’re trying to simplify things and allow the site to get out of your way so you can get work done with your team.

When we added support for messages awhile back, we thought we’d do an experiment to see if the subject of messages was overkill as well.  It turns out that having subjects for messages does provide value.  While most tasks are short and don’t require a summarizing subject, most messages end up being longer and do benefit from a subject.

Therefore, this morning we deployed message subjects.  We hope you like them!

New pricing for No Kahuna

We have been rolling out a ton of new features and improvements over the last weeks.

One such update is a much simplified pricing: No Kahuna projects can be either public or private. Public projects are free and you can have as many as you like. For private projects you need an upgrade. That’s really all there is to it.

You still get unlimited users on every project but now you also get unlimited tasks and messages. And our new entry level plan starts at only $7.

If you or your company needs privacy from the start – no worries: Every subscription plan comes with a free 30 day trial now – no strings attached.

And thanks to Spreedly (our payments partner) it was easy for us to make these changes and still allow our current customers to keep their plans and conditions for as long as they like.

Finally, if you had a private project on your free account you’ll find that we decided to upgrade it for free.

API support to see your projects

Today we heard a question from customer:

I have an API question.  How do you get the projects in an account?  … This would be a really cool feature.

We agree!  This is a feature that’s been on our list and we had planned on adding support for it next week.  We decided to change plans though and implement it today instead.  You can check out the details on our wiki.

We also heard from the same customer:

I am writing a series of iphone apps to integrate with project management tools… your app is on my list too.   

This is great news and we’re quite excited to hear when customers start using the No Kahuna API.  

Hide inactive projects

Today a customer told us that he found it hard to quickly select projects from his ever growing list and that it would be nice to somehow hide inactive projects from the interface.

We liked the request so much, we thought we’d do something about it right away. So if you have any inactive projects you would like to keep without cluttering up your interface you can now simply hide them via the configuration tab. 

Are you missing anything from No Kahuna? Sometimes an email and a day is all it takes!

Coming Soon - Messages

When people collaborate on a project, two forms of communication generally happen - actionable and non-actionable.  Actionable communication occurs for things someone is responsible for, for things which are eventually marked as done. Up until now, No Kahuna has been quite focused on the actionable items for your projects.  Soon though, we’ll have support for the non-actionable communication in the form of messages.

Why should this communication happen in No Kahuna rather than in email? Well, many of the reasons for having tasks in No Kahuna apply to messages as well.  It’s important:

• to have centralized communication related to a project rather than random email threads all over everyone’s inboxes.
• to have messages that can be commented on.
• to know who is subscribed to a given message.
• to be able to unsubscribe from a message.
• to search old messages and know that everything you find is related the project you care about.
• to allow new people on the project to see the history of communication.
• to know that your data is backed up.
• to easily categorize messages. 

We’re excited about this upcoming feature and we’ll let you know when it’s available.

Some Performance Improvements

I’ve been noticing that the site hasn’t seemed quite as responsive as it once was.  Up until this point, we have spent basically zero time thinking about performance and how to make the site faster.  

Today I started thinking about some possibilities.  I considered various caching options and then decided to look at the database.  I started by adding one index to one of our database tables.  This index has had a pretty significant impact on the performance.  

Before the index:

The show a task page:

• 3.5 requests per second
• 285 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

• 1.5 requests per second
• 656 milliseconds per request

After the index:

The show a task page:

• 5.3 requests per second
• 188 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

• 4.5 requests per second
• 220 milliseconds per request