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

No Kahuna API

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve started releasing parts of the No Kahuna API to allow developers to programatically interact with No Kahuna.  We can’t wait to see how folks start using it.

We’re still adding additional API calls. If you contact us with your needs, it will help us prioritize the next steps we take.

Leading up to the dashboard release we have also improved the way activity is presented on No Kahuna. Event lists are now more distinct from task lists and the information is much easier to parse. They are also better integrated into the various contexts on the site. Old vs New:

The new dashboard lets you quickly see what happens across all your projects and teams.

Some projects need a lot of your attention, some need it only once a week. You may work with people in different time zones or just across the hall.

The new dashboard shows you the projects with the most recent changes at the top and you can see at a glance who has done what - all so you can decide what to do next.