March Update: Desktop apps + performance

March 6, 2018
march-update-2018

Each month or two we highlight new features, improvements and bug fixes...This update is dedicated to desktop apps and performance.

Desktop App

Finally! With the desktop apps, Ora is closer to you and more accessible than ever. No need to open a browser anymore and you can immediately see when there is new notification. And if you never quit Ora, you will never have to wait for your project to load.


Ora for mac You can download the betas from here.

Doing more with Ora for desktop

Calling Oracmd/ctrl + alt + o - will activate the Ora window for you. Then N is for a new task. cmd/ctrl + 1-9 open pinned projects.

Notifications & Badge — now you get native notifications and also a badge on the icons, so you can instantly know if there is something new happening in your projects.

What's next for Ora desktop?

We are working on a small companion toolbar app that will take care of time tracking while simultaneously tracking your productivity during the day.

Also after a very short beta phase, the apps will be add to Apple App Store and Windows Store. The linux version is already in there.

Performance Boost

At Ora performance is very important for us. The old version had some troubles on projects with more than 200 tasks. You might have never experienced this if you project was small but our team’s most noticeable project of 2000 tasks had some troubles, and one of the biggest priorities recently was fixing the performance.

It wasn't easy. We have tried before to virtualize, to optimize but the technology was the wrong one. Ora was build using angular.js, and at the end, we decided it is impossible to achieve the performance we want with anuglar.js. We had to decide between Angular 2+ and React.js, so we finally decided to go with React. It took us nine months to rewrite the board and list from Angular to React, but it was worth it!

Why did it took so long?

Ora is a very complicated app with tons of features. We had to rewrite all the functions that were connected to the board or list views — mentions, assignees, labels, multiple select…

You won’t see any visual changes besides some cool new animations, the experience you know, and love remains the same, so we prepared a comparison video for you.

But why should we compare Ora to itself? Let's compare it to the big guys out there and see how all tools handle a big project.

As you can see the problem we solved is a significant one for everybody and we are proud to be the fastest one when you have a big project.


Improvements

Slack command set project will allow you to set a default project when you have multiple ones linked to the same channel.

Github,bitbucket,gitlab logout option

Bug fixes

Fixed Reports not working correctly

What's next?

At the moment we are working on mobile apps, sprints, useful new reports and support systems integrations. So stay tuned and as always stay productive!