Checkvist story

Attachments, markdown, team discounts, and a new hosting provider

This server update is dedicated to the two main things: new functionality and new hosting provider.

Starting from the latter. Dear Rackspace, we used your hosting for about four years, but last months were disappointing. We admit, that your “fanatical support”(tm) saved the situation several times, thanks for that. But with VPS hosting you never know, who will be your neighbor on the host and how they will overload the disk. Having faced with bad neighbors several times, we decided to use a dedicated server and will do everything to make it as stable as possible. Our provider for the dedicated server is LeaseWeb, and so far we haven’t got problems with them (keeping fingers crossed).

The features part is not very new for those who followed our recent experiments on the beta server.

Attachments

This is the most visible part of the server upgrade. As usual, we tried to make it as keyboard friendly as possible. Everything you need is under your fingers:

• Select a list item and type at to invoke the attachment dialog window (you can upload several files at once). Use tab/shift+tab to navigate within the dialog.
• You can attach files from you local disk, or from the web. In the latter case, you can link to the remote file, without uploading it to Checkvist servers.
• Smart syntax with completion img: lets you embed images into text.
• Arrow left/right or up/down to select an attachment, press Enter (or mouse over) to preview the image, del to delete attachment.
• Drag-n-drop files from your desktop.
• Click the file name link to open the image/file.
• Type sd to show attachment details.
• Filter current list to show only tasks with attachments using “with-attachment” keyword
• On the Disk Usage tab of the profile page you can see which lists have attachments and the used disk space.

There’s a short demo of this feature from a previous blog post.

Team accounts

Team accounts are for those who want to give PRO accounts to their family, friends, or colleagues. All members of the same team account share the same list customization - logo, colors, etc. A company style, so to say :)

Disk space within one team account is calculated as 512MB*[number of users].

For one person Checkvist PRO account costs now $19 per 6 months (ab. $3 per month). But all teams, even as small as Checkvist’s own team, get discounts:

• 2..5 users - 10% discount
• 6..14 users - 20% discount
• 15+ users - 30% discount

Trial access

For those who are not sure whether they need a PRO account, we’ve decided to replace our “14 days money back” policy with the “14 days free trial period” option. No credit card, no nothing. Feel free to add as many users to the PRO trial as you need. Even if you decide to stay with the free plan, no data will be lost, and you can continue using the tool.

Markdown

After multiple requests we implemented basic wiki formatting for Checkvist (Markdown). You can enable Markdown syntax for your lists on the profile page.

Besides we fixed some annoying things that you help us find and nail down:

• Custom CSS styles and logo that you define in your lists are visible to all other users (say, if I have my own logo and styles, your lists will be displayed with your logo, not with mine).
• List author permissions can be changed anytime in the Share dialog window.
• gg shortcut now works in notes as well
• Fixed the bug with the ‘show details’ mode which turned itself on
• Enlarged radio-button size in the mobile version
• More accurate calculating for the task counters on the index page - invalidated tasks are not included.

Well, all this said and done, the best news is that now we can continue with a new design, lots of polishing, and new features after all!