Tables, Helpdesk 2.0 and more!


6 min read



Hello Everyone!

A new version of Cryptee is out!
This version brings the most anticipated feature everyone's been asking for! Tables!

After almost a year of development and testing, we're so excited to announce that you can now create tables in your Cryptee Docs! In typical Cryptee fashion, we didn't want to stop there for this update. We've also created a whole new helpdesk, and many other improvements to our service! Let's dive right in!

TABLES

TABLES IN CRYPTEE DOCS

You can now create tables in your Cryptee Documents!

Before we talk about what took us so long, let's first take a look at how Tables work!

Once you click on the New Table button in the editor's toolbar, you will be presented with a picker, where you can quickly choose the number of columns & rows you'd like to start your table with.

NEW TABLE

Don't worry, after creating your table you can easily insert more new rows & columns. Making additions / changes to your table is also one click away. Simply press the dropdown button, and you can quickly remove/add rows & columns. We've even added some color-coded highlighting to make working with tables a breeze, and easier than other editors out there!

DELETE TABLE ROW
INSERT TABLE ROW

And that's tables! You might be rightfully wondering what took us so long.

Well, turns out building a rich-text editor that supports tables is complicated. REALLY complicated. We had to re-code and prepare each and every text editor feature from scratch to make this happen. Think every combination and permutation of every single formatting feature. Anything you can think of, bold, italic, underline etc, we had to test it all out to make sure they can work compatibly with tables.

And we had to test thousands of scenarios to make sure tables won't break or error out. Scenarios like :

Paste a link into a table, make it half bold, half italic, select it all then make it 48pt, would it break the table?

What should happen if you paste a bullet list onto a link that's in a table?

What if you copy the table and paste it onto another table with lots of styling?
etc. etc. You got the idea!

So we bought ourselves a big espresso maker last year, and started working around the clock to account for these types of scenarios and ensure that tables work on all browsers without issues.

You may have noticed in the screenshots above that we had to disable all block-level editor features, to ensure tables can't/won't accidentally break.

DISABLED TABLE FEATURES

So for example, you can't add math formulas, insert embedded videos, or write long blocks of code, or add long checklists into tables. This is because features like these are treated differently by each browser, (for example video players work differently on each browser) and it's going to take us a bit longer to introduce these features. But we thought this is a good start for launching tables!

This also meant that we had to re-write our markdown shortcut engine, to make sure these features won't accidentally get triggered in tables. For example, normally if you start a line with "-" our markdown engine will automatically turn the line into a bullet list item. However, in tables bullet lists aren't supported, but also you may simply wish to write something like "- €1000" in a table cell. And that's yet another reason why it took us a long time to bring tables to Cryptee Docs.

Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, you might be wondering... Yes, all the keyboard shortcuts you're familiar with from other editor applications, like navigating the table with arrow keys, or tab to jump to the next cell are all supported in Cryptee, and they work on all operating systems, including tablets like iPad.

Finally, if you're using a right-to-left (RTL) language, Cryptee tables support all RTL languages as well. Best of all, we've made it so that RTL is supported at cell-level, and not just at table-level. (unlike Google Docs for example) So if you're learning a new RTL language, and would like to have a vocabulary list, you can have a left-to-right language on one column, and a right-to-left language on another column. Best of all, all keyboard shortcuts will automatically invert and work in the correct direction. (So for example, tab key will jump RTL, instead of LTR, you got the idea!)

Needless to say while we are confident in our tests and we've tested tables against thousands of different scenarios, there's still a non-zero chance that browser extensions or unexpected keyboard-shortcut differences between operating systems & browsers could potentially cause issues. If you do run into any issues, please reach out to our support with your operating system, browser configuration and the exact steps you took. We'll fix it up right away!

One caveat. For now, our tables aren't DOCX or Markdown compatible, due to all the additional features Cryptee's text editor supports. We're still working on the cross-compatibility layer and eventually we'll add support for them.

APP PERFORMANCE

For the past few months, Cryptee's userbase has been growing at an unprecedented +5-7%/week rate, and our team has been working around the clock to ensure service stability. We've made some performance improvements to our servers & apps, reduced their response times, and managed to make our server connections 30% faster overall.

A NEW HELPDESK EXPERIENCE

With great userbase growth comes great helpdesk responsibility! After hearing out our new users' stories and their onboarding experience with Cryptee overall, we've realized the biggest pain point for most of our new users is migrating their content from un-encrypted services to Cryptee. So we thought it's time to redesign and improve our helpdesk. We've added tons of new helpdesk articles, added more popular questions & answers, improved our search so that you can easily find the answer you're looking for, and most importantly, we've created new migration tutorials to help you move your data from old unencrypted apps to Cryptee. Here's how it looks like :

NEW HELPDESK

IMPROVEMENTS / 2K & 4K DISPLAY SUPPORT FOR PHOTOS

Some of our professional photographer users have reached out to us and mentioned that they have 2K or 4K monitors, and would love to see more albums on their large monitors, and higher resolution album thumbnails. They've also mentioned that Cryptee wasn't detecting the correct EXIF dates for photos that were edited in professional photo editing applications like Lightroom or Capture One. So, we've spent some time, did the math, and made it all possible.

With Cryptee, and its on-device encryption, all photos & thumbnails you see on your monitor first need to be decrypted before they can be displayed. Due to this, displaying 2x more large album thumbnails mean 2x more processing power & memory usage. So to make this possible, over the course of the last two months, we've improved our thumbnail - decryption process, and made it so that at least 8 albums' thumbnails can be decrypted simultaneously, with no additional usability impact, by decrypting album thumbnails using multiple processors.

The result? If you have a large monitor, you can now see 2x more albums on your screen than before! Here's how they will look like :

PHOTOS HD ALBUMS

In addition, we've improved the range of EXIF tags Cryptee can recognize. Now even if a photo is edited or processed using professional photo editing applications like Lightroom or Capture One, Cryptee will always pick the correct photo-taken date, instead of the photo-last-saved date, to make it easier to sort large collections of photoshoot sessions, and find the photo you're looking for.

Other Improvements, Bugfixes & Closing Notes

This update also fixes hundreds of bugs, brings mini user-experience and other various speed & performance improvements.

Thank you for all your enthusiasm, help, understanding and kind support. Neither Cryptee, nor any of these features would be possible without you. If you're enjoying your experience on Cryptee, please consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid plan. Every payment helps us make the internet that much more safer and private.

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