Telerik blogs

Happy holidays everyone! We hope that you enjoyed the end of year festivities and are settling into what promises to be an exciting 2014! To celebrate another year together, let's have a Q1 2014 roadmap update!

Our Q3 2013 release was a great success, and if you’re an existing customer, we hope you’ve taken the time to upgrade and start using all of the new features in Web, DataViz and Mobile. If you’re not yet a Kendo UI customer, but want to be, what are you waiting for? Anyone buying Kendo UI today will get full access to the Q1 Beta in February and automatic upgrades for the Q1, Q2 and Q3 2014 releases!

With a great Q3 2013 release behind us, it’s time to take a look at some of what we’ve been working on these last few months, and what you can expect this March in our Q1 2014 release.

What makes a roadmap?

Before I dive into the details of the Q1 2014 roadmap, though, I thought it might be helpful to set the stage with a little background on how we arrive at our roadmap, in the first place. I like to re-share this information with each roadmap post, so you’re welcome to skip ahead if this isn’t your first rodeo, and you’ve read this section before.

UserVoice is our public forum for customer feedback, of course, but the data contained therein is only one piece of a much larger puzzle to fit together when it comes time to plan for a release. When planning a release, we gather all of your feedback from UserVoice, as well as relevant data from these sources:

  • Industry research and analysis
  • Direct customer surveys and feedback
  • Forum posts and support requests
  • Input from Telerik leadership

With all of this data in hand (and there is a lot of it!) the team gathers to prioritize all relevant requests, create a roadmap for the next few quarters, and establish themes for the current release. Themes categorize much of our focus, while also clearly defining the value we plan to deliver to you, our customers, in a given release. Though each release of Kendo UI is full of new features and fixes in our Web, DataViz or Mobile suites, we feel that it’s important to focus our release planning around a broad theme that represents the “big rocks” of value we want to provide. Many of these themes align to a single suite, while others affect the framework as a whole. Here’s a bit more about our Q1 theme, and a sneak preview of some of what’s coming in the Summer.

Q1 Release Theme: “Powerful, Extensible, and Open”

The modern web is becoming less about devices and more about experiences. For end-users, web apps are about experiences that feel natural, comfortable and consistent. Regardless of the device on which they are accessed, users expect that apps behave in a way that feels tailored to the device, while also invoking familiar elements that are unique to the app itself.

But the modern web isn’t just about the experiences provided to end-users. It’s also about the tools that developers use to deliver the modern web to their customers. And while end-users clamor for natural, comfortable and consistent experiences, developers are increasingly looking for powerful, extensible and open tools. Tools that speed-up the delivery of reliable, cross-device experiences; tools that provide everything one might need, while also playing nice with other libraries; tools that are inexpensive to use, and built by world-class developers.

To that end, Kendo UI’s Q1 2014 release is focused around new features and enhancements that make our product even more “powerful, extensible and open.” Let’s take a look at some of the “big rocks” in this release, as they relate to this theme:

New Tools for Kendo UI Developers

Our Q1 release will feature the introduction of and improvements to several tools that compliment your Kendo UI workflow. For starters, we’ll be bringing some of the best features of the Kendo UI Bootstrapper into Visual Studio, so VS developers can use tools like the Kendo UI Linter from inside their favorite IDE. If you’re a Kendo UI Mobile and Icenium user, you’ll also be excited to hear that we’ll be improving the Kendo UI Mobile designer in Icenium to offer richer support for building and configuring DataViz charts and graphs. We also have a couple of surprises up our sleeves, so stay tuned and be sure to join us for the official release in March.

Grid Frozen Columns

For many of you, these feature needs no introduction, and is one that you’ve been eagerly awaiting for some time. I’m happy to share that we’ll be delivering frozen columns support in the Kendo UI Grid for our Q1 release. Believe it or not, this is a complex feature that requires some top-to-bottom enhancements to the Grid, but we’re excited to be able to provide this oft-requested feature, and do so in a way that keeps your Grids nice and snappy.

Kendo UI GeoViz RTM

For Kendo UI DataViz, we’re planning deliver the RTM for the new Mapping and spatial visualization features we introduced as BETA in Q3 2013. This includes features such as:

  • Load-on-demand functionality for shape layers
  • An improved Drawing API with Canvas support
  • A “Bubble Chart” layer
  • DataSource support for markers
  • Keyboard navigation
  • and more!

Diagramming Control

In Q1, we’ll also be delivering a brand new Diagramming control as a part of Kendo UI DataViz. This new widget will include support for Visio- and OmniGraffle-like visualizations, including flowcharts, organization charts and more.

Android 4.x Theme Updates

For Kendo UI Mobile, one of the things we’re working on this quarter is an overhaul to our Android theme for Kendo UI, which will include some Android 4.x-specific theme updates and maybe even the introduction of an Android-specific widget or two to Kendo UI Mobile. Stay tuned to find out more!

The items above are some of our “big rocks” for Q1, but there’s a lot more we’re working on. In addition to the items noted above, you can expect that we’ll deliver a number of other requested widgets, features and enhancements in our next release including a few new Kendo UI Web widgets, and even more Chart types for Kendo UI DataViz. For more information about additional features we plan to deliver, head on over to the Roadmap page on KendoUI.com.

The Kendo UI roadmap is a living document. Even though we’re focusing our efforts around the themes I shared here today, we’re always looking to deliver maximum value to our customers with each release. With that in mind, you should consider the public roadmap published at KendoUI.com to be a living document, as well. There’s always a chance that other key and requested features will find their way into our Q3 release, so keep an eye on that space over the coming months.

And as always, we want your feedback! If you’re interested in weighing in on the roadmap moving forward, head on over to our public UserVoice forum to view, comment and vote on ideas, or even add your own. We watch this forum regularly, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see in a future release!


brandon-satrom
About the Author

Brandon Satrom

Brandon is the founder of Carrot Pants Press, a maker education and publishing company, the founder and CEO of Tangible Labs and an avid tinkerer.

Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.