dev blog

We just added a column for campaigns in the shout distribution and widget media tabs — that’s really useful if you’ve got a lot of similarly-named items going to different groups. It’ll be on the search results lists soon as well.

Been wanting to try out Shoutlet? 14-day demo accounts are now available. You won’t be able to actually send e-mails, text messages, and all that, but you’ll get a nice idea of how everything works.

We updated the look of the shout and widget create screens a few weeks ago, and now the distribute and track screens have been redrawn to be a lot easier to use. Micro-searches are coming to the distribute screens this fall.

Do you use Shoutlet and Salesforce? You can now put together a video and send an SMS to your Salesforce contacts by adding Shoutlet to your AppExchange. (Enterprise, Developer, Unlimited, Force.com editions only.)

click thumbnails for full-sized screenshots

I spent a little time last week considering reports design; Deedee shared her thoughts.

962 YOU SHALL PASS! -jmac
958 DELETED SHOUTS! YOU SHALL NOT PASS! -jmac
947 carousel has been punished for being false and not an object at all times :) -ryan
928 really fixing the carousel height, i mean it this time -miriam
921 working on jims reports, miles to go. goddamn, little man, quit poking me -miriam
888 THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE (media file associated with the widget) -jmac
876 farglesnatch -ryan
869 durr -jmac
859 And the yt API integration LIVES!!! -ryan
850 rapidly trying to drain the bottom of the boat with a turkey baster -jmac
749 One Comma To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them! -jmac
745 trixy trixy hobbitses -jmac

miscellaneous little stuff

• added a pre-coded tag to e-mail distro, so you don’t have to bother with the <a href=”"> things when you’re adding a permalink
• took out “add a group” from the home page buttons–the “manage files” button that replaced it is more useful (and highly requested)
• fixed some occasional horizontal scroll bugs
• added “CST” next to the scheduling calendar
• tightened up our complexity requirements for better password security

new carousel design

• looks much fresher
• more powerful
• see full-size

reports

• lots of server and database improvements are speeding things up
• new maps are easier to understand, print
• total views/downloads by month, day, and hour now available for widgets and podcasts
• see full-size

new media widget

• works great for single videos
• supports much smaller dimensions than the podcast widget

oh and one more thing…

publish to your own YouTube account

You can still publish to lots of other sites, but now you send directly to your own YouTube account — which is really handy if you use different ones for different campaigns. The first time you use this feature, you’ll be taken to YouTube to double-check the credentials, but it’s only a couple of extra clicks… and only that first time.

Sometimes, our usual dev team McGuffin solution (”adding a little WQF to it”) isn’t sufficient, and we have to escalate to “Ah, yeah. Well, that wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem, but you see, someone spilled a diet Coke on the flux capacitor last week so it’s gonna take longer than two days to do $InsanelyBigProgrammingTask.” Not surprisingly, then, we were kinda excited to get a note from the ThinkGeek overlords announcing that they’re now shipping said flux capacitors. Read the fine print, though! It’s a replica. For that shocking price tag, we could easily build an interocitor or an oscillation overthruster, things that would much more useful…

Not really worthy of a blog post, but here’s a list of little fixes from the last two days that just got promoted to live:

• cancel buttons gone from everything but pop-ups
• save as draft / save changes buttons are now just ’save changes’ throughout
• fixed an unclicky tab set on video create-distribute-track
• totals on audio reports added
• tag fields now have help text about “using quotes” for “multiple-word tags”
• header search button now more visible
• fixed the page height on a fully-expanded contact view

keep on truckin’!

…and when I say “today,” of course you know I mean, “last week.” It’s been busy here–as if it’s ever not–and we’re so eager to move on to the next to-do item that we’re in danger of blogrot already! Oops. A lot of the changes are design-related, so you’ve probably already noticed.

new!

• Were you getting a little information anxiety on the shout and widget forms? Us too. We’ve streamlined those pages, so that similar things are grouped a little better, and you don’t have to see the advanced options unless you want to. More complicated items are broken down into steps, so it’s easier to grok what you’re doing. We’ll be making even more improvements to these soon.
• View and manage files: It’s pretty basic for now, but click “settings & account” on the tippy-top navigation, then click “edit” to the right of your client. We’ll be building more around this in the future, so you can check out your storage and bandwidth information.
• Continuing the evolution towards nicely-printing reports, long lists of things (contacts, links) should print better.
• We added embed code to RSS feed distribution, so that it’s easier for you to add a “subscribe now” button and a RSS-enabled icon (the one up in the address bar) to your site.
• Using the Pro Edition? Now you can put your own logo on the podcast player.
• Another database server really sped things up.

Here’s a before-and-after of the new form style. The old ones were nice, but the new are nicer. Click the thumbnails to see full size.