V3 fixes released

We’ve had a rapid design session, and made some changes to the interface in order to make things clearer.

The number one cause of confusion has been the new tab system. We had not made it clear that tabs migrated from the previous version of Protopage would be placed in different categories according to whether they had been made ‘public’ or ‘private’.

Because of this, many of you had fairly assumed that your tabs had disappeared, because the old ‘twister icon’ did not indicate well enough that it was possible to see other categories. We’ve changed the way the category tab looks, so now it’s more obvious that there is more than one category available. We introduced the “(2 of 6)” style display to indicate there are more tabs, and created a new button (the double down arrow) to indicate that more categories can be revealed.

The second cause of confusion was that we had made it far too easy to accidentally delete a tab. The ‘Delete this tab’ button was too close to the ‘Save’ button. We’ve now seperated them clearly, and as an additional precaution, it is now impossible to delete a tab without first deleting the widgets within it.

Finally, we have fixed the bugs with the ‘search tab’ in Internet Explorer, fixed the issue with adding widgets and bookmarks to your page, fixed the internal feed reader layering issue, and some other miscellaneous bugs too. Please continue to let us know if you discover any further bugs using our contact form here.

Due to popular demand, we’ve also just released a new group of page settings giving you more options within your Protopage, including:

  • An option to open articles directly in new windows by default (you can currently just SHIFT-click the article to open it in a new window, or CTRL-click the article to open it in a new tab).
  • An option to disable the article preview bubbles when news feeds are hovered.
  • An option to disable icons in bookmark panels, to allow a more compact set of links to be displayed.

These settings are available by clicking ‘Colors and Settings’ on the toolbar.

We’ve also just released a new keyboard shortcut to launch articles into new windows from the new feed reader.

Thanks for all the helpful feedback and bug reports coming in – please use our contact form to tell us what you’d like to see Protopage do in future, so that we can record, tally and prioritize new features according to demand.

Please also send us a message if you are experiencing any bugs or issues with your page – we’re here to help.

19 Responses to “V3 fixes released”

  1. Jared Says:

    Will there be a way to collapse the read, crossed out entries in the Feeds window? I would really miss the “Mark as read” button, but even failing that, I would like to not have to look at the greyed out items that I marked as read afterwards in the quick view. I think it’s great to show all the previously read items in the actual rss viewer, but in the small preview thing, I only want to see titles if they are new and I haven’t read them yet.

  2. james Says:

    good job – keep it up!

    show off your PP!

  3. Ian Says:

    Still having RSS trouble. On Day 1 I couldn’t re-size the RSS widget. On day 2, in the end I deleted it and created a new one for Savage Chickens.

    Lo and behold when I clicked on the feed within the Savage Chickens feed, it opened up the news-reader and all the old items were there as well, although they didn’t appear on the Newsfeed widget.

    Now the widget only shows the SC feed: is this because on day 2 it was still picking up the ones I had deleted, and now it isn’t because I had earlier deleted them?

    I then added the Dilbert feed, and was (as before) instructed to ‘drag and drop this widget on to your page’. Did that but it wasn’t there – apparently. In fact the Dilbert feed WAS there but it was in the first new widget, which is still entitled ‘Savage Chickens’ because that was the one I started with.

    I know a lot of work went into this, and I know it is free, and I’m sure we’re all very grateful, but I would have enjoyed testing it!

  4. Protopage Team Says:

    Ian, you’re the only one who has reported a problem like this, and we are unable to reproduce your issue. Our tests seem to indicate that everything is working fine with resizing, adding and reading cartoon widgets.

  5. james Says:

    Ian
    what browser are you using? have yout tried clearing your cache?
    all these things work fine on Firefox…

  6. Protopage Team Says:

    We dropped the ‘Mark all as read’ feature because most people found it too fiddly. We’ll have a think about how to bring it back in a more pleasing form.

  7. Damian Says:

    Excellent — thanks for listening!

  8. MacsBaine Says:

    Change is hard but I love it that you all are so quick and hard working. Companies I pay good money to don’t work as hard as you do. Thank you!

  9. MaSC Says:

    I would like to see news feed articles to open in the side pane of the news reader and/or a window on the protopage rather than a new window. That is the one thing that is keeping me away from protopage.

  10. Protopage Team Says:

    Thanks, MacsBaine. MaSC – we’re not exactly sure what you mean, but if you give use a bit of extra info we’ll look into it.

  11. Al Says:

    Thank you so much! This update fixed many of the things I wasn’t overjoyed about in V3 (even though I loved the upgrade in general!). Still a few constructive criticisms: I see your comment above about the “mark all as read” but put me down as one of the people who really miss it. I like to clear my RSS feeds when I am done reading them, and the grey-ed out strikethrough isn’t ‘clean’ enough for me (I guess a minor quibble!).

    The other issue I am still having is the internal RSS reader continuing to pop-up underneath many of my widgets (despite your note above to the contrary) – on one tab it pops up under all, on another it works fine, on another it pops up under only half of them. I don’t see any rhyme or reason why it pops up over some and under others, there is no consistency between bookmark widgets, RSS widgets, etc. I can deal now, since I can check “open RSS in a new window” but I would like to try the internal reader out and I can’t with this issue! :)

    Even with those complaints I still love V3 overall! Good work guys!

  12. Brownspank Says:

    I wish the “Open news items directly in new windows” option also automatically cross out the news item itself. That, I believe would be the logical result, since most users opt for that to bypass the feed reader. :)

    Other than that, great quick update!

  13. Sam Says:

    I’d like to see the tab menu have a fixed position. I miss the navigation moving with me down the page so I don’t have to scroll back up to move to another tab. Really saved a lot of time.

    Otherwise, this is an incredible piece of work. Nothing short of elegant.

  14. Julie Says:

    Thank you!!

  15. Al Says:

    My feed reader pop-under issue has been fixed – thanks!

  16. Jane Perzyk Says:

    Is anyone having a problem uploading photos? I have tried on two different occasions to upload photos, each time selecting the option to fit to the widget. On both occasions, I get a photo widget so huge that I could scroll to infinity and never see the end of the box. In addition, there is no delete function available. The best I have been able to do is to “dock” the bad picture widgets to a private category since I can’t delete them. Any thoughts?

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