Tab system update and online manual

Hope you’ve all had a fantastic Easter! We’ve been conducting a number of focus groups over the last few weeks, and have made some final tweaks to the tab system. In particular, we have simplified the look of the tab bar, and created a new button to provide access to the tab sharing features.


We’ve just completed the online manual and frequently asked questions page, which explains with visual aids all of the functions that Protopage provides.

Also included in this update are a number of assorted bug fixes and performance optimizations. You may notice that we’ve tightened the appearance of the widget shadows, so that the shadows look more pleasing when in combination with lighter background color choices.


And finally, we’ve introduced a new setting (accessible from the ‘Colors/Settings’ button on the toolbar). If you tick the ‘Hide read headlines’ checkbox, your news widgets will hide read items instead of displaying them with the default ‘grayed out’ look.

43 Responses to “Tab system update and online manual”

  1. Jeff Says:

    Please bring back the Mark As Read feature. I\’ve found myself using Protopage a lot less since it was removed. I have lots of content and size my windows such that I can see all the feeds when I\’d select Mark As Read, but now that it\’s gone, I don\’t bother using the scrollbar to see the feeds that don\’t show up in the main window.

  2. Protopage Team Says:

    Hi Jeff,

    We had more people asking for that feature to be removed than wanting it to stay. What we’ve done instead is to provide a new ‘hide read headlines’ option, which should provide you with similar functionality. Note that there are keyboard shortcuts in the feed reader which you can use: pressing ‘X’ on your keyboard will mark all items in a feed as read.

  3. Steve Morton Says:

    Like Jeff, I would love to see the return of Mark As Read.

    Your latest ‘Hide read headlines’ feature only appears to work if you use the built in News Reader, which I don’t use because it slows down the reading of several news feeds.

    Please reconsider including the mark as read feature as an option.

    Steve

  4. Protopage Team Says:

    Ah, so you like to click to articles directly, instead of reading them in the feed reader… How about if we made the headlines gray out/become hidden when they are clicked directly from the widget?

  5. Jeff Says:

    Maybe it’s just a matter of me not understanding how it now works. I have a widget that’s filled with a bunch of feeds. The widget shows a short blurb on the latest 3 (default was 7, but I changed it to 3) stories. When there’s a story I’m interested in, I click on it and a new Firefox tab opens up with the full story. I read it and close the tab. The story still shows up in the protopage feed regardless of the status of the ‘hide read headlines’ option. It sounds like the ‘hide read headlines’ would work but it’s not clear to me how to use it or the ‘X’ keyboard shortcut you’re referring to.

  6. Simon Smillie Says:

    As per the Protopage Team’s post above (April 15th, 2007 at 7:17 am), that is exactly spot on. I don’t use the built in feed reader and prefer to read the articles in a new window, but have found that doing it this way means the article never gets marked as read. It is therefore difficult to keep track of read and unread items, please implement the “read” feature for those of us that do not use the inbuilt feed reader.

    Thanks.

  7. mentos Says:

    Yes, I’m also one of those who REALLY miss the mark as read feature; I can’t understand why it was taken away. I’d have no problem if “Mark as read” were reduced to a little “x” next to the widget title, but please bring it back. I can’t see how this feature would annoy anyone not using it and it would definitely be helpful for people who do.

    I don’t use the internal reader either, because I think it’s more efficient middle-clicking each of the interesting headlines and have them load in the background and let Firefox render them (especially because I use certain extensions that ‘enhance’ my browsing experience).

    Please bring back this little feature. All the other new features you introduced are all nice and well, but personally I think the mark as read feature was the most useful and I’d like to see it again before diving into any of the new gimmicks.

    In any case, thanks for the great work!

  8. Frank Fucile Says:

    Hello Protopage Team…

    Just today experienced a strange problem….when I log into my Protopage the entire site goes “blank”…

    I have tried a couple of different PCs and browsers…and I am still experiencing the same problem…

    I did the usual things by clearing cache, deleting history files, etc…

    Any idea what is happening???

    thanks
    frank

  9. nakliyat Says:

    thank you very nıce muck vary very comment…

  10. pndxtr Says:

    Is there a way to has something from your restricted page be added to your main page so we don’t have to switch back and forth?

  11. toto Says:

    Yes please, let us go directly to the article. Most of the time the feed reader can only display a snippet!
    It’sa pain to have to click twice to see the article, and then when you get back to your protopage it’s all cavered by the reader so you need to click once again to close it.

    The other solution which I use most is to middle-clickt he links. It take me directly tot he article. But the downside is it doesn’t mark article as read :(

  12. Protopage Team Says:

    We’ve just released an update to address this issue.

    Items are now marked read when you click directly to the news items.

    Most people prefer to use the feed reader for blogs where the full text of the article is available, but not to use the feed reader when there are only headlines and it is more desirable to go straight to the web page.

    You can SHIFT click articles to go directly to them (which opens a new window), or in Firefox and IE7 you can CTRL click articles and they will open directly in new tabs.

    Also note that there is an option in the Colors / Settings screen to let you disable the internal feed reader, so that all clicks go directly to the news article web pages.

  13. Jeff Says:

    THANK YOU! That’s perfect.

  14. Simon Smillie Says:

    Fantastic, it works perfectly. Thank you Protopage Team.
    It’s nice to see that some developers actually do listen to their users.

  15. Steve Morton Says:

    Hi
    Great improvement, but like others I would just like some facility of being able to mark items as read (and then disappear) that I have no interest in reading….

    Nearly there
    Steve

  16. Steve Morton Says:

    Oh and if you are wondering why this option/latest change is popular then it allows us to use smaller windows/boxes for various feeds, thus allowing us to cram in more on our screens. Wonderful!!

  17. nakliyat Says:

    thank you very very nıce thank you very very much….

  18. Steve Morton Says:

    Is it just me, but has the minus option disappeared? The one to minimise windows on your page. And when you moused over the bar it would drop down. Can’t see this on any of mine now?

    Steve

  19. Mythus Says:

    First of all I want to thank you for the awesome job with V3!

    One thing I miss is a proper way to put a webtracker in the page. I tried in different ways but none of them worked (using http://www.sitemeter.com/).

  20. Gabe Says:

    I’ve started using Protopage as a “virtual desktop” since most of my content has been moving online. Bookmarks work to organize my commonly used links, but what would be great is to drop a small, icon sized widget that can I would be able to edit the location link, and arrange them on my Protopage desktop like I would my Windows desktop. Then I could move from computer to computer and just pull up my Protopage desktop and press on. Again, bookmarks serves this purpose, but individual icons would be even better. Any ideas how I could do this?

  21. Sampo Says:

    Hi!
    Excellent site, keep it up!

    Is it possible to completely disable the “mark as read” feature. I am sharing my startpage with many users and it is annoying that a story read by one user will be marked as read for all users. My goal is to share one page with many users, not create separate pages for all users.

    This feature is a kind of a “deal breaker” for me, since I am on a deadline, and currently choosing the best site to use.

  22. Kletterhalle Says:

    Excellent site.

    Very cool.

    See you,

    Peter from Germany :-)

  23. sampo Says:

    Is protopage dead? Does anyone read this blog?

  24. Martin Arnold Says:

    I’m reading! Protopage is alive, I just spoke to the developers a few days ago. They’re busy on new features.

  25. avsa adasi Says:

    thank you

  26. Alec Says:

    Any updates? New features coming?

  27. Protopage Team Says:

    We’re working on a couple of important new features – they’re going to be a surprise though so don’t ask us what or when just yet :)

  28. FreeBee Says:

    Well well, hello Team,

    You haven’t been sitting still over the last 18 months, have you? I haven’t been able to show my ‘face’ a lot – not at all, actually – but I didn’t forget about you guys… Great to be here again!

    Will take me a while to get used to all that has changed over here, but at the very least that proves that you’re still doing ‘it’:)

    Keep that up!

  29. FreeBee Says:

    You telling us not to ask what or when causes me to ask you two things…

    1. WHAT are you up to right now…
    2. WHEN can we expect to see it?

    (Don’t tell me what not to think or I won’t be able to not think about it…)

  30. Protopage Team Says:

    Haha don’t think of driving to the 24h Krispy Kreme booth for glazed donuts!

  31. FreeBee Says:

    Argh, shoot, you got me!!! :)

  32. Simon Smillie Says:

    How come the Protopage team are posting comments on their own blog entry that was initially posted in April 2007?

    I thought announcements (no matter how small) such as “We’re working on a couple of important new features”, would have been posted in a new entry. This would do two things, one make the blog look like it is still alive, and two, alert those of us who have a news feed set up for it.

    By the way are these new features having any affect on my news feeds and e-mail widgets, as they keep being “temporarily unavailable”. It seems coincidental that I lose access to all widgets, regardless of which provider they’re pointing to (both at home and at work).

  33. Steve Morton Says:

    Hi Simon
    I’ve been having the same problem with RSS feeds both last night and tonight, although they did work during today (office hours)

    Yeah I agree with you regarding the comments from the team, a fresh thread every so often wouldn’t go a miss….

    Steve

  34. FreeBee Says:

    @Simon and Steve:

    If you look closely, the Team comments were actually responses to questions in this same thread, so I don’t see why they would have to be in a new thread… Unless you also want them to post a useless message like “We’ve answered your questions in ” in this thread as well.

    @Steve only: I’ve had problems the last two nights as well. I asked them about it, and Andre told me they had some problems with their datacentre… Apparently, they haven’t quite solved it yet, but I’m sure they’ll get it working again. This issue isn’t as permanent as Simon’s message implies, so his problem is a different thing I don’t know about.

    Regards,

    FreeBee

  35. FreeBee Says:

    Oh, I forgot to mention something else: Protopage comes free of charge AND free of advertising. And they once told me, they want to keep it that way. This is possible because they also have other business which generates the funds. That’s what the commercial/press inquiries are for, I guess.

    For everything there may be a good reason. :)

    Regards again,
    FreeBee

  36. Rambytes Says:

    Hi,

    I’m a new user with Protopage and i’ve read all the comment here and like me, it will be great to click a button to make “mark all item read”.

    Like me, i have more than 30 rss feed and I don’t want to click EACH of the link to make gray/dissapear (it’s 200 clicks, a waste of time).

    Why not make a option in each tabs and “mark all item as read”?

    Ho, whe have the “X” option… but again, it’s more than 200 clicks !!!

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  38. luiz andre Says:

    Hi all, why we canot import a restricted tab from a diferent user I have the password inside my protopage??

    It was possible in the past, its very useful to make things like freinds intranet.

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