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.

Happy new year from all at Protopage! We’ve been releasing incremental performance improvements over the last two weeks – hopefully you’ve noticed the difference. We’ll continue to optimize the platform for maximum speed.

We’re currently working on a number of things including a Frequently Asked Questions page. Look out for more new features in 2007!

A few of you have written in about Firefox using some extra CPU time. We’ve just released a set of tweaks that will increase performance and lower CPU usage to zero when the page is idle. We’re also working on further improvements including a new caching layer which will decrease page load times.

We also just released a new feature for those with blogs. Protopage will replace the default CNN news feed with the news feed from your own blog. It will do this automatically when you link to us (it detects the page from which new users arrive, and sets their new Protopage up by autodetecting the news feed from your blog). Consider it as us returning the favor by automatically linking back to you.

We’ve had a few bugs related to data migration, tabs and sharing/importing of tabs. All of these issues should now be resolved. We have now made it impossible to lose widgets by preventing tab deletions unless they are empty. We have run a script so that any widgets from any accidentally deleted tabs should now be restored. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any issues via our contact form here.

By the way, you can drag widgets to different tabs. An arrow will appear above any tab that you drag a widget to, as illustrated in the screenshot.

Also note that the default tab which will be selected when you load your Protopage will be the first tab in the first category in your Protopage. You can reorder tabs and categories simply by dragging and dropping them.

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.

Please note that you can click the ‘twister’ to reveal more categories. This seems to be the most common reason for not being able to find tabs imported from your old Protopage.

We’re also getting feedback in from people who have accidentally deleted tabs. We thought this might happen, so we took precautions. Any widgets lost due to tabs being removed can be ‘undeleted’ – we’re working on the user interface for this now.

Some of you have also had trouble finding panels that you had kept in the old ‘widget dock’ – these should have been migrated into your page under a new tab. Please let us know if you have any trouble locating them.

We’ve also had a lot of requests to turn off the icons next to bookmarks – we’re working on that too.

You may find that your old color scheme isn’t as suited to V3 as it was to the old version of Protopage. You can make your page look like the screenshots on this blog by clicking ‘Colors and Settings’ and then ‘Load defaults’.

Please do write in and let us know if you have any problems with the migration of your page to V3 – you can contact us at our feedback form here.

UPDATE: We’re working on our first mini maintenance release now. We’ll post again today.

UPDATE 2: We’ve made 9 mini maintenance releases in the last 48 hours – thank you for reporting bugs and please continue to do so here. We are still working on undelete / migration issues and will post again soon. All data is backed up so all issues should be resolved.

Welcome to Protopage V3. An enormous THANK YOU to our loyal users and to everyone that has written in with comments, suggestions and bug reports – your support and feedback continues to be critical in shaping the future of Protopage.

We’re pleased to announce the following brand new features:

The new feed reader auto-detects feeds which only provide headlines and summaries, and displays them in an “article summaries” mode (try it for a feed such as CNN.com). It also uniqely remembers and orders your news feeds according to the frequency with which you read them.

Cartoon mode: see the largest image from any particular feed as a single image, which is perfect for cartoon news feeds.

Thumbnail mode: see thumbnail grids of not only Flickr/photo feeds, but of any news feed.

Video podcast support

Audio podcast support, with integrated podcast player

You can now organize your page by creating tabs and categories. If you want to use Protopage as a quick and easy web page publishing tool, you can make your tabs public so that the whole world can see them. You can also assign passwords to groups of tabs so that only certain people will be able to view or edit them.

A hierarchical todo list, with edit-in-place and drag-and-drop – not only within lists but between different todo list widgets.

Protopage launches with 270 preloaded widgets, including 96 games, 71 finance widgets and 26 sports score widgets.

For developers: our integrated online widget showcase and development environment features revision control and source code diffs. There is a visual designer for the configuration forms of widgets, with template based attribute injection to enable configurable widgets to be created with no knowledge of Javascript or XML. We’d love for you to create your own widgets, share them with the users of Protopage, and hear back from your users on your widgets’ comment forms! You can sign up for our widget development system at http://widgets.protopage.com

It’s now easier than ever before to add new content and widgets to your Protopage. There are wizards for adding news feeds, podcasts, video podcasts, cartoon feeds and photo thumbnail feeds, as well as a directory of hundreds of news publications and blogs to choose from.

No more clicking the ‘edit’ button to change a sticky note! You can now simply click to edit the text directly inside the widget. (Note: This only works for our new plain-text sticky notes. If you use a Rich Text / HTML sticky note, you still need to use the ‘edit’ button so that you can use all of the Rich Text formatting control buttons and options).

For quick access to your favourite search engines, such as Wikipedia, you can use the new search box in the top right corner of your Protopage. You can choose from our directory of built in search engines, or add your own.

With the introduction of support for the Opera browser, you can now even view your Protopage on your Nintento Wii!

Mac users: we highly recommend you use the either the Firefox or Opera browser for the best Protopage experience.

Thank you for being a Protopage early adopter – and thank you again to everyone that has written in and supported us.

We’re now working on new features including the ability to export the contents of your Protopage. We record and tally feature requests sent in so that we can prioritize the introduction of new features according to demand.

Please continue to send us your comments, suggestions, bug reports and feedback so that we can continue to make Protopage everything you want it to be!

We’re now in mid “launch sequence”, and we will launch today (Monday 27th November). Accounts are being migrated to V3 as we speak. The image below is a taste of V3. We count 30 major new features.

See you on the other side.

Until recently, much of the design of Protopage has been in flux. There have been several major aspects of v3 that we have redesigned twice over after receiving feedback from test groups. We have also made the decision to extend the functionality beyond our original plans. Earlier timeline predictions required guesses as to how many design iterations we would have to complete in order to get Protopage just right. Now that we have locked down the design, the timeline is far more predictable.

We know that many of you have been keenly awaiting version 3 and we thank you for your patience. Because of the deep structural changes to the application, we’ve been forced to batch all of our new features into one ‘big bang’ release. After v3 goes live, we will resume our regular weekly blog postings and release new features week-by-week as soon as they are developed.

While we’re completing Protopage v3, we thought you might enjoy playing with our new mascot, Protopuppy! You can try Protopuppy and see full instructions for adding it to your page here:
http://www.protopage.com/protopuppy

If you have an RSS or ATOM news feed that requires a username and password, it will now work inside Protopage.

If it is not already, please ensure the feed URL is in the following format:

http://username:password@example.com

We will also support secure http (https://) feeds when version 3 is released.