formatpixel – blog

We are happy to announce stacknflow has now gone into a public beta phase! All existing formatpixel users can login with your same login details.

Naturally all new users can also sign up for a stacknflow account so everyone can join the party.

Collect, design and share,get started here!

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Test stacknflow player:
http://www.stacknflow.com/v.php?i=2#/2/0

OK, so its official, fp2 has been named and will now be known as Stacknflow’!

We’ve been chucking names around for months simply because fp2 was turning into quite a different app to what it started out as. When we started writing fp2 we took what lessons we had learnt from formatpixel and started afresh.

The thinking behind the new build is to let people quickly collect together visual elements and present them in their own way. The term ‘Stack’ should be thought about as a stack of individual cards, each card can contain images, text, video and graphics and be completely different sizes. Once a stack is complete it can then, like formatpixel projects, be shared over the internet.

Another BIG feature that we would like to announce is PDF export. Yep, we’ve listened to all the requests for saving projects out as PDF files and we are happy to say that Stacknflow will allow you to export stacks as multi-page, screen based PDF documents

As always, watch this space as we hope to launch a private Beta programme at the end of September.
We’re getting there!

fp2dev update: The colour selector now has the option to colour pick from anywhere on your page. This means you’ll be able to easily match colours to your imported images. Keyboard shortcut’s are also going to be a main part of the editor to help speed up your designing process.

formatpixel update: Published projects are now Twittered! Every time you publish a project a twitter message is sent out hitting a larger audience. Be sure to categorizes your projects as it will use this in the message for twitter # tagging.

This is the first post hopefully of many which we will use to keep you posted on how the brand new version of formatpixel is going. We will refer to it as fp2, it’s dev name, but as we have been building we are realising that it’s becoming a very different tool to what formatpixel has been. As such we are considering launching fp2 as a sister site rather than an update for formatpixel’s current system.

We’ve been developing fp2 for a while now and started from scratch. Every part and feature is being built from the ground up. Already we have addressed some of your comments about fonts and are pleased to tell you that fp2 will support multi-fonts. Also the ability to rotate any object. All this is done through an enhanced user tools. Another new feature is to allow each page to be different sizes within the same project. This means you could start with a square page, then move on to a rectangle and so on.

If you would like to be considered as a beta tester then please let us know either through this blog or contact us at team[at]formatpixel.com with the subject line ‘fp2 beta’.

To all existing users of formatpixel, the new release will be available to you all without the need of re-register

above: early screen shot showing customisable backgrounds!

So there you have it, our first post about what we are up to! We know that it’s been a while with any sort of update and we have been banging on about a new version so we hope this post will show you that things are moving along

Every now and then we pull off reports from the database to Ooo and Arrr over numbers and see what’s happening, making sure things are ticking over nicely.

Just to let you know a little about the community, to date there are over 9300 formatpixel users who between them have created over 9100 projects and 7300 of them are currently active! The image servers currently holds just over 10,500 bit’s of media and over the last 6 months has served up 979,135 bit’s of media for viewers of formatpixel projects.

We are still seeing a gradual increase from month to month which is encouraging.

And in case your wondering what we are up to, well apart from sitting around drinking tea and dunking biscuits, we are hard at word building the next version for formatpixel. It’s going to be a complete rethink and rewrite. We are taking on board all the comments and feedback we have had and hope to create something a little bit special …

Happy publishing