formatpixel – blog

Things are still moving along with fp2 development. Here’s some new screens showing the editor, image bank and spread planner.

Above – The editor, shown with text properties panel

Above – Image bank, will allow uploading from your hard drive or from a URL

Above – Spread planner, the focus of projects will be shifted more onto the spread planner than before. User’s will navigate to this first after opening a project to choose which pages to edit.

This weekend has seen the beginning of adding the new skin to the editor. To wet your appetite here’s a couple of screen grabs. As you can see from the above screen things are a lot more streamlined compared to the existing editor.

Even with this minimal interface, you will be able to access all the new features. There is now a direct import for YouTube videos to be placed into your projects which will allow you to scale, rotate and resize them, something the current editor does not support.

As every, you can follow the up-to-date in’s and out’s on the FP2 Dev twitter at: www.twitter.com/fp2dev/

More screen grabs will be posted as things more on!

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

We have just updated the editor and player (0.173.03) to load transparent PNG’s correctly! They will now display with their transparent settings in tact. (Thanks to eblurb for pointing it out!!)

This fix has been rolled out across online and offline players.

Apologies for the delay in this fix!
Happy publishing