KickApps Recent Updates
Check this page for updates on the latest features, fixes, and enhancements to the KickApps platform.
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7/03/08
What's New
Widget Studio Updates
- 31 crispy new fonts: Widget artists can now celebrate their independence from the two-font system! With 31 new fonts, rendered oh so crispily by our new font renderer, you've got a new world of design possibilities at your fingertips, so put on some tea, fire up the Studio, and make some widgets!
KickApps List Widget with new fonts. Now that's crisp. - Enhanced YouTube support: Now you can play any YouTube feed in the Video Player. To play a single video from YouTube, just copy the URL of the YouTube page that you found it on and paste into your vid player's Feed/Media input field.
- Linkable text: Click actions for text components enable you to link your text to any URL.
- Opacity setting available on shape component: Translucent rectangles are now within your grasp. Don't hold back!
6/25/08
What's New
Widget Studio Updates
- Video Playlist: Now you can create a TV station for your community! Check out this one from the Dub and Reggae social network!
- Mix it up with our new Audio Player:
This one features an optional playlist. By removing the playlist and the info panel above the playbar, you can make one of these sleek little numbers:
- Feed URL parameterized
- Say you make a widget that you like so much that you want to re-use it to render different feeds. Until now, the only way to do that would be to use Save As... to save new instances of it in the Widget Studio. That could get tedious if you wanted to make tens or hundreds of copies. To address this issue, we've introduced a new parameter into the FlashVars of your widget embed code:
mediaURL. To power your widget with a different feed, simply point this parameter to the new feed's URL. Just make sure to escape the feed URL (tip: use this encoder with the escape option) and then append it to both the FlashVars <param> and the FlashVars parameter of the <embed> in your widget embed code, like so:&mediaURL={your escaped feed URL here}
- Say you make a widget that you like so much that you want to re-use it to render different feeds. Until now, the only way to do that would be to use Save As... to save new instances of it in the Widget Studio. That could get tedious if you wanted to make tens or hundreds of copies. To address this issue, we've introduced a new parameter into the FlashVars of your widget embed code:
6/16/08
What's New
New Reporting Launched
- Our new reporting interface is out of beta! Now you can view reports on traffic, members, media, widgets, and feeds within our simple, easy-to-use interface.
Upload Images Into the Site Styler
- Click the new Upload button to apply images from your hard drive to your Site Styler theme.
Updates to Widget Studio Beta
- New Video Player
- The new Video Player features an optional video information panel that appears on hover and an optional in-screen menu that includes a thumbnail carousel of other videos in its feed, along with buttons to share the widget, view more videos, and rate the current video.
- The new Video Player features an optional video information panel that appears on hover and an optional in-screen menu that includes a thumbnail carousel of other videos in its feed, along with buttons to share the widget, view more videos, and rate the current video.
- MySpace bubble
- You may have noticed that the links in widgets embedded on MySpace don't work. That's because MySpace blocks JavaScript link-outs. This affects all widgets embedded on MySpace, not just KickApps'. As a workaround to this issue, we've implemented a small balloon that pops up over your widget when a link is clicked. Users can copy the target URL from this bubble and paste it into their browsers' address bars to visit the page in question.
- You may have noticed that the links in widgets embedded on MySpace don't work. That's because MySpace blocks JavaScript link-outs. This affects all widgets embedded on MySpace, not just KickApps'. As a workaround to this issue, we've implemented a small balloon that pops up over your widget when a link is clicked. Users can copy the target URL from this bubble and paste it into their browsers' address bars to visit the page in question.
- Usability Enhancements
- We continue to make incremental usability enhancements as we iterate on the Widget Studio. Highlights from last week's build include scrollbars on the stage for navigating large widgets, and a Preview button that launches a live, interactive preview of your widget directly on the stage.
- We continue to make incremental usability enhancements as we iterate on the Widget Studio. Highlights from last week's build include scrollbars on the stage for navigating large widgets, and a Preview button that launches a live, interactive preview of your widget directly on the stage.
Performance Improvements
We continue to work hard to accelerate your pages. Here are some specific steps we took in the last build:
- Combined JavaScript and CSS files to reduce HTTP requests
- Reduced the number of media items from 25 to 20 on list pages; message board pages now paginate after 20 posts as well
- Removed JOINs in a number of our database tables
- Created additional CNAMEs for serving JS, CSS, and images to increase the number of simultaneous connections in Firefox 2, Safari 8, and IE 6 and 7.
- Related media on Play Pages is now being rendered using AJAX to reduce initial page weight.
- Widgets and Feeds are now being served from Akamai's high-speed Edge network. To accelerate your widgets and feeds, make sure that your widget embed code and Feed URLs are pointing at http://serve.a-widget.com, rather than http://affiliate.kickapps.com or your own domain/subdomain.
RSS Chicklets in Address Bars
- And finally, you'll now find that RSS chicklets appear in your browser's address bar when viewing list or search pages. It's just one more way to help distribute your content and drive traffic to your site.
5/16/08
What's New
- You can now add live text and video Chat and Instant Messaging to your community, powered by Userplane. Turn on this feature in the AC under Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Features.
Userplane Chat Window
- New widgets in Widget Studio Beta
- Video Player Lite: a simple, lightweight video player with optional playbar. Fully customizable within the Studio.
KickApps Video Player Lite with volume control exposed
- 3-D Slideshow : a three dimensional carousel populated with photos and/or video screenshots. Click on a video screenshot and it will play within the widget.
KickApps3-D Slideshow Widget, powered by a feed of Flickr public photos tagged "color"
- Video Player Lite: a simple, lightweight video player with optional playbar. Fully customizable within the Studio.
- Enhancements to Widget Studio Beta
- There's now a standard pull-down Menu that you can use to create new widgets, open existing ones, save, and preview.
- We've replaced the former Widget Manager page with a streamlined dialogue box, complete with widget preview, and options for embedding your widget on other sites.
- In addition to driving your widgets with RSS feeds from your KickApps community and other sites, you can now specify the URL to a single video or photo in the Feed / Media panel.
- We've added an "Auto-size canvas to widgets" option to the Widgets menu. With this option enabled, the canvas, or background on which your widgets, players, and components are arranged will automatically adjust its size to fit them. It's like automatic shrinkwrap for widgets.
- The width, height, and position of the selected component can now be edited from the menu bar at the top of the stage.
- You can now set the links in your widgets to open in the same browser window or a new one.
- Improved save functionality ensures that changes to your widget are faithfully recorded.
- You can now change the background color and opacity of text fields, as well as the color, thickness, and corner radius of their borders.
- Layers can be duplicated and deleted.
- Trying to track down an obscure message board post on KickDev? Try our revamped search, now powered by Google:
You can filter search results for matching Support Articles, Tutorials, and Message Board posts. - You can now enable and disable Single Sign-On directly from the improved Single Sign-On page in the AC. All of the information you need to implement Single Sign-On is now available from this page as well. You may miss chatting with our support team, but you can always send a postcard.
- Do you forget the URL to your community homepage? Not any more you don't! This URL now appears in a prominent position on your AC dashboard page.
4/23/08
What's New
- Our new Widget & Video Player Studio is now available in Beta. The Studio will enable you to build widgets and programmable video players in a WYSIWYG environment, and power them with RSS feeds from your community or other websites. The Beta version includes the List Widget, along with components for Buttons, Images, Text Fields, and Shapes. We'll be pushing out additional functionality frequently over the course of the next few weeks. You can find the Studio under the Deploy tab.
- We've added new API calls for reading and managing comments.
- Message board feeds have been refactored to ensure that links to replies always point at the appropriate reply page.
4/09/08
What's New
- Your members can now invite friends to join your community from their address books in Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Plaxo, and others. Simply click the "Add friends from Address book" link from the Invite Friends page under "my home".
- We’ve improved the Community Homepage interface in the Affiliate Center to ensure that all affiliates can customize the welcome messages on their pre-made Community Homepages.
- KickApps Media IDs now appear in the <ka:id> namespace for each media item in your KickApps feeds.
4/07/08
What's New
- A couple weeks ago we added the ability for members to add photos to blogs and message board posts. Now your friends will know what you're talking about when you rattle on about the stunning Mandarin goby:
Note: if you used our tutorial for adding image insertion to the text editor via JavaScript, you need to remove this JavaScript from your Global Page Template in order to take advantage of this new built-in functionality.
- We continue to make incremental, cross-platform performance improvements with caching and database enhancements. The effects are most noticeable on our message board pages.
- When members click through to add media from a group page, the related group is now pre-selected on the add media page that they land on.
- Several affiliates reported that inappropriate ad content was being delivered to their sites. We've identified the sources of these ads and have removed them from our queue. Please don't hesitate to report inappropriate ads in the future, and remember you can take full control of the ad inventory on your KickApps-hosted pages.
- Our own Stan Shaul put together an easy-to-use tool that you can use to generate a Tag Cloud Widget for your site.
What we're talking about
- Piclens and their slideshow-fu.