New Release! Booyah!

It's new release time (hello 11, aka Carell) and as usual, this release has a theme: “Carell” is all about "reading."

You already know that Vox is about communicating and keeping up with your neighbors, friends, family and the topics that interest you. And, like us, you also know that having busy offline and online lives makes it difficult to keep up with your blog reading (even when you're reading a small number of blogs). Blogging is supposed to be fun and not another source of pressure (OMG, I have 530 unread posts!). Therefore, we wanted to add improvements to Vox that would help you effortlessly and painlessly keep up with your blog reading.

Onto the new features that enable improved Vox reading:

Reader

You may have noticed a new destination in your Vox application navigation: “Read.”  As the name implies, this is where you can go to read excerpts and view media found on Vox. 

Vox Navigation

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Think of the Vox Reader as the current Vox dashboard (Home) on steroids vitamins. Currently, the dashboard serves as a way to quickly see who has updated and commented on your blogs. The reader isn’t meant to replace traditional blog reading (that’s why we’re using excerpts). Instead, it’s a way to make sure you haven’t missed anything that’s been posted.

Here, in the reader, you can:

Reader

Read excerpts from the blogs of your neighbors, family or friends. Not only can you read all excerpts from one particular group, but you can go down a level and read new posts from just one person in your neighborhood.

View photos and other media as part of excerpts. We’ve sized the photos smaller so that they don’t overwhelm your reading experience. The inclusion of photos and media in excerpts has been a popular user request and we’re happy to have been able to make this fix.

Filter Time

Highlight content based on the time posted. Want to see all content created within a certain period of time? You can filter and read new stuff posted within 1 day, 3 days, 1 week and 2 weeks.

Keep track of recent activity such as comments you're following and comments on your blog. And now we finally have a place to see when someone has marked your content as “a favorite!”

Subscribed Tags

“Subscribe” to a particular tag on Vox and keep updated whenever someone has publicly posted something with that tag. For example, if you love the Beatles, you can subscribe to the "beatles" tag and then be able to read any post/photo that is tagged via your reader. Prior to the tag reader, you would have to do a search in Explore. Now, the results come to you. How can you subscribe to a tag? Well, any time you see a tag you’re interested in, simply hover over the tag until the standard explore box appears. Then, click on the icon to add it to your reader.

Subscribe to Tag

There are a number of little things about Reader that we’ll leave up to you to discover and explore. The Vox Reader is constantly improving and we’re already working on improvements for the next couple of releases.

Now, if the Reader wasn’t enough of a feature to merit an entire release, we’re really proud to show you what we’ve done with the Organize and Connect sections of Vox.

The merging itself is the smaller change. What we’re really excited about is the new viewing ability we’ve enabled in release 11. You now have the option to view your media as thumbnails (as it has always been) or in a list view. You can toggle between the views and find a layout that best suits your viewing needs. We love the new hover behavior since it doesn’t “freak us out” as much when a hover appears unexpectedly. There’s more control and a clearer idea of what’s going to happen when something is mouseovered or hovered above.

Bulk Invite
It’s now easier to send Vox invitations to your friends, families and associates. We’ve made the invitation page easier to use and have given users the option to invite up to three people at one time. If you haven’t invited people lately, today’s as good of a day as ever!

Improved-invite

Themes
And what would be a new release with some new themes? Our designers were very productive this release and you’ll see designs created by every member of the core Vox design team (a first!).

New-themes

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• Camo (Blue, Green, Grey, Khaki, Pink)
• Endless Summer (Brown, Orange, Pink, Sand)
• Food (Dinner, Market, Picnic, Sweets)
• Modernist (Birch, Cherry, Espresso, Maple)
• Butterflies (Grey, Purple, Red, Teal)
• Playful (now available in the two-column layout)
• Weston (now available in the three-column layouts)
  

The Vox Banner Contest is still underway so expect more varieties of themes in upcoming releases.

Those are the highlights of today’s release. There’s always a lot of work to do and these features are in constant development as we iterate upon and improve them with each new release. We’re happy with the direction of this release and hope that our Voxers will be equally pleased.

Remember to use that feedback link up on your control strip to submit feedback!  Some of you have been leaving feature requests and feedback in comments to Team Vox posts, which is not the right place for it.

Enjoy the new release and thanks for your continued support!

- Mena