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.
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:
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.
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!”
“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.
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 new and improved Organize (code name: Organnect)
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!
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!).
- 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
Comments
impressive
What gives? Is this a browser or OS issue?
I have Firefox and Win98 (unfortunately)...but I love LOVE my Vox and was so happy being able to indulge my organizing fetish.
HELP!!
Thanks for all your great efforts though, this site is great.
Also, a good downloadable upload manager like Flickr has would be nice... what does that registry download for Windows actually do??
Rina: Here's what I did...I hadn't been keeping up to date on my browser and didn't have a really current version of Firefox. I don't know which version I had, but I checked out the requirements for using Vox and realized that it wouldn't hurt me to go ahead and just upload to the most current version of Firefox available. I also got a nifty skin that makes my browser look like a Mac, but that's besides the point. ;)
Since you mentioned that you're using Netscape, it may be why you're having some difficulty. They advise Internet Explorer 6.0 (gag) or strongly urge Firefox which I love so insanely I should get paid for pushing it.
Anyway, I just wanted to chime in since we were having similar problems. Hope you're able to solve yours!
Keep up the great work!
and please: width reduction!
love it.
Vox is getting better and better with each release! Still not perfect, but you can't always please everybody on everything, eh? Keep up the great work!!!
This are only three small suggestions. Hope that someone can follow them :-)
Can't understand why we still can't add links to images elsewhere on the 'net though - there are some things (eg event banners, screenshots etc.) I really don't want to have to download and add to my own photos... Is this coming soon?
Great update! Always exciting to play wtih new features.
I noticed when sending an invite, it show your full name. Is there a way to omit this if you so choose?
A few things:
Any chance Semagic or free blog client is avail to post blogs instead of web creation ?
Any chance the uploading podcast mp3 system can change ?
A little progress bar and how much time left to upload would be nice
Also how big can mp3s be uploaded ? I made my first podcast file, it goes for 30 odd mins and its 35 meg
Has an errant HTML tag in one of the posts that corrupts the RSS feed. I've seen this a couple of times now, so perhaps you need an HTML "cleaner" pass before a post is saved, or at minimum the ability to go to HTML mode to clean up problems like this. In the above example, it looks like she bolded something, then unbolded and the "close EM tag" didn't get deleted.
Yay! All new, all good.
If you're taking requests for designs, I'd love to see a Seattle skyline. :)
Love the new themes--I try a new one every day.
The only suggestion I want to put out there is an option to use amazon.co.uk instead of .com for books/movies: often the covers are different over here, and it'd be nice to be able to put in the 'actual' cover we have instead of the American release. :)
otherwise, yeah, keep up the great improvements!
I would like it if there was a way to subscribe/unsubscribe to specific posts(not by tag but by author/title). Also a few over rides for themes would be nice. I do like the themes but it would be nice if we could change the odd aspect of them. Such as slight changes in a colour of something or font size(base font size for general items like h2 and default text or stop some tags from having increased/decreased font).
Could someone please post file size/total size upload limitations for things not linked to the integrateds(ie amazon, fickr and photobucket). I do have other hosting/storage space and don't wish to use flickr or photobucket because I know of a script that got posted in 2600 mag that is for mass downloading and don't want that done to my stuff. Is it possible to add to the editor a button to post image or content from link? Also could it be put in help the file size limitations and what raw html code is permitted? I know you are looking at ease of use but there are some of us who could handle things more advanced.(Choice between a basic/advanced editor in settings?)
Thanks. :-)
Will we be able to add 'badges' in the future? I do like my badges ;-)
Kudos to the team from one very happy UK Voxxer!
I recommend using Portable Firefox , Portable Thunderbird and Portable Miranda IM