New year, new features
A new year, a new fluxiom! In-between the eggnog and the chocolates, our developers sneaked in a few hours of hard work, as a surprise New Year gift to our esteemed clients:
- Endless scrolling
- Smarter Details panel
- Export all your assets
- Improved toolbar behaviour
- Improved keyboard navigation
A new year, a new fluxiom! In-between the eggnog and the chocolates, our developers sneaked in a few hours of hard work, as a surprise New Year gift to our esteemed clients. Keeping in line with our obsession to make fluxiom more fluid and more reactive, we have been hard at work implementing a few big improvements to the Assets and Details views, that should make working with large quantities of files much easier.
Endless scrolling
The Assets view now loads assets on-the-fly as you scroll down, in manageable chunks, until you have seen all that is in your account pool. This means the initial view loads faster, and the system is more responsive as you scroll down the list, because it only handles the data to be displayed. While all browsers will get a speed boost from this new loading technique, those on older versions of Internet Explorer or on slower Internet connections should notice the greatest improvements.
Endless scrolling in action.
This informal speed test compares initial loading times for an Assets view holding a little over 2000 files. Of course, your mileage may vary, as they say, depending on network latency, but these figures still make for an interesting comparison:
Before endless scrolling, roughly 13 seconds.
With endless scrolling, a hair below 3 seconds.
Smarter Details panel
The layout of the Details panel has been re-organised: commonly requested information is easier to find at a glance, and the general slew of details fluxiom extracts from your data is presented in a clearer, friendlier way. Worry not, no data has been removed from the panel!
The new layout of the re-organised Details panel.
Improved paging in the Details view
As you page from one asset to the next using the arrows at the top of the Details panel, the Assets view refreshes to highlight the asset being displayed in the Details panel itself — in essence keeping the panel and the page it is overlaid on in perfect sync.
Additionally, if you select multiple assets before opening the Details panel, the arrows at the top of the panel will restrict the cycle to those assets you have selected. This makes it easier to compare details between a few files, as the Details panel honours whatever selection you have made in the Assets view and won’t let you cycle out of it.
Export all your assets
We want you to renew your fluxiom subscription because you are happy with the service we provide, not because you can’t get your data out. While fluxiom has always featured numerous export options, and has always allowed you to export all your assets in one go, we felt we should make it clear to all account administrators.
Export all your files with the click of a button.
This is why they will now find a dedicated “Export all assets” button, in the “Account” tab of the fluxiom interface. It can’t get easier!
Improved toolbar behaviour
Traditionally, when no assets were selected in your fluxiom account, but a toolbar button was pressed — such as “Download” —, fluxiom would apply the instruction to all the assets in the account. We felt this was a quick way to enable “all-in-one” operations, especially on accounts holding a great many files.
Our users, however, have made it clear they find this behaviour confusing and expect the toolbar buttons to do nothing when no asset is selected. Therefore, we have now altered the toolbar’s behaviour to match these expectations, and you will notice buttons that were previously enabled by default, with a global effect, are now disabled.
To apply an operation to all your assets in one go, simply select them all, and click on the corresponding button. In other words, no functionality has been lost as a result of this update, you merely need to confirm you really do want an action to apply to all the assets in your account.
Improved keyboard navigation
While fluxiom has long featured some keyboard navigation essentials, this update now enables you to navigate the Assets View by using the arrow keys: a simple press of the appropriate key will move the selection rectangle by one tick in the desired direction. Of course, this works even when the Details panel is visible — which you can conveniently and coincidentally toggle by pressing the Space bar.
New keyboard navigation.
Because users managing large collections of assets tend to prefer the sober efficiency of the keyboard, we are embarking on a comprehensive review of fluxiom’s keyboard accessibility, and would like to hear your feedback. If you sometimes use your keyboard to navigate fluxiom, or would like to, send us a ping and let us know what your dream feature set would be.
updated navigation bar
And of course…
No release notes would be complete without the mention of miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements. This release is no exception, and many snags too minor to mention have been filed, buffed and varnished away.
Happy fluxin’!