Do more, brand more, flux' more

Today, we are delighted to introduce further speed-ups, a smarter branding system, and a small, but significant change to video previewing.

Next to many nice interface tweaks, notably around the Tabs bar, and in the sub-menus of the Account section, here are the main changes:

Faster initial load

Initial loading times have been cut roughly in half, by dramatically diminishing the number of files we download from the server, as well as the size of these few components we cannot do without. This means fluxiom can now load as fast as 1.5 seconds on a good office connection.

To achieve this, we now optimise our support files with Jammit, and embed most of our images right into our CSS declarations.

Better branding

The branding interface has also been streamlined so that setting up and altering your branding is as painless as loading the results. For example, you can now play around with gradients without uploading a logo. We hope this will titillate your inner artist.

Speaking of branding, we now handle gradient generation via CSS, and have reduced the number of images involved throughout the process, resulting in further speed gains.

fluxUp!

Finally, if you have been using fluxUp! to upload your assets, you may like to know we will release an update later today to integrate the application with fluxiom’s new branding structure. So stay tuned.

Streaming video

If you are in the habit of handling large and long videos, you will no doubt notice we now stream your video previews. This means you can easily jump to any point in the file, without waiting for the initial frames to load. This makes it even easier to compare movies, or zoom right into your favourite sequences.