We hope you are enjoying your summer so far. Before you know it school will be starting up, and for us in Michigan at least, we’ll be getting plowed with snow again. Take heart, we still have a couple weeks of nice weather, beach trips, barbecues, and of course some new Spinscape features. So sit back, relax, and let us tell you about our busy month.

Inbetween consulting, conferences, and the daily life of a software company, we managed to pour through Spinscape requests and we got quite a few of them scratched off the to-do list.

We added quite a few new features this month. We hope you dig them.

Notifications

In accordance with our plan to continue rocking the collaboration features, we added real-time notifications. We noticed that occasionally we will be working on a map and someone will share something with us. If we don’t happen to check our email frequently, we’ll miss the fact that a map was shared until later. Worry no longer, Map Sharing Notifications are here!

Now you can work away and if someone shares a map with you, you will get a message on your screen to let you know that a map has been shared. It will even give you a button to click to open that map so you can dig in and collaborate with the person that shared it.

Encryption

While we’re all upstanding citizens, we realize that we are hosting your data. Now we have always gone to great lengths to keep your data safe, but to give you a little more piece of mind, we included an Encryption feature this month. Simply go to File / Encrypt map and enter a password to encrypt the map you are working on. All the data in the map will be encrypted and only people with the password you entered will be able to open and read it.

Note that with bigger maps it will take a few seconds to a few minutes to encrypt all the data. Performance will be a bit slower as well, but the feature is there if you want.

To decrypt the map (remove the encryption), you just go to File / Decrypt Map. When you do that, everyone that is currently in the map with you will be kicked out momentarily while the data is updated in the database.

Focal Presentation Mode

This one is really cool. If you haven’t seen Presentation Mode yet, I highly recommend you check out some of the tutorials on it.  In a nutshell, you create a map.  Then go to Presentation mode.  From there you can move the map, zoom in and out on nodes, and create slides of the map states that make sense for you.

So for example, the map I’m using to create this blog is called July Features Blog.  It has nodes called Notifications, Encryption, Focal Presentation Mode, etc. So when I want to present this information I would go to Presentation mode and first collapse all the nodes into the central node.  I would zoom into the central node (July Features Blog) and I would click Add Slide from the toolbar at the top.  You will see a preview thumbnail to show that the slide has been added.  From there I would expand the nodes so you can see Notifications, Encryption, etc.

Now, I want to focus the viewer on Notifications so I may just zoom in and center on the Notifications node. (I embedded this map into the blog so you can see it in action. See below.) Similarly when I get to Encryption in my presentation I would pan the map, zoom into Encryption and continue with the dog and pony. It’s as simple as that.

Now on to the new feature. We have actually combined our Focal Mode feature with Presentation mode.  So now, if you want to talk about just Notifications, you can double-click on it in presentation mode and all you will see is Notifications and its children. This really helps you focus on the nodes you want to focus on when you present. Check out the example embedded below.

Embedded Player Improvements

We have made a few improvements to the Embedded Player this month. We have added some tags and a description to the player to help with SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization).

Basically your map name will be embedded on the pages along with any tags you have added to the map. The bots can then look for keyword and title information.

The zoom feature in the embedded maps now works better across different browsers. Some day hopefully all the browser companies will follow the same standards. For now, it just makes life for us developers a bit trickier.

Analytics

This is a biggie. We have a Facebook Analytics package that is now completely integrated into Spinscape. We’ll post some videos of this one soon.

Assign task to email

We listened to our customers and added the ability to assign tasks to people even if they aren’t Spinscape users yet. Just share the map or node with the email address of the person you want to share with and you will see that email address in the node Task Manager drop down list of people that you can assign tasks to.

Miscellaneous

As always we continue to look for bugs and other improvements that will make your Spinscape experience better. To that extent we have fixed a bunch of gremlins that have sprung up. No doubt there are a few more of them. If you spot one, please report it in the Bugs section of our Support Forum and we’ll do what we can to squash the little bugger.

Parting Words

Just a word of thanks to our existing customers. We really appreciate your business. Spinscape is a labor of love for us and it is something we truly believe in. We’re small, but we have great ideas and we put those ideas into practice. (I hope we have proven that!)