Moonfruit Lounge

And this time it's working! There has been a huge amount of work that has gone into this release as some of the core parts of the Moonfruit data structure have been rewritten to support the mobile HTML roadmap (V1.0 in this release) and the new Blog and e-commerce features that will follow (blog first, then e-commerce).

Mobile HTML version (V1.0)

So a large part of the work in the past 6 months has been in setting up the technology so that we can display your sites in the full Flash version (as before), a desktop HTML version (if you don't have Flash), and now a mobile HTML version (which is optimised for the small screen). We'll publish a dedicated article on just this topic in the next couple of days, but below is an idea of how the sites look in the different versions.

The mobile optimised version is a single column render of your site in HTML. This allows the content to be displayed as a long vertical list which is easier to read and the user can scroll down through the objects on the page. The site navigation is done by a roll out menu, so the majority of the screen space is dedicated to your content.

This is Version 1.0 of the mobile HMTL and we will continue to upgrade it over the coming months. If you have cases where you think the mobile version is not displaying the right content in the right order, let us know and we'll add it to our test cases. We'll also add specific mobile styling into future releases to give you more options for customising it.

NB. If you are looking through the HTML version on your mobile and see a page with no contents in it, just refresh the page and it will then display the contents correctly. This 'empty page' will only happen the very first time a page is visited following this new release, so it won't happen for all users and will happen only once.

Shapes

The new shapes widgets allow you to apply effects, fills and gradients to a variety of different shape objects. These are seriously useful for customising the basic design of your site. We'll be looking to add this kind of functionality to other objects in the coming months, including text boxes, images and the blog, all of which will benefit from the improved design you can achieve with it.

Let us know how you get on with them and the kinds of things you use them for.

No background option

We've added a new setting to allow you to turn off the Flash background of your site so that the HTML background is shown across the full browser. This allows you to achieve the 'full screen image' or 'chunky header/footer' styles that are common in the new contemporary web look and feel. How about a full screen image, shove in a few rounded corner shapes with drop shadow under your text boxes for legibility and bish-bash-bosh there you have it ;-)

And before you ask, tiling options for your background image will follow shortly ;-)

That's it for now. We regret we can't bring you the blog at the same time, but there's a bit more work to do on that. 2010 was a big year for us in terms of investment in the infrastructure to make certain features possible, and 2011 will be the year when all these features start hitting the streets. Expect a lot more from us in 2011. We expect more from ourselves.

Just to give you all an update on progress and expectations for the next release. We were prepping to have a release ready for the end of the year, but we won’t release it until early in January. We generally try to avoid releases too close to Christmas before many of the developers go away. The last thing we want is to find unexpected bugs that we can’t fix quickly which cause you grief.

This January release will include the first version of the new mobile optimised HTML, some improvements to the desktop HTML (current HTML version), and some forerunners to the full blog release, e.g. new shapes components (including gradients, images fills, effects like drop shadows, etc. - see below) and a few other bits and pieces. There is also quite a big change to the way we store data. The full blog will come out a few weeks later.

We are choosing to do the release in 2 parts as there is a lot going into it and it’s much easier to manage this way. We appreciate this means the blog will be later than you expected, but we hoped to whet your appetite with some of these changes sooner rather than later, and the mobile HTML improvements will be in this first release.

In the meantime, here’s a few examples of the kinds of things the new shapes objects can do that will really open up some of the design possibilities in your sites...

New Shapes

All of these are achieved using the new basic 'shapes', with a number of effects, fills and gradients applied to them which are part of the shape settings. So the design possibilities are pretty wide ranging!

Stars - using 2 semi-transparent gradient fills, with thick border and blur effect on star shapes

Swiss cheese - using bevel border with blur, and multiple shapes aligned to appear to be one layer

Cute - Eiffel Tower has a flat image fill, chunky white border and drop shadow, while the girl has a chunky dotted yellow border and pink/purple drop shadow

Splat - a borderless image fill (car), with 2 transparent PNG 'splats' in brown and white, positioned to create a contrast

We are proud to announce that we are expecting to update SiteMaker to version R5.0 next week.

We've decided to bump our major release number to 5.0 because there has been an enormous amount of work done over the last months on the new edit environment. In our last release back in November, we introduced Flex (new Flash application framework) into the edit environment, which continued to talk to the old Flash edit tools that made up your site. We have now rationalised these into a single Flex environment which simplifies the code base and allows us to more rapidly develop features in the future using the Flex framework. Flex is still based on the Flash Player but it provides more tools to the developer who can therefore produce features more quickly. The big new features coming down the line (blog, eCommerce) will benefit significantly from being developed with Flex. These features are already in progress and well on the way to completion. More about that later.

Moonfruit.com and every site hosted by us are now served from 14 locations around the world.

To celebrate the launch of this new service we are offering five (5) pairs of return tickets from wherever you are in the world to any of the 14 locations that Moonfruit sites are now served from. And we'll offset the carbon footprint of your flight so you can still look all your green friends in the eyes - or will that be green eyed friends ;-) - with a clear conscience.

To find out more read on...

Yeah, it's release time again! Believe it or not we get just as excited as you do at these times. The months of hard work all come together and we get to push new things out to the Moonfruit-osphere. And this one is a biggy too.

So first things first, the new interface. For those of you who didn't see our sneak preview, this is what it looks like.

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

We're seeing the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years as we drag SiteMaker kicking and screaming into the present and pave the way for the future. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too...