Convertri Updates – 19.12.17

With less than a week to Christmas, it’s our final update of the year… and we think it’s a good one.

Because today sees a couple of big projects getting pushed across the line.

Not only did page importing just get a lot better, we’ve also fixed probably the single most complained-about bug in the system (and it was a bit of a mission).

Details are below (and do read them, they’re kinda important this time).

When you’ve checked those out, hard-refresh the app (CTRL + SHIFT + R, or CMD + SHIFT + R if you’re on a Mac) to get these new features and fixes:

FEATURES:

– Page Importer: We’ve overhauled this to a new ‘headless’ version, and no, I don’t know what that means either. But the result is that a lot of the issues people were experiencing importing HTTP pages should now be fixed. You’ll still find pages where it doesn’t give a great result – it’s basically impossible to make something like this work well 100% of the time – but you should see a big improvement.

– Font search: As a side effect of the bug fix below, you can now also type in the name of the font you want to use from the fonts you’ve loaded, making it easier when you’ve got a lot installed.

BUGS:

– Text colour selector: So for ages, there’s been an annoying issue where you couldn’t type in a colour code for text, because the browser lost the selection. The reason for this was an architecture mistake we made very early on, so we thought we’d have to rebuild the editor to fix it.

…turned out we didn’t have to.

We DID have to do a big overhaul of the text editor – but it’s done, and this bug can finally be put to bed.

There’s one outstanding bug we know of in this new text editor implementation – at very low line heights (0.75, or occasionally larger if the font is particularly big) you may see a difference in line height when the text element is selected and when it isn’t. We’re working on a fix for this, but line heights like this are only used rarely so we didn’t want to delay the colour selection bug fix. What gets published will always be what you see when the text element isn’t selected – have a look at the video for details.

– Scrollable layers: When these didn’t extend beyond the height of the viewport, all the elements were shifted a little to the right in the editor of where they were actually going to be published. This has been fixed, so now it makes more sense.

Check out all the details in new-fangled moving-picture format here:

IN OTHER NEWS:

Christmas is coming, and our staff appear to have these things called ‘families’ that they’d like to see.

And it seems only fair to let them do that. I knew a guy who got grouchy about it, and – you wouldn’t believe it – ghosts kept him up the whole night.

We’re not shutting down completely – we’ll have a skeleton crew in the office during the whole Christmas period, so support queries will still get answered and problems that need a developer will still get attention – but things might move a bit slower than usual.

We’re also not going to update the app on 26th Dec or 2nd January, but we’ll be back on the 9th with more feature updates and bug fixes.

Until then, have a great Christmas and new year!