Monthly Update — June 2020

5 min readJul 7, 2020

Welcome to the development team update for June, the second edition of our monthly development team update.

These updates are to keep our users in the loop with what changes have been made, what is being worked on, and some sneak peek screenshots of future updates in the pipeline.

Interactr Evolution 2.0 Update

We know that the update everybody is waiting on is the 2.0 update which will include the surveys.

There’s been a delay on this for 2 reasons:

The main reason being early in the month I took the decision to move one of our developers onto getting the player working in FullScreen mode. This has been such a highly requested feature I didn’t want to wait till this 2.0 update was done before we started working on this so I moved one developer onto working on that.
The second challenge has been the amount of time working on key business functions has taken off me being able to code myself.

We currently have myself (Chris) and 2 full-time developers in the team, with one being moved to the ‘FullScreen’ feature and me having to do a lot of “non-coding” work for the majority of the month means we’ve had one developer rather than 3 working on this.

We’ve decided to hire a new Head Of Development who will help us in implementing new features faster in the future but we need to get the 2.0 update out of the way before we spend time on recruitment.

Also, based on your feedback we’ve added many more features to the update other than the initial node editor and survey changes.

So let me talk more now about the update itself and give you some information on what changes will be coming in addition to the surveys feature:

Redesigned Node Editor

We have redesigned our node editor from the ground up to make it easier to add, edit, and adjust your element timings on the video. The timeline is now much wider and we’ve also added in text inputs either side of the timeline bars to manually define the element “in” and “out” times.

The ‘Timeline’ has also been streamlined to only show grouped elements and non-grouped elements — so all elements added to a group will only show in the timeline under that group, further reducing the number of items in the timeline.

Finally, for the timeline, we have added a checkbox for “Show from Start” and “Show until End” to make it easier to show elements either from when the video starts, or all the way till when the video ends.

In addition, all elements are now shown in a list next to the video with stats for how many times that element has been viewed and interacted with.

And finally, when editing an element a new slide-in menu gives you more space to view and edit the properties of the element.

Animations On All Elements

We’re now adding in the animations from “Interaction Layers” to all elements. So any popup, button, or image can use the same animations as you see on Interaction Layers.

Popups Not Linked To Timeline

We’re reversing the change we recently made to popups. So popups are not restricted to the timeline.

This means that you can create popups that are opened by clicking a button or any other action, not just the video getting to a set time.

Project Sizes

The size and dimensions of a project will now be editable in the project's settings.

This will finally allow users to create projects with square videos as requested by many users.

Dropped YouTube Support

So along with all the new features coming in 2.0 we will also be dropping support for YouTube and the “Legacy Player”.

This means that all projects will now be published with the same version of the player and everyone will have access to the same features.

Fullscreen Update

As mentioned earlier we now have a developer who is working fulltime on this so we hope to have a solution soon.

The main obstacle to overcome is the lack of fullscreen API support on iPhone so we’re currently in the process of trying to find a solution that works on iPhones.

ChangeLog

Here is a full list of all changes made to the app in June:

Fixed https typo in Whitelabel sharing page
Removed evolution project label on sub user pages
Fixed player responsive issues where scrollbars appeared on some websites when embedded
Fixed bug when trying to create a new user with no name
Fixed bug with projects being created with no name
Fixed bug with form label not updating
Fixed bug for select inputs when working with objects
Added in the feature request link to the dashboard
Added better error handling when sorting nodes
Fixed bugs with agency logo when the sidebar gets smaller
Updated sharing page background color to match the agency color
Updated the video thumbnail URLs to use the CDN link
Allowed gif files to be uploaded for video thumbnails
Fixed scaling bug with elements inside interaction layers on player
Fixed iOS resizing bug on player
Fixed replaying the same node from inside an interaction layer
Fixed replaying the same video in different nodes
Fixed form placeholder not linking right + placeholder color
Fixed interactions flashing bug
Fixed the chapters scrolling in the player
Fixed seeking bug in player
Fixed skipping button action not closing the modal