Status Updates and You

My fellow Bitstrippers, to all of those who don’t follow the Wrangler’s series, Happy New Year! We’re all excited to make 2009 officially the year of the Bitstrip.

Today we’ve released an update to the right message sidebar you all know and love. When building Bitstrips, we went back and forth trying to decide, “Is it a status message, or is it a way to chat with users?”. One limitation of using it to communicate with other users was that you would have to refresh the page to see any new updates. Not any more! Like all the other cool kids, we now dynamically add new messages from your friends as they appear. We’ve also added an option to review older updates in case you missed any.

We hope you enjoy the addition and as always, please feel free to comment by emailing feedback@bitstrips.com, or by reporting a bug.

More Keyboard Fun

My fellow Bitstrippers, we’ve pushed a new version of the builder out to both regular and beta users this morning – you’ll find the version number is BS 2008-11-13.

Along with several bugfixes, we’ve added a few new keyboard shortcuts:

L key: lock/unlock a character/prop/text bubble-/+ keys: scale a comic asset up and down on its current level

We’re looking forward to seeing what the new levels of creativity the scaling controls unleash!

Left, Up, Down, Right: Bitstrips Shortcuts and You

My fellow Bitstrippers, you’ll find there’s a new beta-builder version this morning, BS 2008-11-11. We’ve included several bug fixes, as well as a new feature that has been requested for a long time – keyboard controls!

Here is a summary of the new arrow-key based controls:

Shift Key – Pressing the shift key, you can toggle ground-lock on your asset. Try it out – press shift while dragging a character or a prop and you’ll see it starts moving along the opposite axis it was moving on before.

For text bubbles, pressing shift while dragging them will keep the tail of the bubble in the same location while moving the words.

Arrow Keys – Assets can be nudged around by pressing the left, up, down and right arrow keys. There are also a few modifiers you can add:

Ctrl + arrow keys – nudge the item by a smaller amount, useful for fine-grained control

Shift + arrow keys – toggle ground-lock while nudging the item

Alt + arrow keys – rotate the item with the left and right arrow keys

Also in the beta – when saving and reloading a strip there should be no visual differences. In previous versions, it was possible for text-bubbles to slide right and left when editing a saved strip. Now, everything should be exactly as you left it. If you can find a situation where things are different, please make sure to submit a bug report.

If you ever encounter an issue with a beta builder, remember that you can go back to the regular non-beta builders at any time and continue bitstrippin’ without encountering the latest and greatest bugs.

New Beta: Buddy’s Hidden Shame

My Fellow Bitstrippers, we felt it was time to reveal one of Buddy’s darkest secrets from his sordid past. In Grade 3, Buddy failed Mrs. Burkes English class. The horror! Buddy has been struggling with logophobia ever since.

It has only been through great personal determination that Buddy has been able to bring you his Editorials – the pain and sacrifices he’s made to properly form his messages to you have taken their toll. That’s why we’re happy to announce a new beta version – BS 2008-10-17! We’ve continued to iron out several text-bubble bugs, as well as one major new feature – spell checking.

The keen observer will notice the red squiggles in the picture above. When typing in a textbubble, misspelled words will be highlighted and suggestions provided when you right-click (or on a mac, ctrl-click) on them.

We’re looking for feedback on this latest beta – when you submit a bug on a beta builder, add “BETA” to the bug form, or when you send us an email, be sure to mention you’re using the beta builder.

Once this beta has been well tested we’ll move it out so that everyone can take advatange of it. We’re loking forwerd to ceeing the best speled comiks in the wurld!

We’d also like to thank gskinner.com for writing a great bit of code – Spelling Plus Library. It’s what we’re using to bring you spell checking and we couldn’t believe how easy it was to set up. Grant, you guys rock!

Thursday Update: New Beta Builders and Ads

My Fellow Bitstrippers, in my last post I briefly talked about the new Beta Builders option on the site. Today we’ve pushed an update to the tools and you can now test them out! Here’s how:

On your account page, make sure Beta Builders is checked

Beta Builder Option

Now when you launch one of the builders, you’ll be loading the latest beta version. Here’s how you check what version you’re running. Right click (or for you Macs, ctrl-click) on the comic and a popup will display what version you’re using.

If it displays “BS 2008-10-16″, you know you’ve got today’s beta builder running.

Version Information

So… what’s new in BS 2008-10-16? We’ve fixed a few regressions around text bubble handling – for those that submitted bug reports about not being able to select text, those issues should now be fixed. We’ve also started using a great piece of code to handle loading artwork – BulkLoader.

This should help with in situations where characters will appear “stuck” once you’ve put it in a comic. Behind the scenes, when you drop a character in to a comic we start by placing a bitmap thumbnail of the character until we’ve loaded all the bits of art we need to properly display them. Unfortunately sometimes those bits of art don’t load, and you’re stuck with a dimmed dude who doesn’t do anything. BulkLoader helps by retrying to get the bits of failed art several times before giving up. Great stuff!

We’ve also included one new spot which will display ads on the site. We created Bitstrips because we love comics and we wanted to create a tool that would allow anyone to communicate and express themselves in threw cartoons and comics, even if they couldn’t draw. The few ads you see help us recoup a portion of the costs we have in running the site, as well as giving us the opportunity to continue improving the Bitstrips experience.

Election08 + Updates

My fellow Bitstrippers, what an exciting time to be making comics! Let me tell you about a few of the updates we have just released.

Election08 Art

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to release your inner political cartoonist. In the Comic Builder, look for the “Election08″ collection to quickly access the latest political characters and scenes.

Series Re-Ordering

This has been a popular request since we launched. Have you always wanted to switch the order between episode #5 and episode #4 in one of your series? Now you can! Go to your series homepage and click Reorder Series to switch it up.

New Builders

Over the past two months we’ve been transitioning from Flash to Flex Builder for all our tools. While things won’t seem much different at this point, there have already been substantial changes occurring internally within the latest builders. We’re now able to quickly add new features and test them out in ways we never could before.

The Comic Builder/Scene Builder will now load up significantly faster, as well as using less memory overall. The Art Library also received some UI improvements, making it even easier to find the characters, props and effects that you’re looking for.

Beta Builders

Help test out the latest and greatest builders before we release them to everyone. On your account page, look for the “Beta Builders” option. More details on this soon.

Stale Data

Nobody likes stale bread, so why would you like stale data? We’ve fixed several areas where your views/ratings wouldn’t necessarily update as they should.

Big strips

My fellow Bitstrippers, on this rainy Sunday afternoon I thought I’d take a moment to write about one of the things we’ve been working on behind the scenes.

One bit of code we’ve been experimenting with is high-resolution output. Here’s an example of fr619snowball’s strip 300th Strip !YAY! (a good test strip for loading many characters)

Click for Full Size (2800x1300)

Want your own high-rez strip? The first 5 comments on this post will have a bitstrip of their choice saved and sent in this format.

Hats & Hair

My fellow Bitstrippers – we thought we’d honour this historic day by finally announcing the sorely-missed addition of goatees! You’ll be able to find them under what used to be the “Beards” section of the character builder. While you’re in the character builder, you’ll also notice a few new hats to pick from.

We’ve also pushed an update to the reliability of all the builders on the site. For the advanced users, you’ll also find you now have independent eyelid control.

Remixing 1.2

Since the beginning Bitstrips has had a prominent Edit button on every strip. If you published a strip and left it public, anyone could come along and remix your strip in to a new one. Behind the scenes, we’ve been tracking this history of remixing and have now enabled readers to easily follow the remix-trail.

When reading a strip which has been remixed, you’ll see a Remixes: listing of all remixes of the strip on the bottom right of the page. If you’re reading a strip which is a remix of another strip, you’ll also see Remix of: listed.

What about if your strip isn’t actually a remix? Buddy does this a lot – all his editorials are remixes of earlier editorials. In this case, if you’re the original author of the remixed strip, you’ll find you have a Remove ‘Remix Of’ button below the Remix Of strip which lets you disconnect them.

In the next few days we’ll enable remix-notifications (get a message, see a news event when one of your strips is remixed), as well as a remix-tree view which lets you see the overall hierarchy of a remix-trail with all its branches and leaves.

If you’re looking for some interesting remixed strips, here are the top 5 most remixed strips currently on the site:

1. Bitsville’s Beauty Pagent
2. Bitstrippy
3. June 13, 2008
4. The glitch in the system (more info on this bug in another post!)
5. Toys R US!

Enjoy!

Bitstrippin’ 1.2

In case you hadn’t noticed, we finally updated bitstrips.com to version 1.2 – thanks to everyone for their patience these last few months. It was a relatively smooth upgrade and we’ve just pushed several fixes for issues people were seeing:

• “My Friends” in the builders wasn’t loading
• New series wouldn’t show up when you created them
• Inbox count wouldn’t update (or stay at (1))
• “Latest strip” wasn’t updating on profiles
• “Total Kudos” now appears on profiles

We’re also testing out a fix for the slower page-loading issue people have been noticing. If certain things still seem slow, or you come across another issue, let us know by submitting a bug report. Thanks to everyone who has been sending them in so far – they really help.

There’s also one new setting in 1.2 that nobody has mentioned yet. On your settings page, you can select which builder will load by default, the Quick Comic Builder or the Super Comic Builder. Default to the super builder and enjoy faster loading times!