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.