The Interactive Ideas Blog

Yesterday, ProtoShare 3.6 was released. The update brings with it many highly requested features, and also introduces the new Professional and Standard Plans. Additionally, ProtoShare now supports the Google Chrome browser, for both reviewers and editors. Chrome joins Safari 4 and Firefox 3 & 3.5 as browsers that are approved to work in the ProtoShare editor. As always, ProtoShare reviewers can also use Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

The Standard Plan received several new updates including a new rich text editor, speed and performance improvements, and the ability to store your assets in the palette. This allows images put in the Gallery folder in the Assets Library to appear at the bottom of the palette. You can then drag and drop them onto the page to work more quickly in the wireframe editor.

The Professional Plan, aside from having no more limits on projects and pages, contains all the updates to Standard, plus some highly-requested features.

• HTML Export – Access and run your projects offline, create and store archives, have a starting point for development. Further, because ProtoShare uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, your exported site will look and function EXACTLY like your ProtoShare prototype.
• Interactive Grid View component – A true interactive, configurable, sortable dynamic data grid.
• Interactive Tree View component – A hierarchical list of items that are configurable and clickable.

Director of Sales, Josh Chaney, put together this preview video to highlight the features’ benefits to effective, better prototyping. As usual, keep your ideas and feedback coming; we’ll continue to listen and deliver.

UPDATE: (Tuesday, 25 August, 14:12 PDT) ProtoShare upgrade issues were fixed last night, and the tool is performing very well. Thanks for all your feedback and compliments. You can always keep up-to-date with us on Twitter.

(Monday, 24 August, 10:11 PDT) ProtoShare was successfully upgraded to version 3.5 on early Sunday morning. So far, it all looks to have gone well; however, a few customers have reported issues in creating new or archiving projects. The engineers have identified the cause of the issue, and should have a fix published by the end of today. As always, if you have any issues or need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact our customer service team. Thanks.

Original Post:

We’ve been hard at work on the next ProtoShare – Version 3.5 (code name: Hungry Hippo) – that arrives on Sunday, 23 August. The new release has many valuable new features like editor support for the Safari 4 browser, native cut/copy and paste, numerous speed and performance improvements and, most importantly, enhanced ability to use ProtoShare for more stages of your development process and work flow.  Earlier this week, Director of Sales, Josh Chaney gave a preview of ProtoShare 3.5, below are the quick video highlights.

The new feature that significantly increases the tool’s flexibility and value is multiple layouts per page. ProtoShare 3.5 supports multiple wireframes, design comps, and live site views per page.

This support allows you to use ProtoShare throughout all stages of your development process:

• Pull a website(s) into ProtoShare to collaboratively workshop, discuss, reference, or brainstorm ideas and concepts before you start wireframing
• Create and test multiple wireframes and layouts on the same page
• Upload design comps (even add hyperlink regions on top of the artwork and give your reviewers a more interactive experience.)
• Pull in the site while in development to collaboratively make comments, monitor, or compare to the approved prototype and creative

Native cut/copy and paste works like you’d expect: control/command-C to copy, and control/command-V to paste. However, once copied to the clipboard, you can paste the selection anywhere within ProtoShare. Paste it to another page, another template, another project, or even into another account.

The speed improvements and performance enhancements are discussed in the video, and will be detailed in release notes. Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the new features of ProtoShare 3.5. We think you’ll like what you see, and like it even more when you use it.

Want a quick, easy,  significant (and free) way to speed up the performance of ProtoShare? Download and install FireFox 3.5. Because ProtoShare is a web-based tool that uses JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, your browser is responsible for a lot of the speed and performance you experience when displaying and building pages in ProtoShare. So what’s the difference between the new and old? According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.5 renders JavaScript twice as fast as version 3.0. It also accesses and manipulates the DOM more than twice as fast as Firefox 3. Okay, so lots of stats but what does it mean in the real world? It means a faster, smoother, and better prototyping and collaboration experience in ProtoShare and, for that matter, most likely better performance in all your web-based services.  So give a whirl to the new combination of ProtoShare and Firefox 3.5, and experience the difference of a better browser.

P.S. Full ProtoShare editor support (currently in beta) for Safari 4, also a very high performance browser, is coming soon. Look for it in the next release mid-August. And Chrome to soon follow. As always, keep in mind that ProtoShare reviewers can use most popular browser to review and comment on work.

In response to your requests, and our own determination to support more browsers, we are working hard to get the ProtoShare Editor to flawlessly run in the WebKit family of browsers. (As you know, ProtoShare reviewers can use most major browsers to experience and comment on prototypes).  So it’s with great pleasure that we announce the first step toward our goal: as of today, the ProtoShare Editor has beta-level support for Safari 4 Beta, and alpha-level support for Google Chrome.

In our initial testing, the ProtoShare Editor works pretty well in Safari 4 Beta. We’ll continue to refine it in the months ahead. Google Chrome, while also built on WebKit, has just a bit more “tweaking” and configuration to do than Safari, that’s why it’s still in alpha.

We invite you to try out ProtoShare in these browsers, but remember they are far from certified. And if you have a minute or two, we’d appreciate any and all feedback on what’s working and, more importantly, what isn’t. We’re excited to get the ProtoShare Editor running on these two great – incredibly fast – browsers. Look for more improvements to soon follow.

We are pleased to announce the release of ProtoShare 2.5: The next step in the evolution of collaborative website development. The new ProtoShare facilitates even more the process of prototyping, collaborating, and building an interactive project. We’ve worked hard in implementing many of your requests and suggestions for improvement, and we think you’ll see that in ProtoShare 2.5. What better way to bring in the New Year than with a shiny, new ProtoShare?

We’re still in the process of updating the video tutorials, but for a quick overview of features, as well as a video of a webinar we gave last week, you can see all the juicy details in the 2.5 Upgrade section.

We look forward to a great 2009 together, with ProtoShare continuing to evolve into an even better interactive development tool. Happy Holidays from all of us here at ProtoShare HQ in VERY (unusually)  snowy Portland, Oregon.