• New Home Dashboard – monitor activity in all of your rooms
• Page Voice Notes – Easily record up to 5 minutes of audio on each page
• Translate Quickly – If you work with people who write comments in other languages, you can easily translate
• New Language Option – Chinese is now available in the UI
• Hand Grab Tool – Hold the space bar, then click and drag to drag the page around (instead of scrolling)

New Features:

• New Home Dashboard – separate from your rooms list– view recent activity in your account.

• The Vyew User Interface is now available in Simplified Chinese. Set the language in Menu->Account Settings, on the General tab. Other languages to come.

• Page Voice Notes – record up to 5 minutes of audio directly on a page. Accessible via Insert -> More… -> Voice Note.

• Hand Grab Tool – grab and move the whiteboard. Accessible by holding down the space bar.

• Zoom in and out by holding down Ctrl while moving your mouse’s scroll wheel.

• Comments are now translatable to and from many languages.

• Speed Optimizations – This release added some changes to speed up Vyew a bit. More optimizations coming next month.

Touch Devices:

We’ve begun work on getting Vyew to play nicer on Android tablets. Our first set of improvements:

• Scroll around the whiteboard with a finger swipe.
• Tap whiteboard media to select them.
• Most other scrollable components (e.g., chat history, userlist) are finger-scrollable too.

Bug Fixes:

• Youtube videos now playable by Collaborators or Viewers.
• Comments -> Filter -> Filter by User now always shows the commenter’s actual screen names.
• Create New Comment popup now shows the latest comment you’re replying to instead of just the original “head” comment.
• Dynamic Button plugin is now always on top of regular whiteboard media.
• Comment Summary now includes task/approval info.

• Page Voice Notes – Easily record up to 5 minutes of audio on each page

• New Feature: Task Assignments and Page Approval Requests
• Email documents and text directly into your Vyew Room
• Reply by Email to comment notifications for import into the Vyew Room comment thread
• Copy Pages between Rooms
• New MP3 Player plugin
• Updated the Quiz/Poll Plugin for Vyew 4
  

Quiz / Poll Plugin

• Multi-answer poll option.
• Quiz option can be multiple choice, true/false, or answer fill in.
• Single or multiple correct answers.

• Show quiz takers their score after finishing the quiz.
• Show quiz takers the right and wrong answers after answering.

 Interact with Your Vyew Room via Email

• You can now reply to comments posted in your room directly from the notification emails. See here for more info.
• Import files and text via email. See here for more info.

Unlink/Relink Document Pages

When uploading a multi-page document, you can now unlink a page from the rest, so that resizing, rotating, moving, etc, will not affect it. Relinking a page resets it like the rest of the document again.

Copy Pages From One Room to Another

In the page manager, multi-select pages in one room…

… and copy them to other rooms.

Lone Viewer Unsync

When a user enters a room that’s in Sync mode and they are the only one in the room, the room will become Unsync’ed.

SHIFT Key Constrains Drawing Tools

By holding down the SHIFT key before clicking and dragging, you can constrain certain whiteboard drawing tools:

• The Rectangle and Ellipse tool can now draw a perfect square or circle.
• The freefrom Pen tool will be constrained to perfect vertical or horizontal lines.
• The Line tool will be constrained to lines in 45 degree increments.

New MP3 Player Plug-in

Loads quicker, sleeker design, same functionality.

Comment TODOs and Approvals

Comments can now be flagged as a “Todo”…

… or an “Approval” and assigned to a particular user with a due date for follow-up.

Additional Changes

• Comment reply pop-ups are now moveable and now show the entire text you’re replying to.
• Taipei, Taiwan timezone added.
• The room renaming and screen-name renaming pop-ups now support IME text input for non-English characters.
• Imported .TXT files are now converted to editable text boxes.
• Text boxes can now only be edited by one person at a time.
• New, easier-to-use zoom interface for both room and screen sharing modes.
• Holding/releasing the SHIFT key toggles the magnifier tool between zoom in/zoom out.
• Comment subscribers now shown by clicking on Invite→See who has access…

Improved Page Manager

Improved page manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Search within the Room – Search for text within comments, documents, page names or text tool within the room.
2. 

   Easily search and download files in a room.

   Pages/Files Tab – With the Files Tab, you can view all the different files that have been uploaded to this room, find which page they’re on or download them.

3. Thumbnails help you visually search for a specific page.
4. Dock to Side- Click DOCK to keep the Page Manager always visible on the side of the room.

 

 

 

Organize your invitations

In previous versions, all the Rooms you were invited to were kept in a single folder. Now you are able to drag them out to your own folders for more flexible organization. Note that the rooms you've been invited to will still also stay in the “Rooms I'm Invited To” folder to maintain your list of invitations. Whiteboard/Drawing Improvements

 

Improved Drawing Tools

• Precise location of Text tool - previously, when placing the I-beam text tool mouse icon, the text did not type exactly where it was placed. This has been fixed.
• Predefined line widths - For speed and simplicity, we add preset line widths. You can also select other line widths with the sider.
• Use the arrow keys to move media to an exact location - Once you select an image, document, or other media in your Vyew Room, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to shift it pixel by pixel for exact placement.
• Fixed:  copy/pasting of lines – There was a bug where pasted lines became shifted, and did not stay in the proper location.
• Multi-language Text tool  - The Text tool and other text fields now accept typed input for non-Western languages such as Chinese, Russian, etc.
• Edit multiple media properties at once - For example, if you multi-select several lines and shapes, you can then change the line color and thickness all together.

  

 

A few things we’ve been working on:

• Comment Flags— Comments can now be marked with flags such as Todo, Done, Question and Important (Star)
  

  Fixed Copy/Pasting Multiple Media Objects — Now, after selecting multiple objects and pasting them, the newly pasted items do not lose selection so they are easier to position after pastingMP3 Player Fixed — This was the last item on our list of Vyew v3 features that needed integrating into v4. You can insert MP3 files into a Vyew Room from your computer or a URL online. Play the MP3 for everyone in your room, or set it to auto-play when a person arrives on that page. Page Bookmarks — Add bookmarks to special pages in your Vyew Room inside the Page Manager Easier Button Plugin — Do you know what the Vyew Button is for? You can add it to any of your pages to allow easy navigation within the Vyew Rooms. For example, when your visitors click a custom button they can be jumped to a specific page, a different Vyew Room, or a web page. You can insert a button by going to INSERT, then "Button" in the plugin section (may need to click "More" if you don't see the plugins)

• Upload Multiple Documents Easily — Now you can upload multiple files or documents from your computer in one shot. After going to INSERT, From My Computer, simply select multiple files on your computer by holding down the CONTROL key while selecting (on the Mac, hold CMD key).
• Drag / Scroll — If you need to move media objects to a different are of the page that is not currently visible, just drag it to the edge of the screen and the screen will scroll.
• Comment Notifications— We released this feature a month ago, but we made it a little easier to use now. Firstly, the emails are a lot easier to read because we updated how the emails look:

  

  Second, clicking “Reply” now will open up that exact comment in the Vyew Room so you can reply directly in the Vyew Room.

Here’s what we’ve been working on over the past month:

• New Feature: Subscribe To Comments- When responding to a comment in a room, now you can get an email notification when someone else responds to it. Anyone else who comments on that thread also has the option of subscribing.
  

  Minor Bug Fixes - As some of you know, Vyew 4 is a complete re-write of the Vyew interface from the ground up. Since our initial Vyew 4 release, most of our time has been going into minor bug fixes and optimizations. The new Vyew platform gives us a big potential for a faster product. In the coming months we'll be focusing on this area more.Faster Load Time - While there is still more work to do in this area, we've made a few changes which decreased the load time by about ~2 seconds.Fix: Uploading to multiple rooms - This feature was a little buggy in the past. We've worked on this to ensure the page counts are accurate in the Home tab, and uploads to 30 rooms at a time work consistently.Add: Multi-select in Page Manager - Use Shift-Click to select multiple pages to move or delete them all at once.

• Add: Multi-select objects in a room- Though we already had this in the old Vyew 3, we just added this into Vyew 4.

  

• Fix:Laggy Rooms – We identified a problem which caused random users in a room to experience a 3-5 second lag/delay time in the interface. It was related to our auto-saving feature, and has now been fixed.
• Fix: Scheduled Meeting Sync Mode – When scheduled meetings were set to sync mode, they were not actually switching to sync at the time of the meeting. (Fixed in v4.13, March 2011)
• Add: Keyboard Shortcuts (Hotkeys) – Use these shortcuts for better productivity in a Vyew Room.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Control-RIGHT — Go to the next page
• Control-LEFT — Go to previous page
• Control + (plus) — Zoom In
• Control – (minus) — Zoom Out

Keyboard Shortcuts while an object is selected

• Control-UP — Layer object on top of others (after selecting the object)
• Control-DOWN — Layer object below others (after selecting the object)
• Control-X — Cut
• Control-C — Copy
• Control-V — Paste
• Delete — Delete selected object
• UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT — Nudge an object a little (when it’s selected)
• Shift-UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT — Move object a further distance (when it’s selected)

Things To Be Aware Of

• No Stamp Tool − The Stamp Tool has been discontinued in Vyew 4. The Mathematics Stamp Collection was replaced by the Equation Editor plugin. We are considering adding it in later, but it is not a priority. If you have a problem with this, let us know how important it is to you.
• No MP3 support − We have not yet implimented MP3′s into Vyew 4. We hope to get this out in the next month. If this is a deal breaker for you, then stick with v3. We will make another announcement when that is read.
  

How to Switch to Vyew 4

Go here to switch: http://vyew.com/switchversions

Is My Account Vyew 3 or Vyew 4? How Do I tell?

The link above will tell you.

What’s new in Vyew 4?

It’s been rebuilt from the ground up in the latest Flash Flex4 technology which means…

• Export to PDF/Print – Export your whole room to a PDF file for offline storage or printing.
• The interface is more responsive, faster, and more stable.
• Loading times will be faster. We will be working on optimizations heavily in the coming months.
• Simpler, easier to use interface.
• Secure – We’ve added more security to keep your content safe.
• Searching – Search for content within your rooms (located in the Home Tab, upper right corner)
• New Page Navigator with easier drag/drop rearranging of pages, and docking to the side like PowerPoint.

VyewBook’s are now called Rooms

When we first started Vyew, for some reason we thought of a cute idea to call our meeting rooms VyewBooks. We called them Books, because we wanted to distinguish our meeting rooms from other peoples meeting rooms which were not “asynchronous.” The concept of a book, was that the content was there, and always would be there. In the end, maybe it caused more confusion than it was worth, so now we’re going back to the generic term “Room.” So, from here on out, we’ll be referring to Vyew Rooms, not VyewBooks.

The no-frames version of Vyew is ready to roll out, and we will be doing so today (Friday March 4) on one of our servers. This change will be transparent to everyone, but for the weekend, a notice will appear at the top of the screen informing them of this change. In case any problems are experienced, please click the link to contact support as we will be monitoring your responses throughout the weekend.

How do I know if my account is Vyew 3 or 4?

To check what version you are on, go here: http://vyew.com/switchversions

What’s the difference Vyew 3 and Vyew 4?

• There are 2 minor things are not in Vyew 4: (1) Stamp Tool, (2) MP3 Support (will be fixed). Learn more.
• Vyew 4 Interface has been changed to make it easier to use (we hope, your feedback is important to us).
• We added some new features… Read here for more info.

The New Interface

Our goal of for the new interface was to make it simpler to use. Some of you who have been using Vyew 3 for a long time, may feel slightly lost when first jumping into Vyew 4 because we moved a few things around.

.

Where did my buttons go?

Here’s a list of some things we did to the Vyew interface:

• Removed Book Menu – Most items moved into the Main Menu such as renaming, publishing, activity logs, settings.
• Moved Edit Menu – Moved into the drawing tools side bar. This includes cut/copy/paste, undo/redo, etc…
• Import Button renamed to INSERT – The Insert menu now houses inserting any new media, plugins, or blank pages and screenshots.
• Removed buttons: Insert Plugin, Paste, Print, Add Page, Duplicate Page – these buttons were moved into the INSERT menu, or EDIT menu.
• Moved Login Status / Logout into the Main Menu.
• Chat Pod Loading is Different — If there is nobody in the room, the chat side pod does open by default. You can open it by click on the double arrow icon at the lower right part of the screen.

More Help Topics:

• Quick Start Guide
• Screen Sharing Troubleshooter
• Setting up a Mic/Webcam
• About Sync/Unsync Mode
• About User Roles/Permissions

• Desktop Sharing – We are working to make this feature more stable and work more seamlessly among presenters. We have installed a few new changes which should facilitate a smoother experience. We are still working on a few more stability features to be released next month. If you still have any problems, be sure to submit a test report here, and use the Vyew Accelerator for desktop sharing.
• Dynamic Button – The button plugin allows collaborators and up to open external link URL’s automatically for everyone in the room.
• Bug fixes –  A lot of minor bug fixes including single apostrophes in book names sometimes had problems redirecting when opening.

Coming up…

We have been working hard on our next major version release, Vyew 4.0. We hope to have this launched early in 2010.

• New, easier to use interface
• Faster interface response times
• Faster drawing tools response times
• Higher security
• and much more…. to be listed later.

There haven’t been too many recent changes to the current product. This is because we are hard at work producing our next major version release. We hope to have this done by December 2009. It will have significant upgrades in these areas:

• Speed and Responsiveness
• Ease of Use
• Stability