Thank you everyone who helped us test Bloom 4.6 while it was in Beta. It is now the Release.
Here’s what’s new in 4.6:
4.6
Collection Tab
In Settings, we’ve added the option to use Kayah and Shan numeral systems.(Feature Request)
When opening a different collection, Bloom now offers you the last 9 collections you opened. (Feature Request)
Edit Tab
We added a completely new WYSIWYG Quiz page. You can control formatting (Feature Request), location in the book (Feature Request), and the content of the heading. You can also record audio for all parts of it (Feature Request, Feature Request).
Bloom can normally tell if you are working on a derived book or an original. But if it gets it wrong, you can now remove the derivation copyright and license using a new checkbox in the Copyright & License dialog (Feature Request).
You can now marks books as Public Domain using CC0 (Feature Request, Feature Request).
You can now paste hyperlinks into books which will work when people use the digital version of the book(Feature Request).
You can now copy text from language translation speech bubbles.
The “Add Page” dialog now clearly indicates which template pages are available only with Bloom Enterprise enabled.
Books with many pages
We have improved Bloom’s ability to work with books that run into the hundreds of pages.
Sign Language Books
We have improved computer performance when working with sign language videos. Page thumbnails no longer include the first frame for the video (this was hard on memory and CPU).
In the Publish:Upload screen, we’ve added a place to identify the language of your sign language videos.
We added a “Text above Video” template page.
Talking Books
You can now record audio for all the parts of a Quiz Page. (Feature Request, Feature Request)
We improved the smoothness of Talking Book playback by now playing only a single audio file per page. This means that highlighting is now based on timestamps, rather than on starting up individual audio files for each sentence. Talking books created with 4.6 require a Bloom Reader version that is up to date (latest v1.3).
Publish Tab
Bloom Reader Publish Preview
New, easier publish screen
We added a preview that lets you interact with the book before publishing to a real device.
We added new hints about publishing with USB and Wi-FI.
We’ve added the ability to limit Bloom shellbook downloads to BloomLibrary.org visitors in single country. If you need to publish books with that kind of restriction, please contact us.
ePUB Publish
New, cleaner ePUB publish screen
User Interface
We added smarts to Bloom’s user interface to use different fonts, as needed, in order to display various non-roman languages. This is not related to what you see in books, just the Bloom interface. Bloom now ships with Google’s “noto” fonts for Arabic, Bengali, Devanagari, Thai, and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).
This version is the beginning of a multi-version effort to move Bloom’s UI to a more consistent and contemporary visual design language. We have chosen to move towards Google’s Material Design, which is what users will be familiar with from their phones.
Upgrading
If you are using Bloom 4.5 Release, Bloom should automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, you can get 4.6 from the Bloom downloads page. As usual, you can have the Release & Beta versions installed at the same time , and open books in either one.
If you have any questions about these new features, please ask them here on this forum. If you find bugs, please use Help:Report a Problem and include your book. If you need to use email, please send to issues@bloomlibrary.org.