Announcing Bloom 5.0 Release

Thank you everyone who helped us test Bloom 5.0 while it was in Beta. It is now the Release.

Here’s what’s new in 5.0:

Collection Tab

We made hovering over a book thumbnail show the folder name of the book. This is helpful to see what’s-what when you have multiple copies of a book.

Bookshelf selector

In collection settings, Bloom Enterprise projects that have bookshelves on Bloom Library can now choose the bookshelf that corresponds to the collection. Then when books are uploaded to BloomLibrary.org, they automatically go to the correct bookshelf. This setting also can now be used to automatically choose a back-cover image to show where the book fits in the overall curriculum and choose a cover color based on the grade (this is used for a large MOE project in Kyrgyzstan). screenshot-online-only

Edit Tab

Comic Tool —> Overlay Tool

The Comic Tool is now the “Overlay Tool”. We made this change because this tool is now useful for more than comics and people who were not interested in comics were not finding it with the old name.

:exclamation: The Overlay Tool requires a Bloom Enterprise subscription. However, books that contain overlays can be translated into other languages without a Bloom Enterprise subscription. If this change causes you any problems, remember that you can always enable Bloom Enterprise freely if you do not have external funding, and SIL-affiliated people have other free and almost-free ways of getting subscriptions (see below). If those options do not work for you, please reach out to us at issues@bloomlibrary.org so that we can help you finish your book in some other way.

:star:You can now control the transparency of overlayed text elements and make corners round. You can also show a line that you can use to point to something in a diagram:

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:star:You can now make circle text elements. Feature Request

Widgets

We’ve made it easier to add HTML5 widgets from Active Presenter. No more zipping/unzipping.

There is now a “Widget Page” that gives you a full-screen page to host your html5 interactive widgets. (Widgets are part of Bloom Enterprise).

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Leveled Reader

You can now specify two new limits: Sentences per page (Feature Request) and Average count of sentences per page.

We added some new measures: total sentences in book, longest sentence in book, and longest word in the book.

We added a button to copy all the leveled reader measures of a book to the clipboard, in a form that can be pasted into spreadsheets.

Text on Simple Quiz pages is no longer counted when computing whole-book statistics. Note that this change only applies to newly created Quizzes. Contact us for instructions about applying this change to pre-exiting quiz pages.

Team Collections

:exclamation: NOTE: Team Collections debuted in Bloom 5.0 beta, but did not “graduate” out of beta successfully because of a bug found by a beta tester (yay beta testers!). We did not have time to properly test the fix before it was time to release Bloom 5.0. Therefore, you need to run Bloom 5.1 beta in order to use this feature.

Performance

Recently we spent weeks improving Bloom’s ability to deal with large books and long Bloom sessions without running out of memory. As part of that effort, we’ve added a tool for watching what happens to available memory and speed as Bloom does various things. This is mostly for our own use, but it’s also available to you, in case you suspect that Bloom is eating memory or slowing down as you use it.

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BloomLibrary.org

When you download books from BloomLibrary.org that have audio, Bloom will now download the audio as part of the shell book.

We’ve improved what you see when you look at template books on BloomLibrary.org. It is now easier to understand what the template pages are for:

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Reminder for SILers

Most SIL projects can freely use the SIL internal Enterprise License. Questions? Shoot us an email at enterprise (@) bloomlibrary.org.

Upgrading

If you are using Bloom 4.9 Release, Bloom should automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, you can get 5.0 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.

Wonderful to see all the progress that’s being made on this!
As far as the sharing / Team Collections feature goes, I see the thread on this was recently closed, but it is still not available in the release version. Just wondering…is there somewhere else to discuss any further issues about the Team Collections feature?
Thanks for your work on this great tool!

Unfortunately, you’ll need to get the 5.1 beta to use Team Collections.
See the release note above:

If you have questions about if Team Collections is right for you, write to experimental@bloomlibrary.org.

If you have specific questions which come up as you are using it, please start a new topic.