What's New in Bloom 4.8 beta

If you run Bloom on beta channel, you are a crucial part of the Bloom team. Your help ensures that folks who don’t have easy access to technical help get a solid product when the beta becomes the release version. Thank you!

Here’s what’s new in 4.8 beta, available now.

Edit Tab

:star:Talking Book Text Playback Order. You can now control the playback order of all the text boxes on a page, including comic book bubbles.

Improved performance with very large books. Some of you are creating terrific picture dictionaries with Bloom. These run into the hundreds of pages. However, the page thumbnail list gets very, very slow in these books. In 4.8, we’ve re-written that page thumbnail list from scratch, so that it is now much easier to edit these huge books.

Original Title (SIL PNG Request)

Bloom now has a way to declare the title of the original book upon which your translation is based, in the Credits page. It will automatically determine this if it can, otherwise you can type it in.

:star:Widget Activities (Feature Request)

You can now embed little interactive activities in digital publications (web, Bloom Reader, RAB App). Many of these widgets already exist (they work with Apple’s IBooks and the Kotobee book software). You may also be able to make your own or commission a programmer. If this approach gains popularity, we’ll have a set of them to share within the Bloom community. To learn about “book widgets”, please see this blog. To enable this feature, you need to go to Collection Tab/Settings/Advanced Program Settings and tick “Show Experimental Features”.

Getting the Beta

If you already have a beta version, Bloom will automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, Windows users can get 4.8 from the Bloom downloads page. The Linux version is available as well. As usual, you can have the Release & Beta versions installed at the same time, and open books on either.