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!
5.0 (Beta)
Reminder for SILers
Most SIL projects can freely use the SIL internal Enterprise License. Questions? Shoot us an email at enterprise (preposition) bloomlibrary.org.
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.
Edit Tab
Comic Tool
You can now control the transparency of comic element and make corners round. You can also show a line that you can use to point to something in a diagram:
You can now make circle comic elements.
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).
Leveled Reader
We added some new measures.
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
The new Team Collection enterprise feature debuts in this release. With a Team Collection, you can safely share a collection within your team, across the internet, without full-time internet access. For this release, we’re going to keep this feature behind the “Experimental” checkbox. For now, we are only supporting Dropbox & LAN environments. Please contact us if you are considering using this. We need your help to fully understand how this will be used, and how the experience goes.
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.
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 a template books on BloomLibrary.org. It is now easier to understand what the template pages are for:
Getting the Beta
If you already have a beta version, Bloom will automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise you can get the beta from the Bloom downloads page. As usual, you can have the Release & Beta versions installed at the same time, and open books on either.