July 23, 2011 Release Notes

Hello!

After a bit of a break from these release notes, we figured it was time to fill you in about our most recent changes. Yet again, we've got some exciting new features, as well as some major changes both on the front and back ends of the site.

One of the most noticeable changes to the site is the introduction of our shiny new HTML5 image uploader!

Our new image uploader gets rid of that cranky old Flash uploader and leverages some cool new HTML5 features. You can now drag files from your computer and drop them directly into the browser. You can also upload as many images as you want - simultaneously. These features work with most modern browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. We're keeping the old image uploader around for those other browsers that still don't fully support HTML5 (cough cough IE).

Along with this long-overdue update, we've got a new feature that has got us all tingly with excitement. (Or maybe that's just the lack of sleep...)

Next is something that has been rattling around inside our brains for a long time now - we call it Stories. After seven years and tens of thousands of customer surveys, we decided it was time for something completely different. So we scrapped the old feedback system and created a fancy new storytelling system to allow our favorite repair technicians—our users—to share their adventures with everyone! This is finally your chance to tell the world your side of the repair. Did your toddler mistake your iPhone 4 for a pacifier? How'd that MacBook Pro Unibody repair go? We want to hear about everything! Right now we're inviting customers to comment on their recently purchased products, but we'll soon allow anyone to write their story about a product or a guide.

Some other smaller fixes and features we've added over the past few weeks:

  • Limited tag length to 32 characters to prevent layout-breakingly long tags.
  • Fixed broken links on meta.
  • Clarified discussion topics and added an info page about them, which is linked from the Ask page.
  • Give reputation for votes on discussion topics.
  • Added tabs to edit profile pages to allow easy switching between previous orders, shipping and billing, guide profile editing and "About" page editing.
  • We've done a large data conversion on our database. All text is now correctly encoded using the utf8 character set. Previously, much of our text was a mix of Latin1, UTF-8, and several variants of doubly encoded UTF-8 or latin1 text. So now the last nooks and crannies of the database that weren't happy with Unicode characters should be cleaned up. Unleash your snowman characters upon the world! ☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃

As always, let us know if you come across any problems on the site.

Cheers!

Tim

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I am so excited about finally getting rid of the flash image uploader. Wahoo!

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Thanks for the update Tim. Who are you? There's no profile information.

by

Tim is one of our new developers. His specialty is user interface design, and he designed the new Story tool. This is as good a time as any to say 'welcome!' We've hired a couple more people recently to help out our development efforts, and I'll let them introduce themselves soon.

by

i like the story idea, is it meant to be like a blog that we can update? my dad belongs to a model engineer site (mad train men) which has this idea and you can watch/message as the repair/build takes place. it's a really popular feature. Anyhow I enjoyed Tim's story, bit of fun is good.

by

does this mean bye bye to silly pdf uploads for my flowchart idea?

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