Blocs 4.3 Beta Build 5

Blocs Beta
#1

Hey everyone, here is Blocs 4.3 beta build 5. This release contains a range of fixes for new and old features.

Blocs Store Integration :shopping_cart:
You can now find store products and install them directly within Blocs. Products show up with normal search terms or use the search term blocs.store to show the 50 most recent products for the category (Brics in Bric Bar, Blocs in Bloc Bar and Page Templates in New Page window). Most 3rd party developers still need to prepare their products for inclusion in in-app search, so some products don’t show yet.

This feature can be disabled in main preferences :innocent:.

Localisation :netherlands: :it: :portugal:
Hallo, Ciao, Olá! Our none native English speaking users will be happy to hear Blocs now speaks Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. You may notice a bad translation, some text cropping or another little interface oddity. Please let me know if you spot something and it’ll be fixed up in no time!

Quick Gallery and Carousel Creation :rocket:
You can now select and drag multiple images from either the Asset manager or the MacOS Finder to quickly create galleries or Carousels.

Drag Text To Canvas :spiral_notepad:
You can now drag text from word processors directly onto the Blocs design canvas to add new text Brics or replace the content of a Bric that is already placed on the page.

Quick Preview :arrow_forward:
Right click the preview button to quickly preview your site in any installed browser.

Visual Impairment Filters :eye:
Blocs now has support for visual impairment filters which you can enable to test your sites for visual impairment accessibility issues.

Show navigation drop downs on hover :computer_mouse:
You can now enable navigation drop downs to auto open when the mouse cursor is over them. (Only works on classic navigation drop downs on mouse/trackpad controlled computers).

Support for Brics within Custom Brics :onion:
The developer API now supports a new html tag (<bric_container></bric_container>) that lets any custom Bric have other Brics placed within it. Just add the above code to a custom Bric and it will gain a new input area that you can add Brics into.

Have a great weekend! :beers:

Download Blocs 4.3 Beta Build 5

Don’t forget to hard reload your browser, if the beta doesn’t show!

Known Issues
There are various known issues with Blocs 4.3 that I plan to address during the text phase, so please be aware I already know about these issues.

Blocs Store Integration
Currently installed custom Blocs may show duplicates when you search the store for Blocs.

Visual Impairment Filters
This feature uses SVG filters to apply the visual impairment filters, unfortunately SVG filters don’t play well with the Safari webkit engine (which the Blocs canvas uses) so you will see lag when you apply a filter and scroll. Disabling the filter back to none will return scroll speed.

I’m hoping Apple fix this soon, so please bare with it.

Support for Brics within Custom Brics
I definitely have a few more grey hairs after implementing this, it’s been a real challenge. It’s still a bit rough in areas and you will very likely see selection issues if you nest Tables within Tables or Custom Brics within custom Brics within Custom Brics.

I’ve tested it a lot in house but I’m still able to break things, so developers please don’t roll out any products that depend on it until it’s rock solid.

3 Likes
#2

The weekend is going to be awesome! :star_struck: :champagne: :tada: :balloon:

1 Like
#3

Have a great weekend Norm! :smile:
Try not to work you need some R&R. We so appreciate all that you do for us, Love Blocs!

1 Like
#4

It would be useful if Blocs had an option to display the kb image size in the asset manager.

2 Likes
#5

Hi @norm,
Something weird is happening here on my M1 and Big Sur 11.4. When selecting a page using the page selector (on some pages, not all). Blocs crashes. When selecting the same page from the layer tree there’s no issues. This happens in 4.2 as well. The same is not happening on my Intel machine. I’ll PM you the file.

1 Like
#6

Thanks I’ll take a look

1 Like
#7

I was working on a project yesterday and twice found that clicking a video on the canvass made it play with no means of stopping. I tried stopping it in preview and even switching to other pages but it kept playing to the end and I’ve not seen this before.

This was the first time I’ve encoded a video for a website using Handbrake with the fast decode option enabled and I wondered if that might be related. The video is remotely hosted on the server, rather than stored locally.

#8

Well, Norm, this new beta now displays in Portuguese instead of Dutch. Not sure if that’s an improvement or not, but it is a change. So whatever you did in this beta clear invoked that change. Fingers crossed the next beta will force English back as the main language!

By the way, if I hack the app by deleting ONLY “pt-PT.lproj” and then relaunch Blocs 4.3b5, I can see English!

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Separately from the above, I should mention that the hosted background image bug that prevents image display in Preview on High Sierra is still in effect though. I know I get chastised for using the greatest version of MacOS X since sliced bread (High Sierra), but the fact remains that Blocs 4.1.1 doesn’t have any issues with Hosted background images at all. And since I am testing each of these new betas in BS4 mode, it cannot be said that BS5 is the cause. But I believe you changed a lot of jQuery code to plain JS, and I can only wildly speculate that a bug in one of those files must be causing this. How else can we explain Hosted Background Images display fine in Blocs 4.1.1?

1 Like
#9

「 Show navigation drop downs on hover」

Is there a page explaining how to do this?

#10

Hi @sifrec

Select NAV BAR in the menu, and you will see it on the right hand side settings.

Hope this is what you meant?

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#11

Thank you, I’ll take a look.

#12

I understand that the submenu appears when you mouse over it.

#13