Here is the third beta of Blocs for Mac V5.2.3. This build introduces some nice new features for custom Brics and fixes a few more outstanding issues.
Missing Custom Bric Improvements
If you ever encounter custom Brics that you don’t have installed in a project, Blocs now checks the Blocs Store for the Bric and offers options to either install or view the Brics product page.
Server Path Finder
As long as you have your server credentials added, you can now log onto your server from within Blocs and select an upload path.
Obviously there are many types of hosting and server configurations, so this feature may not work as intended. Testers should pay close attention to the path value inserted into the field when a server location is selected.
Project Loading Speed
For anyone who is using a large project, you should see a little speed boost when it comes to opening your project (Average of a 25% faster loading speed when opening a 1GB Blocs project ).
Audio Player Preload Option
If your website has multiple audio player Brics on it, this feature is for you. Disable preloading to get an instant page load speed increase.
Is there a use case for an audio player that does not automatically stop the currently playing track when the next track is played, as I have been telling you before?
Music becomes messy.
The native html5 audio player doesn’t do it by default. You have to code for it. So unless Norm builds that into blocs it’s actually just a small bit of JavaScript to enable yourself. Lots of example online showing you the code.
A little tick box for the option for audio to stop on the next start of a track would be brilliant / I have just seen it’s an issue so many have over the years - could you add this please @Norm ?
I’ve used code in the past too but with blocs on desk top and now mobile & iPad being pushed, bloggers might want to do several audio records when out on location and having a few of these on a page would be so much easier if the user can check a box for it to stop on last play.
Using this beta I had a strange problem with a bloc set to use the ID for flexy. It had a coloured background inline with the areas above, but always showed as an empty white space in Blocs preview. This was driving me nuts looking for potential problems in the layer navigator, until I then previewed in Safari and it was correct.
The same project had some text in the footer that was black, but always light grey in preview. I could change it to any colour I liked via custom class in edit mode, but it remained light grey in preview, unless I selected the text and made it black via the side panel, which would force it to preview correctly.
This second issue was the same, whether previewed in Blocs or Safari, however the same published site using an earlier version of Blocs looks fine online without having needed to wrestle with any of this.
This was a job where I built 14 mini websites for a client using Volt some time ago. Looking at the various project files, they are all using Bootstrap 5 and were last modified back in May 2022.
It’d be very cool to have a player in “one click”, with < > || > change buttons, even better : with selected music (among a list as for the menu) trigged by page loaded (or more basically, one player by page).
And cherry on the cake : with random trigger (random music when going on same page, with a check bo “random”).
Is there a way to disable a custom bric’s sidebar options (Spacing, Scroll FX, Animation etc) ? It may be already possible, I just don’t know how. These options are irrelevant on brics like my Dromeas and Perspective which are just placeholders on the page.
I was just about to do that video walkthrough for you, and encountered a strange anomaly. Since uploading the updated Volt project to the server I no longer have that blank space with Flexy when previewed inside Blocs, even when opening an older project version that has not been updated. I think it may need to be uploaded to a different domain without updating Volt, but not sure how useful that is to you.
The other problem with the text not changing colour via custom class is still present though.
Great A check box “launch automaticalluy | Launch on click on Play”, so we can impose playing by default Vs on-demand (click) for user.
And personal big wish : Random check box (among list, in both upper mode if possible), it adds dynamism + no wearisome page loaded.
I’ve added support for this in Blocs V5.2.4 which should hopefully be available to test later this week.
During export Blocs will check each page for multiple audio players, if any are detected Blocs will include a little JS in the footer to auto pause playing audio when another player is started.
).
A check box “launch automaticalluy | Launch on click on Play”, so we can impose playing by default Vs on-demand (click) for user.
: Random check box (among list, in both upper mode if possible), it adds dynamism + no wearisome page loaded.