This post is to reassure you that we haven’t forgotten about the promised major update to the Ryuzine webapps – in fact they are well on their way for a release sometime later in 2015! Instead of releasing the incremental changes this upcoming release will jump right to version 1.0!
Above you can see the app icons have also undergone a visual overhaul, but the webapps themselves are all undergoing massive rewrites – with so many changes and new features the change-log already goes on for pages. What sort of changes? Well, for starters the User Interfaces have all undergone a lot of simplification.
User Interface Updated
You’ll no longer need to hit the “More” and “Less” buttons to slide controls left and right – all the buttons are now presented on one Navigation Bar:
Updated Phone UI Nav Bar
Behind that “Share” button is also a completely rewritten social media sharing widget, and in addition to still being able to drop in your own widget the third-party “Add-Ons” API from Ryuzine Writer has been completely rewritten and will also available in both Ryuzine Reader and Ryuzine Rack. That means adding your own custom dialogs and panels, but previously built-in features like the “Lightbox” are also going to be broken out into optional add-ons, making it easier for third-party developers to expand or replace them.
Page Manager & More
One of the biggest changes coming to Ryuzine Writer is the new “Page Manager!” Here’s a look at it in action:
“Page Manager” panel in Ryuzine Writer’s Editor
Professional page layout programs used in the print media industry allow the designer to easily see how their pages lay out in relation to one another, and easily add/delete and drag-to-reorder the pages. All of those features will be available in the new Page Manager panel, as well as the ability to change the size of the page thumbnails, show individual or facing pages (either left or right bound), and a “continuous” view in the editor that is a much better representation of the same view within Ryuzine Reader.
The editor will also support “Master Styles” which can be changed without having to refresh the browser and reload Ryuzine Writer. Issue-specific styles can also be loaded, previewed, and unloaded within the editor. If you are using PHP File Operations in the editor the Image Insert no longer creates a pop-up window that may be blocked by browsers.
The “Package Builder” has also undergone a major rewrite and will also offer the option of packaging into a plain folder instead of a ZIP archive. This is useful if you want to make manual additions or changes to the package or plan to immediately FTP it up to a website for viewing rather than offering it as a downloadable publication.
We could literally go on and on listing everything in the change-log but we’ll hold off until the actual release.
Ryuzine is Going Open Source!
We’re still looking through the various open source licenses to find the one that fits us best, but you read that correctly – version 1.0 of all the Ryuzine webapps will be released under an open source license. This will completely replace the current Commercial and Non-Commercial Use licenses. That means with version 1.0 there will no longer be a requirement to purchase a license for commercial use! ALL of the source code will eventually be available on GitHub, with each webapp and add-on in its own repository. Once that has happened anyone and everyone can contribute to making Ryuzine even better! Since it will be a little confusing for non-developers to grab and assemble all the files from multiple repositories, www.ryumaru.com will remain the place to download the pre-packaged webapps.
So When Can You Get It?
One of the factors in deciding to take Ryuzine open source is that, since the beginning, there has only been ONE developer working on it as a side-project, even as the “family” of webapps has grown. The first step was a “code audit” to make sure all the code that will be released CAN be released under an open source license. Then there were all the UI changes, updating themes broken by the UI changes, bug fixes, adding new features, breaking built-in functions out into add-ons, rewriting the Add-On API, and lots and lots more that still needs to happen. Our best guess is that it will be ready sometime in the Spring or Summer of 2015. Until then you can still download version 0.9.6.7 of Reader/Rack and Writer and 0.9.6.8 of the Ryuzine Press plugin for WordPress.