Today, we're excited to announce the release of the 4.1 update to the Mag+ system. This update affects iOS, Android and Fire apps, the Reviewer apps and the plug-in. You can download the new tools from magplus.com as of February 12, 2013. All apps built after that time will be 4.1 apps.
Remember to update your app to 4.1 before you publish a 4.1 MIB! Apps will always read older MIB versions, but cannot serve MIBs that are a newer version. How to build and submit an update.
This release is focused on making Mag+ faster and easier to use, and bringing more creative options to your app and issues. Here are the new features—click the links to see dedicated support articles.
Installation notes: To get the latest version of the Production Tool, make sure you delete the old Production Tool before running the new Prod Tool installer. Also, you will notice a new checkbox in the installer for installing the additional Android device templates now supported.
iOS:
Dual Layout: Mag+ has always offered designers the advantage of doing one layout to support both orientations. With Dual Layout, you now have another option: You can create a completely unique layout for each orientation on each page in a vertical. Use new master page types to create your portrait and landscape versions—you can even have an uneven number of portrait and landscape pages in the same vertical. This feature is not supported in InDesign CS4.
Pinch and Zoom: You can now designate any Block object type in your layout to be zoomable via pinch. This was previously done in HTML, but can now be done through the Mag+ plugin.
Panning: Panning, or having content scrolling inside a box, is another feature that was once only possible with embedded HTML, but is now a simple checkbox in the plug-in.
Popup enhancements: A new feature called Popup Groups allows you to designate that within any given group of popups, only one can be open at a time. In other words, when I tap a second popup, the first one automatically closes. Popup groups are set in the plug-in. In addition, we have added two new transition types for modal popups: zoom and flip. Finally, we now support embedded HTML objects inside popups.
Media looping: You can now set any video or audio to loop (start over when it is done playing) until the user pauses or swipes the page.
Sound effects: We have added a new media type called Sound Effect—an audio track that can play over the top of another audio track. This allows you to, for instance, add background music and sound effects into the same layout.
Link highlighting: Via the plug-in, you can now set a color and transparency level for any hotspot to show a visual highlight when tapped.
New navigation options: Via settings in the Production Tool, Mag+ now allows designers to disable the scrubber; or to disable the scrubber and horizontal scrolling and navigate only with jump links.
Better orientation locking: You can now in Publish choose to lock the entire app to any of the four orientations. This means that all spaces in the app will not rotate—in other words if you turn the device the app will look like its sideways. In addition, via an option in the Production Tool, you can choose to crop portrait orientation issues to the portrait orientation edges; that is, you will not see any unused space between verticals when swiping.
Issue auto-archiving: When the device runs low on space, it will automatically archive the oldest issues, according to Apple's best practices.
Support for Fiksu: a new third-party app-marketing tool
Reviewer app: The Reviewer now has two libraries—the Push Library is where you'll find the MIBs you are reviewing. The Library is where we will publish guides, design examples, inspirational MIBs and more.
The above features are only available for iOS. They are not currently supported on Android. You can serve a 4.1 MIB to an Android or Fire 4.1 app, but the above features will be disabled:
- Dual layout MIBs will only load the portrait orientation.
- Popups will not respect transitions or groups.
- Blocks with zoom and panning will load but the zoom and pan functions will not work.
- Sound effects, looping, new navigation options, highlighting, auto-archiving and Fiksu will not work.
The reason these features are not yet in Android is that we are going through a substantial code rewrite for that platform that we will roll out later this year. In addition to some of these creative features, that will bring a much faster and more stable user experience to our Android platform.
iOS and Android:
Issue download pausing: The user can now pause during an issue download.
Android:
New device types: We have added templates for the Kindle Fire HD 7, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9, the Nexus 10 and Android smartphones 1280x720.
Publish:
Issue Control: New settings in the Issues section of Publish let you decide whether any published issue should be included or excluded from any of your subscriptions. This lets publishers create “super subscriptions” that include exclusive access to special issues, or to create issues that go only to one platform.
Bug fixes since 4.04 was released Nov 19, 2012:
iOS
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash if the app was backgrounded more than twice during download
- Fixed a bug that caused entitlements served via the API to remain even after log out, and that caused downloaded issues to disappear at log out
- Deleting entitlements is now instant
- Links clicked captured again in Flurry and Localytics
- Fixed a crash when opening a TOC vertical
- Fix for repeating inline and popup video
- Slide transitions now respect animation curve
- Tapping near the top/bottom of a page when there are no more pages now brings up the menu
- Fixes a freeze that could occur when tapping the scren while the content is bouncing after a flick
- HTML and hotspots now override the hot zones in the app for bookmarking and page turning
- Fixed a bug that can cause a crash when audio files in the playlist are referenced more than once in the issue
- Using the Show My Account View on Launch setting in Publish now allows the app to launch the My Account view on first run
- App now supports pre-4.0 jump links to the Store for legacy issues
- Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when a mailto link is tapped and no mail account is set up on the device
- When app is launched into LIve screen, page now loads as it should. Previous bug required moving away from LIve and back to it to get it to load.
- Delete All button in Reviewer now clears the cache completely
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As of Mag+ v4.1, Localytics will not report events captured while the app is in the background. This will specifically affect the Issue Delivered event, as that will no longer include Newsstand-delivered downloads. Please use the download stats in Publish instead.
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