Monday 8 Aug 2011
by
bootle
After months of brainstorming and hardcore programming, consulting, redesigning and testing; having Noel’s macbook burned-out (3) 4 times and Matt’s balancing on the verge of death.. We’re releasing something quite exceptional, something we’re quite proud of and something you may like too: a completely rewritten Dropr in its latest and most powerful incarnation, The Bikini Monkey!
What’s new?
Everything, pretty much. Throughout the alpha and early beta releases of Dropr we’ve collected a lot of feedback from members of many backgrounds, media and locations. We’ve mixed it with our own observations and blended into a totally new concept of an online art host. We’ve removed all functionality that wasn’t necessary, then added some new stuff and tweaked until we’ve got something that has more to offer but looks like much less. It’s still fun and interactive but stripped down (almost!) to the sweet minimum. ‘Bikini Monkey’ indeed.
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Ok, but cut the crap, so what’s new?
In short:
Total Multi-deviceness
Now your Dropr portfolios are delivered to phones, tablets, desktop machines and even fridges (apparently). And all that without a crippled ‘mobile version’ of the site, Dropr just adapts to provide the best looks, highest performance and touch or mouse control on all devices.
New interface
We made it a little bit more standard in some ways so that users at varying levels of computer literacy can find their way around the app easily and to minimise the learning curve, but at the same time we’ve remained innovative and while having less from more, we haven’t reached the bore. It’s very interactive and nicely self-contained. And it looks pretty nice too :)
Multi-portfolio management
You can create and edit many portfolios to maintain all areas of your creation that need to be separate (or control portfolios for many artists if you happen to be a music label manager for example). Without logging in an out, with all updates and control gathered around one Dashboard. All portfolios apart from your main one can be shared with others too.
New portfolio styling
They’re simpler, faster and focus on presenting the content even more. We’ve added some innovative styling settings too, such as background filters. Literally, with 3 clicks you can make your portfolio beautiful – and that’s without themes. We’ve removed them, so that all portfolios are unique.
New Explore
Intelligent suggestions, very fast multi-query sifting and infinite browsing. It might be, that the world hasn’t seen a sexier way to look for creatives. Check it!
New dashboard
We’ve changed the Dashboard entirely. It’s very graphic and minimalistic and gathers all your Dropr activity together with inspiration from the Cup (every 2 hours it refills a project you might like) and followed members. You can even switch it to a gallery mode to remove all social interactions and just browse the inspiring content. Or Splash it up..
Simpler and faster Splash Up!
Splashup is back to fullscreen-only. The in-tab version had some performance issues that were impossible to overcome. Now it’s simpler, faster and embedded in the header bar whenever available.
New account types
Unlike previous invite-only versions, Bikini Monkey lets your sign up immediately.
Anyone can get a Treasure Seeker account and immediately start exploring the clouds of our portfolios. To upload content you will need to upgrade your account to Cloudmaster. This can be done in a few ways; apply to us, collect votes from other Cloudmasters or get invited directly by a Cloudmaster (each one can invite two friends). There’s also another nice account type coming soon: the most powerful and chilled; the Guru.
Better semantic stuff
We’ve improved our AAAAA! (Always Active Art Awesomeness Algorythm!) and STRAW (System That Relates Artists and Work) to serve you some content with more accuracy.
Refreshed identity
It seems like over past months it became quite fashionable to put a droplet in a startup’s logo. What is more, a lot of them looked exactly like our basic shape of a circle mixed with a square (which stood for simplicity and cleanliness).
Not to be confused, we’ve decided to go for something fresher: two droplets. Ha!
And more…
There are enormous shed-loads of updates, little tweaks and brand new ideas – have a look around, you might find a feature you requested :)
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What happens now?
For the next few weeks we’ll be testing Dropr to get rid of all bugs we haven’t found yet. Meanwhile, please do overuse the little Bug button in bottom-right corner.
All your feedback helps us make Dropr something amazing!
Since now, we’re also working on the second installment of Bikini Monkey,
the mark II.
The first half of the Bikini Monkey saga brings a powerful base for a lot of innovation and nice new features, which will come in full glory with its second part, the Bikini Monkey mark II, this autumn.
Since today a new survey is available at dropr.com/wtf/2/ – fill it if you would like to give us some feedback and help the project!
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We hope you like the new app!
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Love!
Dropr crew
