New

We've just released a really big update to our server infrastructure and a couple of new features.

New Servers and Technology Stack

You may have experienced a bit of downtime late friday evening when you couldn't log into your account. Your Simplebooklet's were still accessible to your audience, but you couldn't make changes to your booklets. I'm here to tell you that short time was worth it as we move to a completely updated and more powerful distributed server architecture with an updated technology stack. What this means to you is you should see performance improvements in your authoring and distributing of your content of between 50% to 250% (depending on the task).

This has been a very big project by our development team and the results are well worth the effort. You'll see a lot of benefits in authoring your booklets, and your audience will see faster load times.

New Audience Views

One of the big benefits of Simplebooklet is sharing everywhere using one simple, brandable link. But we all like to preview what our customer will see before we share. So we've made this easier to see what your audience sees.

From the PREVIEW window, you'll notice three new icons in the top right corner; a computer, a phone and a tablet. Tapping on each one will show you how your Simplebooklet will be experienced on each of these devices.

Desktop Audience Preview

Phone Audience Preview

Phone Audience Preview (In Landscape)

Tablet Audience Preview

This will give you a better sense of what your audience will experience when viewing your Simplebooklet from their preferred device. You'll also be able to customize the presentation of your Simplebooklet's page transitions and backgrounds and navbars for each device type.

We plan to keep developing the "audience" views throughout the app to give you the confidence of knowing what you're sharing before you share it.

And as always, we've made a number of UX tweaks to improve the flow of work as you enhance and distribute your Simplebooklets.

New

We're just rolled out two new features on the Simplebooklet platform: smart recommendations for choosing a fold for your uploaded file; and, a new modern navigation system to increase reader engagement.

Smart Recommendations

Now, when you upload your PDF, document, or powerpoint presentation, we'll recommend to you page flip transitions that best suit your document. We'll analyze the page count, orientation and content of your uploaded file and recommend a few page flip transitions that we think would work best for your content.

This all takes place in the conversion page of your uploaded file. You set your title, select a page flip transition, then convert. You'll see that it starts with recommended transitions, but you can go through all available transitions by tapping the pill buttons for each style of flip.

As always, you can change the flip transition at anytime within the simplebooklet platform.

Navigation System

We've created a new, more modern nav bar option for you to use. This new navigation bar has been tested to increase focus on your Simplebooklet content while also encouraging outreach and connection with your business. Using the latest google material UX guidelines, you now have the option of an animated style navbar along the bottom of your Simplebooklet landing page. When closed, the most important and engaging call to action and wayfinding buttons are visible at all times.

Then when your reader taps the more menu, it displays even more calls to action, in a smooth eye catching animated reveal.

This keeps the most important calls to action visible at all times through your Simplebooklet, and puts less used call to action buttons tucked away to only be revealed when necessary, and so not to unnecessarily distract from the main content of your Simplebooklet.

We've gotten a lot of good reader feedback on this new navbar, and it is now the default navbar and part of the new default theme applied to all new uploaded Simplebooklets (unless you've created your own default theme which will be used whenever you upload a new Simplebooklet).

Themes

We've updated the UX of our theme tool. We've made it easier to access and put your themes right in the preview after you convert your file. You'll notice the new theme button in the preview window you first see when your file conversion is complete.

We apply a default presentation for your new Simplebooklet. This is a dark, presentation style theme. But you can, by tapping the theme button, select from our library of professionally designed themes. Or, if you already have a theme you've created yourself, you can select it at this point and apply it to your new design. All your own designed themes are saved as the first in the list of all available themes.

This should help you choose a professional, persuasive presentation for your new Simplebooklet right from the preview screen. Each theme is fully customizable in the Design Tab, from the buttons to the logo to the background to even the position and configuration of the navbar.

Making Your Own Theme

You can also save any configuration to be a new theme.

Go to the Design page, then select the background, logo, nav layout, navigation and engage buttons, and any other settings. Once you're happy with the look and feel of your Simplebooklet presentation, tap the Themes menu in the left hand toolbar, and select the paintbrush.

Give your new theme a name, and save. Your new theme will appear in the themes menu whenever you open it.

More to come

We've got a few more tricks up our sleeve before the end of the month, so stay tuned. As always, send your suggestions and feature requests to support@simplebooklet.com or drop a note in our live chat in the bottom right corner of your Simplebooklet dashboard.

New

We made a lot of new announcements last week and we're following it up with even more. We've released new ways to customize the navigation bar in mobile, and improved the navbars and menu buttons for your embedded Simplebooklets.

Customizable Mobile Navbars

That really great new mobile experience we released last week? Its even better now. We're giving you the ability to set the color of the mobile navigation drawer background and font colors. You can select any color combination you want. Here's an example of a black on white, and white on black navbar.

You can also change the font that is used for the navigation elements, and set the opacity of the navigation drawer. When the drawer opens, you'll see it will transform from it's opaque background color to a solid color as it appears over your Simplebooklet.

Customize

To customize your navbar, open your Simplebooklet in the DESIGN tab, then select PRESENTATION > NAVIGATION BARS > FOOTER. You can set the font, font color, background color, and opacity of the closed navigation drawer.

The menu buttons that appear in the navigation drawer are all customizable as well. You can turn them on and off in the DESIGN > NAVIGATION menu, and the DESIGN > ENGAGE menu by simply checking or unchecking the ones you want.

Your mobile experience will impress people more than ever!

New Embed Navigation Menu

Our embed navigation bar really needed a facelift. Embedded Simplebooklet's are tricky, because where they are embedded could be viewed on a small mobile device or on a large desktop monitor. Embedded Simplebooklet's also need to fit within the content already on a page, so it looks seamless and captures your user's attention.

What we've done is created a new bottom based navigation bar that takes a lot of it's cue's from the mobile navigation drawer. This new navigation bar is formatted slightly different, and prioritizes navigation buttons that make sense for the embed environment.

The navbar shows up to 5 priority menu buttons and two page turn buttons. Two buttons that are unique on embed are magnify and full screen.

Magnify allows your reader to zoom in and out of the page within the iframe of the embedded booklet. Its great for zooming into parts of your page while still in your iframe.

Fullscreen will use the browser fullsreen feature, removing the browser chrome and displaying it over top of your website page. It works in most environments by default (however, as always, Apple iOS may not support fullscreen in all situations). It's a great way to give your reader the full experience of your great content.

Customize

The embed toolbar inherits the colors and styles you set in DESIGN > PRESENTATION > NAVIGATION BAR under the footer menu.

You can also select which menu buttons appear in your navigation bar from the DESIGN tab as well from the NAVIGATION and ENGAGE options.

These settings set which buttons appear in mobile, embed, and desktop views, but may appear in different locations depending on the scenario.

We're excited to see how you start taking advantage of these new layouts and looks for your embedded content.

New

Okay, we've been slow to update our changelog and let you know of all the new features we've been pushing out over the last two months, both visible in our interface, and changes under the hood. In this update, I'm going to introduce you to a number of new features.

1. A completely new Mobile Experience.
2. 8 new vertical page flip transitions and one new horizontal page transition.
3. Integration with Adobe Express.
4. Audience following and follower management.

So let's dive into all the details!

Mobile Experience

Starting today, the mobile experience in android and iOS is undergoing a huge leap in usability and modernization. We've completely changed how the navigation bar and your calls to action work when viewed in a mobile device, to make them easier to access and hide for your audience.

First, all navigation tools are now in a bottom drawer. When the Simplebooklet is first loading, the bottom drawer will be open, then after 1 second, will automatically close to show priority features.

Your audience can tap on the page turn buttons to flip through the pages or use the touch swipe feature.

Your audience can also tap the expand bar and get access to all the navigation and call to action buttons you make available from the DESIGN tools in Simplebooklet.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6cd80Rkil9I

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The sub menus are accessed from the drawer buttons. They have all been optimized for both portrait and landscape view in mobile devices.

This new modern interface should make your Simplebooklet perform better and make it easier for your audience to get the most from your content. This new interface will automatically be applied to all of your Simplebooklets, so no need to update anything on your end.

Vertical Page Flip Transitions For Mobile and Desktop

With this mobile update, we also recognized that there was a lot of content being shared and presented on Simplebooklet that would just work better and be more engaging if a vertical page flip was applied. So we've introduced more than 8 new vertical transitions you can select from (and even a new horizontal transition).

And because the desktop and mobile experiences are different, you can select one style of page flip for your desktop audience, and a completely different page flip experience for your mobile audience, all with the same Simplebooklet.

The new vertical and horizontal transition is called Parallax. It is the transition from one image to the next becomes not only smoother, but it also adds a sense of depth, as if the images gently glide on top of each other. It looks great in mobile.

Adobe Express Integration

We've launched a new add on in the Adobe express marketplace. So if you're an Adobe user, you'll benefit by seamlessly moving between your document creation on Express and your sharing and presenting on Simplebooklet.

You'll be able to export any document you create in Express and choose the page flip right from the add on you'd like to apply. It works great for brochures, flyers, cards, and all your Express documents.

What's also really great with this integration is the add on is smart enough to know if it's an existing document you've already converted to a Simplebooklet. This means you can update your document anytime on Express and then update your Simplebooklet flipbook as well, while keeping your url, stats, and all your existing enhancements.

Here's a great video from Angelo taking you through just how easy it is.

We really think this add on integration with Adobe Express will take your flipbook presentations to the next level.

Getting And Managing Followers

We've got a whole new feature designed to keep you in touch with your readers. Following means your audience can choose to follow your flipbook and follow you as the owner. This means you'll see the name of your follower, be able to notify them of updates to your content, and add them automatically as followers to other flipbooks.

Here's a quick video overview of how to activate and manage followers on your Simplebooklet.

Following isn't turned on automatically, you'll need to turn it on from the Share page.

More Coming Soon

We've been productive over the last 8 weeks. You can expect to see even more improvements, features, and reporting tools in the coming few months. As always, feel free to reach out to support@simplebooklet.com with any suggestions or feedback.

New

We know a lot of our users create their content using Adobe InDesign. Its such a powerful tool for creating print marketing, sales, and communication materials. One of our favorite Adobe experts, Angelo Montilla, just created a great tutorial video on how to use InDesign and Simplebooklet to maximum advantage.

Check out the video here:

New

We've been working on a whole new flow for converting your files into Simplebooklet. A big part is to make it easier to choose your page flip during the conversion process and improve the UX of the preview page. We've also updated the UX of dashboard and added a new tagging feature for business accounts.

New Conversion flow

When you upload your file to create a new Simplebooklet, you'll now pick your page flip transition right on the conversion page. We've added the smarts to our conversion engine that it will show you only flip transitions that can be used with your particular file.

Conversion for a trifold brochure

Conversion for a multipage document

So now you get the options to make your new simplebooklet start with the transition that works best for you.

New Preview

Once you've selected the flip and tapped convert, you'll see our new PREVIEW page. This page shows you what your audience will experience when you share your Simplebooklet. From preview, you can change your page flip transition, or do a quick share from the share menu. You can also use any of the enhancement tools like Edit, Design and Record.

We think these changes will make creating your Simplebooklet faster and easier. It is also a big step forward for our soon to be released Adobe Express plugin and our updated Canva plugin.

New Dashboard UX

We've tightened up the dashboard to make it easier to access your booklets. Your Simplebooklet's tools have been rearranged to be easier to interpret and access.

Tags

If you have a business plan, you can now organize, search and sort the Simplebooklet's in your account using tags. You can add a tag (or multiple tags) to a simplebooklet. They'll be displayed on your dashboard underneath your booklet.

Sorting Using Tags

Tap on any tag under your Simplebooklet. Your dashboard will sort to only display other Simplebooklets with that tag. Tap the checkmark to clear the tag sort.

We hope these improvements make using Simplebooklet more intuitive and help you achieve your outcomes.

New

We've added some big feature updates this week. These should improve your productivity and the engagement on your Simplebooklets. We've improved how you can add new pages to your existing Simplebooklet, added the ability to upload your own Videos from your device, and cleaned up the UX/UI for collections to make it easier to use.

Page Inserts

We've redesigned how inserting a new page into an existing Simplebooklet works, and its a lot better. You can now upload a PDF, Document or presentation file, select the page range to insert, and the results will be fully html/css converted. You'll be able to edit the page content just the same as when you upload a file to start a new booklet.

To add a new page, open your Simplebooklet in the EDIT tab, then select the PAGES button in the left hand column.

Next, select new page, and then choose the upload file option, and upload your PDF, Doc, or PPT file.

Select the page range for the file you are uploading. We'll let you know where in your booklet the pages will be added. You can enter just one pages or a specific range of pages to be added. Then tap ready.

Your new pages will now be added to your Simplebooklet.

The Benefits

Your page will now be vectorized text, making it crystal clear at all zoom levels and on all devices. Our platform will also be able to scan the content and automatically surface links. You can double tap and edit the text right on the page.

Edit an Existing Canva Designed Page

This new page insert update also benefits Canva designers. Now, you can click the Canva icon located in the top right corner of the design, and open the page in the Canva editor.

You can edit the page in the familiar tools of Canva, then save it back to Simplebooklet. When it's saved, it will be fully editable and vectorized, plus any links will be automatically surfaced.

This will improve the efficiency of your workflow between the two platforms.

Video Uploads

Pro and Business level subscriptions can now upload videos directly from their device to their Simplebooklet page. The videos can be MP4s, and can be displayed either embedded directly on your Simplebooklet page, or launched in a lightbox from a hotspot link or a button.

To add your own video, in the EDIT tab, select videos, and choose how you want the video to be displayed.

Next, select the upload option tab at the bottom of the popup tool, select your mp4 file from your device, and check which options you want to customize how your video plays and is presented on your page.

After selecting Add Video to your page, you can position and resize it to fit your layout.

The Benefits

By adding your own video, you don't need to worry about using a third party to display your videos in your pages. You can also know that setting it to autoplay will work when the page is first opened.

Collections

We haven't changed how these tools work (that's an update coming soon) but we have improved how you interact with these tools. We've improved the UX to bring it more inline with our new drawer and task menus you are seeing across the app. Its part of our effort to bring more consistency across the Simplebooklet platform and make it easier for you to use our platform.

Upcoming

We've got a lot of new features just around the corner. Some are pretty significant to the way we hope people use our platform to present and share their marketing and communications collateral. We're making a special focus on engagement to make sure you can capture your audience's attention and drive meaningful interactions with your customer.

New

We've updated a few features on Simplebooklet this past month. You'll now see a cleaner and simpler conversion process when you upload your PDF, Doc, Presentation file or Canva Design. You'll also notice a new PDF export feature that will display your image carousels as an addendum at the end of the PDF simplebooklet.

First up, you'll notice some simple improvements on the dashboard. A new upload section of your dashboard makes it more obvious in uploading your file. When you do upload your file, you'll see a much simpler and cleaner conversion form. We've added some intelligence to the upload process, helping preselect options based on the number of pages and what kind of file you are uploading. This should help simplify your creation of your booklet.

You should also see improved output on those more complicated files being converted. You can still access the advanced conversion features if you need access.

Next, you can add an addendum to your PDF export. This places all the images from your hotspot carousels into pages at the end of the PDF. Its a great way to have the downloaded version of your Simplebooklet include all the extra content you've added.

Get ready, as we've been working on a lot of stuff over the last two months, and expect to roll out some significant updates in October.

As always, your feedback is very much appreciated and helps us continue to improve the simplebooklet platform.

Thanks, Scott

New

Some new features we've rolled out for Friday, the 14th of July. The first is a new feature in our hotspot tool so you can present more content in a popup lightbox, and, the second is for tagging your Simplebooklets to make searching for a particular one quick and easy.

Hotspots with Lightboxes

I really like this new feature. Hotspots are great for displaying content that you just can't fit on your page layout, and we've made these hotspot lightboxes even more powerful. We've added the ability to display documents and iframe embed code in a lightbox. For example, when a reader clicks on your hotspot, you can open a lightbox and display an xls spreadsheet for them to scroll through.

You can also do this with embed code from your favorite services. For example, you could embed a google map or google form using their embed code. Create a hotspot, select the code option, and paste in your code. When your reader clicks on that hotspot, the lightbox will open revealing that interactive bit of code.

Lightboxes are a great way to keep a reader in your Simplebooklet. They access the enhanced content, then close it and are right back into your Simplebooklet.

Tagging

This feature is for Simplebooklet users who have quite a few Simplebooklets, either in their own account or across multiple team accounts. You'll be able to add multiple tags to your Simplebooklet, and even reuse tags from other Simplebooklets.

Now, from the dashboard, whenever you're looking for a specific Simplebooklet, all you need to do is type in a tag into the search box, and we'll display those Simplebooklets, even if they are found in team accounts.

New

We continue to add user requested features and improve our user experience. This month, we're rolling out a complete update to your share tab, making it a much cleaner, clearer experience. We've also added a number of new features including: themes that can be set as default for all team accounts, and a brand new way of managing access to your content through verified emails (including restricting access to a booklet based on the reader's email).

New Share Tab

We've updated the sharing tools to share our new user experience and interface. You'll experience a cleaner and clearer set of tools, all with our new popups standardized across each sharing tool.

Sharing on the left, configuration on the right.

Down the left side of the share tab, you'll find all the ways you can distribute your Simplebooklet. We've also worked hard to improve how each of these tools work.

Down the right side, we've consolidated all of the tools you use to manage how your Simplebooklet is accessed and engaged with and how it reports back to you. You can set your booklet's visibility, then control how your readers can access your content.

We think this new share tab will make distributing your Simplebooklet easier and encourage you to share it everywhere, as often as you can.

Requiring Verified Emails

You can now manage access to your Simplebooklet based on your reader's email address. You now have greater control and reporting on who accesses your content.

In the new Access Control Section, you can set up email verification.

This allows you to restrict access to your Simplebooklet on two levels, first as a valid email, and second, restrict it to only emails you have approved. Before a reader can access your Simplebooklet, they will need to provide a valid email address on a branded page.

First, you can require your reader to enter an email that they need to validate before they can access your Simplebooklet. They can use SSO or enter an email and password. This can be open to anyone as long as they have a valid email.

Second, you can create an approved list of emails that have access. So even if someone enters an email, it must be on your approved list to continue on see your content. It's a great solution for selling access to your content or even just making sure only those you want can see the content.

An added benefit of this new feature is you can track and get reports on each email that is used and connected to your Simplebooklet, and track how often they are opening and flipping pages.

Themes Across Team Accounts

This is related to our Business Plan customers. Now you can set a custom theme and make it accessible to all team accounts. It's a great way to ensure all team accounts are using an approved presentation layer for their Simplebooklets.

To apply a theme to all team accounts, you need to create it in your Admin account. Create new theme from the DESIGN tab, and save it as a custom theme. Any custom themes created in the admin account will automatically appear as a theme option for any team account.

Team accounts can see these themes in the DESIGN tab under PRESENTATION. Applying the theme sets all presentation elements including backgrounds, logo and navbar layouts for any Simplebooklet.

Next Up

We're updating our Canva integration to take advantage of new integration features they have enabled and improve the workflow between our two platforms. We'll also be updating how hotspots work in EDIT to allow for more content types and better integration into the PDFs you export.