We’re happy to announce that Pageflow 14 is available now for the open source project and for Hosted Pageflow. Luckily this update contains some visible frontend improvements, that especially affect the user experience on smartphones.
Firstly, the display of Hotspots in portrait mode has been optimised. Users can now be guided through the active areas horizontally via Swipe. This perfectly matches Pageflow’s second new mobile feature which provides a horizontal scrolling on phones in general.
With the “Waveform” a new way for displaying the soundtrack of a file has also been added to the audio page. This new visible layer can make audible story components such as interviews, field recordings or music pieces feel more vibrant. Let’s skip the sound at this point:
The “Waveform” can be activated on the Audio page via “Options”. A color picker determines the color of the wave.
The hotspot page was originally developed for interaction with panoramic images and offers a variety of possibilities to make photos, videos, maps or graphics audio-visually explorable via scroll, hover and click. The “Storylines” allow users to decide on the further course of a story in the sense of non-linear storytelling.
The page type also provides tools that interactively combine graphic design and visual storytelling, which has led to hundreds of inspiring implementations in the past. But there was an issue in the mobile view that has been solved now:
While a hotspot page with a panoramic image can be easily captured by the reader in the desktop view, orientation in the phone layout was sometimes difficult. For this reason, there is an alternative navigation mode now for the phone version in which mobile users can be guided through the hotspots one after the other.
To activate “Guided Hotspots” for smartphones just click on “Areas” in your Hotspot page.
When entering a Hotspot page, the initial image section shows the largest possible part of an image depending on the screens ratio, and jumps to the first spot by Swipe. An indicator at the bottom shows the amount of hotspots and provides orientation for navigation. In order to enable a preview of how your edited piece will look on a phone, Pageflow 14 was enhanced with a Phone-Emulation feature for Hotspots.
With the new option “Mobile Swipe”, horizontal scrolling can now be activated for the mobile version in portrait mode. The feature plays together with the guided Hotspspot navigation, because the horizontal swiping fits seamlessly into the page transitions. So if you’re telling mobile web stories in the look and feel of the established vertical storytelling platforms and focus on rich images with rare words, you can do this even better with Pageflow now.
The new Swipe gesture in the phone layout can be selected in the editor via “Title & Options” -> “Appearance”.
If you have any idea to bring storytelling with Pageflow onto an even more mobile friendly level, feel free to contact us via mail at support(at)hosted-pageflow.com