New Media Players & Chat February 23rd

On February 23rd 26th, we’re releasing new video, photos, and music players as well as major improvements to Chat. There will also be a few more visual changes you may notice as well.

In this release, the video, photos, and music players on Land8Lounge are getting a new design and a few more features. These new media players should give our members even more ways to watch and share videos, photos, and podcasts with each other in The Lounge and across the Internet.

New Video Player
Here’s the new video player:

The (high) video quality remains the same and the video player itself has a new design with updated icons and controls. Better yet, the buttons disappear when you move your mouse away from the controls. It will also play related or latest videos in a video playlist available at the end of each video.

New Photos Player
Here’s the new photo slideshow player:

Chat
We’ve retained all the great features you have on chat today, such as private chats, and are adding the following new features in this next version:
* Chat will be persistent on every page of The Lounge. With this new release, chat will become a bar across the bottom of every page. It will start in “bar mode” and will expand into “window mode”.
* You will be able to pop chat out of The Lounge and keep it open as its own window. This is something many of you asked for and we’re happy to provide it in this next version.
* Sound notifications when messages are received. Notifications start OFF by default, but can be turned on through the options menu.
* Members will appear online more accurately. Because chat is now persistent across all pages of The Lounge, members will be displayed as online more accurately. However, there will still be the option for a member to make themselves invisible, if they choose.
* Reconnections will be more graceful. When a connection to the server is lost for some reason, chat will attempt to reconnect gracefully without requiring a page refresh, and if possible without affecting the member. There will be no more need to reload the page entirely and lose all your messages.
* Chat will now load the entire scrollable list of people online. No more clicking on ‘More’!. As a result, search will now be faster too.
* Better support for firewalls. This new version uses only port 80, the standard HTTP port.
* There will be local message history. Your chat client will now remember the last ten messages sent and allows to look at them by pressing Ctrl+UP and Ctrl+DOWN (arrow keys).
* Chat will now be in Flash. This means that you need to have a minimum of Flash 9 on your computer. You likely already have Flash 9 and, if not, we’ll have instructions for how to add it.

This new version also puts us on the path to release language customization in early March. Specifically, you’ll now be able to support multiples languages.

Here’s a glimpse:

A Few More Improvements
Rounding out the improvements in this release are a number of visual design changes.

We’ve also removed the requirement for you to add an image when creating events and groups. As a result, we have new default event, group, and video images.

In smaller changes, we’re updating the bar at the top of Land8Lounge with a few minor link adjustments and changing the button styles to make actions more obvious.

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